Music Without Borders

Jessie Rivest reviews an OSO performance in Kelowna Friday, November 14, 2025

I slipped into the tail end of the pre-concert chat just in time to hear guest conductor and featured composer Dinuk Wijeratne pose a question to the room: “What is music?” The audience answered, “the depth of the soul,” “a journey,” “the colour of life.” It was the kind of question that doesn’t ask for accuracy, but for honesty—and it framed the entire evening ahead. Under Wijeratne’s direction, the OSO offered a program that crossed far more borders than geography. It crossed genre, time, culture, and even expectation, weaving together a mosaic of folk ritual, classical refinement, innovative hybrid forms, and moments where music felt less like a performance and more like embodiment.

Stories Carried in the Body

The concert opened with Béla Bartók’s Hungarian Peasant Songs, a reminder that before music was elevated into the academy, it was lived. Wijeratne spoke fondly of Bartók, as an inspiring unsung genius of ethnomusicology, who fused classical discipline with the earthiness of folk melodies collected in the field. Wijeratne’s love of Bartók radiated through his direction of the players, with each exciting arpeggiation and every crisp chromatic flourish.

Kareem Roustom’s Dabke followed, transporting us to the Middle East, featuring a bass pizzicato so subtle and precise it was almost a spell. The orchestra leaned into the glissandos and syncopations beautifully. Wijeratne became increasingly more dancey, bobbing his head on the off-beats, the orchestra matching the vitality of his bright orange shirt. A small unison moment between violin and cello landed slightly out of alignment, but in a piece defined by forward momentum, it read more like texture than disruption.

Beauty and the Bridge

Elgar’s Serenade for Strings stretched a soft veil over the room. The violins shimmered, warm and luminous, with complementary lines rising and falling across sections like interlacing vines. In a program rich with rhythm, Serenade offered a moment of suspended time, a bridge from intensity to introspection.

Then came one of the night’s central statements: Wijeratne’s own Two Pop Songs on Antique Poems. The title undersells the work. What begins with the simplicity of pop evolves quickly into a virtuosic, genre-bending tapestry. The first violin and cello found each other in a luminous unison octave, this time perfectly together. In the second song, jazz-inflected licks materialized out of nowhere—so unexpected I wished I could roll it back to hear it again.

Surprise Surprise

Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (Andante) served as a brief amuse-bouche: pleasant, gentle, orderly. Not the most thrilling moment of the night, but harmonically coherent enough that I felt my nervous system rebalancing itself.

In the finale, Gajaga Vannama—also known as “The Beast”—the piano was brought forward, and we were drawn directly into Wijeratne’s world: one rooted in Sri Lankan tradition but brimming with contemporary innovation. Built on a lopsided 7-beat pattern, Wijeratne invited the audience to imagine the lumbering gait of an elephant, but my mind conjured something entirely different: a hidden jazz bar in New York called The Elephant, where genius was generating enough energy to power the city. His piano paraphrasing of the folk melody was airy, mischievous, and spiritually charged all at once.

This was also my first time witnessing someone conduct an orchestra while playing piano—not to mention the surprise use of solkattu rhythm vocalization, and the OSO singing a warm, repeated phrase. We ejected out of our seats for a fervorous standing ovation, as if it were a race to see who could stand first!

Beyond Borders

Throughout the night, Wijeratne returned to three program themes: folk, dance, and the search for beauty. But the deeper theme was borderlessness. Mysteriously, every multifaceted thread somehow leads to a larger sense of oneness.

If music is the depth of the soul, a journey, and the colour of life—as the audience suggested—then Music Without Borders was all three.

Jessie Rivest is a sound artist, creative coach, and local arts supporter living in Kelowna.