The National Arts Centre Orchestra (NACo) and Alexander Shelley will head east to New Brunswick and Nova Scotia this spring with special guest Jeremy Dutcher. It’s the orchestra’s 100th tour since its founding in 1969.
Performances will take place in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia from April 14 to 17. The program will blend orchestral performance with Indigenous music and storytelling.
Wolastoqiyik composer and singer-songwriter Jeremy Dutcher hails from the east coast, a member of the northern New Brunswick Tobique First Nation. He’s a two-time Polaris Music Prize winner, and the 2025 recipient of the NAC Award at the Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards.
The Orchestra and Dutcher will perform three public concerts in Nova Scotia, in Eskasoni, Halifax, and Wolfville, along with a small ensemble performance in Fredericton, New Brunswick, for members of the local Wabanaki communities and other guests.
Along with music performance, the NACO tour incorporates learning and engagement activities planned in collaboration with community partners across the region. That includes Indigenous-centred knowledge sharing.
It’s a milestone tour for Alexander Shelley, who is in his final season as Music Director of NACO. The tour also marks a return to the Eskasoni First Nation on Cape Breton Island, first visited by NACO and Shelley in 2017 on the Canada 150 tour.
Then, the orchestra performed I Lost My Talk, a work that was a NACO commission, based on the poem of the same name by the late Mi’kmaw writer and Elder Rita Joe, on her ancestral land. The text, which deals with Joe’s experiences at the Shubenacadie Residential School, was set to music by Canadian composer John Estacio. It formed part of the Life Reflected project, which honoured Joe and three other notable Canadian women.
“Our 2017 tour left indelible memories for me — the warm reception we received and the special musical moments we shared have stayed with me since. I’m grateful to be returning in this, my final season, and to have the opportunity to say a heartfelt thank-you to these wonderful communities and further deepen the NAC’s relationship with them. To do this alongside my friend Jeremy Dutcher — an icon for so many — is the icing on the cake,” says Alexander Shelley, Music Director, NAC Orchestra, in a statement.
“It was at the encouragement of my mentor, Elder Dr. Maggie Paul (Peskotomuhkati Nation), who told me it was her dream to hear our old songs lifted up by symphonic voices,” says Jeremy Dutcher.
“With this direction, I set out to lift our songs to these heights. It is so meaningful to bring an ensemble as fantastic as the NAC Orchestra to Wabanaki Territory (New Brunswick and Nova Scotia), and to have our songs and language underscored by Canada’s orchestra, in our language, in our homelands.”
Nova Scotia’s own Emma Stevens, from the Eskasoni First Nation, is also a featured artist on this tour.
For Singer-songwriter Emma Stevens, music and activism are inextricably woven into her Mi’kmaq heritage. She performs in her native language, using music and storytelling practices that draw from cultural traditions, blended with elements of contemporary music. Her music showcases the strength and resilience of her people.
Emma first gained an international profile as a teenage artist in 2019 with her Mi’kmaq-language rendition of The Beatles’ “Blackbird”. She has since released a string of original songs and music videos, and toured the world.
There are three public performances in Nova Scotia:
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