My original choreographic design for Matthew Ricketts’ piece Lilt began with musings on the word itself.  ‘Lilt’ is defined as a gentle rise and fall, an intonation or cadence with a rhythmic quality.  It seems to suggest a place of weightlessness or carefree state of drifting. To me, a place where one either speaks or…

My new work Lilt is comprised of three primary types of material, each designed to provoke/provide a contrasting music-body relationship for Jennifer’s choreography. A central idea to both Jennifer’s work and mine has been centrifugal motion: the constant drift from a center but with residual pull back towards an initiatory state, forever tethered yet wriggling…

Alex with Icelandic composer Daniel Bjarnason’s Emergence – a really big score! Physically, it’s one of the largest scores that Alex Pauk, conductor and founder of Esprit Orchestra, has ever conducted (16” x 24”, 40 cm x 60 cm) – so big that it won’t fit on one music stand. It also requires a music…

In the 1970’s when I was getting to know Claude Vivier, he would sometimes phone me from Montreal to passionately play parts of whatever piece he was writing at the time. He did this simply by putting the receiver by the keyboard of his upright and blasting away as loud as he could so you…

For this 35th Anniversary Esprit season, I’ve aimed to present thought-provoking programs with strong thematic coherence and resonance. My philosophy of building strong artistic relationships over time is reflected in the commissioning of composers we’ve worked with or featured previously, repeat performances of significant pieces in the orchestra’s evolution, and the welcoming back of soloists who appeared with…