If I were talking only to long-time readers of this magazine right now, I would suggest you do some online homework before carrying on with reading this story, by heading off to one particular spot on the Toronto Summer Music (TSM) website. Once you arrived, I’d ask you to scroll your way up through the two lists of musicians you’ll find there – the alumni of the TSM’s two Academy programs (chamber and vocal music) from 2012 to 2023. (The lists are easy to find even if you don’t have a link: just go to “Alumni” under the tab “Academy.”)
The object of the exercise? To see how many names jump out at you from the two lists, either because of what they have done musically since then, or (way better in terms of bragging rights) because you were in the audience when, for example, cellist Cameron Crozman played a recital during the 2013 Festival and you can still remember turning to Steve or Jane right there and then and saying “now there’s one to watch.”
Silver Creek: The Academy alumni lists on the website only go back to 2012, so far. But the idea of an urban summer festival being only as good as the extent to which it creates opportunities for mentoring and fellowship goes all the way back to TSM’s humble beginnings. It started in 2004/2005, as a four-or-five concert series presented by something called the Silver Creek Foundation, with a concurrent one-or-two week series of chamber music workshops. The concerts were in Walter Hall, in the University of Toronto Faculty of Music Edward Johnson Building, and mostly featured artists who were faculty members or frequent guests in that building. The workshops were held in the same building and most of the attendees were local music students. The musicians giving the concerts were for the most part also the musicians running the workshops.
It was an appropriately cautious start for a festival that knew from the beginning it wanted to be there for the long haul: tip-toeing in where even angels feared to venture – namely trying to get a classical-based summer music festival up and running in a city which had proved over and again that the people most likely to support such an enterprise during the “regular” season had cottages to go to, and couldn’t wait to get out of town.
Twenty years later, Silver Creek’s modest series of chamber music workshops has flowered into a full-blown Academy, drawing around 30 career-edge musicians, on fully funded fellowships, to emerging artist programs (EAPs) in either chamber or vocal music. The competition to get in is fierce. And Silver Creek’s four or five evening concerts at Walter Hall in 2004 have become 26 well-publicized and well-attended mainstage concerts. And to the delight of TSMs most loyal attendees, these 26 concerts float in a sea of other performances waiting to be discovered, including recitals by the fellows in the emerging artist programs, where the performers and repertoire can’t be announced well in advance, for the simple reason that learning of new repertoire, and the forging of ad hoc chamber musical relationships with people you may just have met, is fundamental to the whole idea of musical fellowship.
ReGeneration: somewhere between the thrill of top-flight performance by masters of their musical craft and the adrenaline-fuelled rush of recitals by academy attendees is something the TSM calls the ReGeneration series – a wonderful weaving of academy and festival. This season it consists of a series of eight Walter Hall concerts – three in each of TSM’s first two weeks, and two in the finals week – in which fellows and mentors perform together.
I don’t know how long the series has had that name but it has been there in practice at least as far back as 2009. I recall that the Beaux Arts Trio, with Menachem Pressler at the helm, was one of the mentoring ensembles that year, and at some point Pressler was asked about the dynamic of “playing with beginners” as the questioner put it. “It’s a good opportunity for them to learn things they don’t yet have in their heads” is what I remember him saying (or words to that effect), and then: “It is just as good an opportunity for us to remember what we have forgotten in our hearts.” Watch for these concerts. Magic happens.
The CCMIB: if I had to pick one concert at this year’s TSM that captures for me the spirit and intent of what TSM is coming to be, and why, against the odds, is still around, almost 20 years after it tiptoed into existence, it wouldn’t be from any of the clusters I’ve talked about so far. But first, a bit of background.
Every year Canadian classical musicians can compete for the opportunity to borrow an exceptional instrument from something called the Canada Council Musical Instrument Bank for three years. They submit applications and then some of them are invited to audition. “At this year’s competition, 23 violins and cellos made between the late 17th century and the early 20th century by famous luthiers like Stradivari, Gagliano and Pressenda were available,” the Canada Council release stated, and 32 musicians made it through to the audition stage.
Among the successful applicants this year were four musicians whose names you will have encountered if you did the online homework I suggested in the very first paragraph of this story: cellist Cameron Crozman (TSM in 2013 and 2015); and violinists David Baik (TSM in 2022, 2023), Gregory Lewis (TSM in 2019) and Julia Mirzoev (TSM in 2018).
Which brings me finally to the particular concert I’d pick from the flotilla as speaking to the spirit of TSM: not its flagship event by any means – that would likely be one of the four Koerner Hall concerts – but more like a tugboat maybe, tasked with seeing TSM into and out of safe harbour.
The warp, the weft and the loom: Here’s the writeup that caught my eye:
“This summer at TSM, David Baik, violin,and Gregory Lewis, violin, are both performing in the TSM Bach & Vivaldi concert on July 24, at Church of the Redeemer, with Jonathan Crow, violin, Christopher Bagan, harpsichord and Academy Fellows from the Chamber Music Institute. The concert is presented in loving memory of Ji Soo Choi, a TSM Fellow alumna (2017 cohort). A reception with the artists is included after the performance. All proceeds from this concert go towards supporting the TSM Academy. (Tickets are $95, or $50 for those under 35 years of age).”
Jonathan Crow, the hands-on artistic director of TSM, is also, in all his spare time, the concertmaster of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. “Spare time” it is safe to say will be in short supply for him during the festival, juggling concertizing, mentoring and fellowship. Harpsichordist Christopher Bagan is a worthy standard bearer for the U of T Faculty of Music’s role in TSM’s evolution from its Silver Creek days. The participation of the Academy Fellows is for me, as previously mentioned, TSM’s most compelling reason to be. And Baik and Lewis are the bridge between the two roles: former fellows, alumni, somewhere on the path to mentorship, here for a kind of homecoming
David Perlman can be reached at publisher@thewholenote.com
