Still pushing boundaries: West End Micro Music Festival
A lot has happened since 2018, the year I described the Happenstancers in these pages as part of the future of chamber music and song recital. A year later, two of the ensemble’s three founding musicians (mezzo-soprano Adanya Dunn and pianist Nahre Sol) departed Canada, which left Brad Cherwin in Toronto with room to invent from scratch and experiment – and experiment he did! The Happenstancers are now a large informal band of musicians with Cherwin as the artistic director, with several busy performance seasons under their belt each more ambitious than the last, an annual festival, a visiting guest conductor, a concert space in a Lutheran church out on Bloor West, a part-time production manager, a video artist, and a solid record of success with granting bodies. And most importantly, an audience which – the Holy Grail of classical music – skews under 40 years old.
Next step would be to have repeat performances and to take them outside Toronto, Cherwin tells me when we meet in a coffee shop to talk about yet another iteration of Happenstancers’ all-choral West End Micro Music Festival (WEMMF), Revelations, a contemporary music shindig pushing boundaries and rethinking the concert form, happening November 22-23 and Nov 29-30 at Redeemer Lutheran Church,1691 Bloor St. W.
“We would love to tour, but it’s hard to make the finances work,” Cherwin says. They performed one year in New York (where pianist-composer and recurring Happenstancer Nahre Sol lives) and at a festival in PEI, but the logistics around performing even in places as close as Hamilton remain daunting.