For many of us, Saint-Saëns’ Le Carnaval des animaux was one of the first pieces of classical music we were able to recognise as children. Though written in 1886, when Saint-Saëns should have been working on his “Organ” Symphony, the piece received its public debut decades later in 1922, a year after the composer’s death. (Saint-Saëns, concerned for his reputation, only permitted the comic piece to be performed privately in his own lifetime, apart from the solemn “Le cygne” cello solo.) Despite the composer’s misgivings, the piece has become one of his most well-known works, and it continues to inspire artists in all mediums nearly a century after its premiere.

From Mikhail Fokine’s “The Dying Swan” solo for Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova to Christopher Wheeldon’s The Carnival of the Animals for the New York City Ballet, Saint-Saëns’ zoological suite lends itself particularly well to movement. This fact did not go unnoticed by the Marcel Marceau School-trained mime artist Trevor Copp, who has recently developed a full-length performance in which he embodies every creature in Le carnaval. Before the pandemic, the Burlington-based Copp shared the stage with several live orchestras, including at The Festival of the Sound in Parry Sound, as well as with actors such as R.H. Thompson, who read aloud humorous verses by Ogden Nash (written 1949 and often recited during performances of the work) between movements.

Keenly aware that mime is considered a “declining art form,” Copp’s latest performance is part of a long-term goal to introduce mime to a wider audience. “The trouble that I have with a lot of mime that I see now, is that it gets very sunk in novelty,” he explains. “There are whole mime pieces where it’s just about, ‘Look, I can make a wall,’ and artistically, that’s all it has to say.” Frustrated with seeing performances that rely on tricks, Copp founded Tottering Biped Theatre in 2009 to develop more expressive, complex mime productions. Over the last decade the company has premiered a series of highly physical shows that draw from source material as varied as Shakespeare’s plays, a Hermann Hesse novella, and Bulfinch’s Mythology. “I’m interested in mime as telling sophisticated, artistically viable conversations... I’m trying to figure out mime for the twenty-first century.”

When the Saint-Saens piece was suggested to him by classical music agent Robert Missen, Copp realized he had found the perfect challenge. “No matter what I do, I will always be a biped,” he says. “I will never walk on all fours, I will never weigh a thousand pounds. But the question is, can I find the quality, the image of the animal that is the essence of the animal, and can I reproduce that?”

Once again, it’s time for the Toronto International Film Festival (September 9 to 18) and The WholeNote’s 10th annual TIFF Tips guide to festival films in which music, in one way or another, plays an important role.

Our picks are based, variously, on track record, subject matter and gleanings from across the Internet. Out of the 177 titles (118 features, 45 shorts, 14 docs) from 64 countries that make up the festival’s 46th edition, I’ve focused on 18, beginning with a handful of documentaries directly tied to music.

Music Documentaries

Prolific documentary filmmaker Barry Avrich’s Oscar Peterson: Black + White, billed as a “groundbreaking docu-concert,” explores the life and legacy of the jazz icon, from his days as a child prodigy to the development of Peterson’s signature sound – as well as his tenacious experiences confronting racism and segregation while touring the United States. Avrich draws from a vast archive of rare performances, interviews and conversations. The film also features new performances of Peterson’s music by his protégé Robi Botos (with Dave Young and Larnell Lewis), Jackie Richardson (singing “Hymn to Freedom”), Measha Brueggergosman, Denzal Sinclaire and Joe Sealy. Ella Fitzgerald, Nat King Cole and vocals by Peterson himself highlight the wall-to-wall archival performances.

Dave Wooley and David Heilbroner’s Dionne Warwick: Don’t Make Me Over chronicles Warwick’s long career as a performer and activist. Annie Lennox blogged about Warwick’s performance of “Walk on By” on her website on June 23, 2015: “I’ve always been drawn to the alchemy of Burt Bacharach’s music. Dionne Warwick must have been his perfect vocal muse, with the most amazing voice to express and interpret his songs. I think it would be hard to find another singer who could do them justice apart from Dusty Springfield. Romantic, melancholic and hauntingly beautiful, Dionne Warwick is second only to Aretha Franklin as the most-charted female vocalist of all time, with 56 of Dionne’s singles making the Billboard Hot 100 between 1962 and 1998.” TIFF co-head Cameron Bailey writes: “Charismatic, outspoken and stylish, she’s a great raconteur.”

How much energy does it take to build a career as a classical violinist in Canada? And then how much more does it take if you are a Black woman. This struggle sits at the core of my conversation with Toronto-based violinist Tanya Charles Iveniuk – and what enthralls me is the career that she has created for herself within this genre.

Born in Hamilton with roots in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Iveniuk is an established performer and avid educator. She has a Bachelor of Music in Performance from the University of Toronto, an Artist Diploma in Orchestral Performance from the Glenn Gould School at the Royal Conservatory of Music, and is an alumna of (and now, a mentor with) the Hamilton-based National Academy Orchestra. Currently, Iveniuk works as a violinist with several ensembles across the Toronto area, including the Toronto Mozart Players, Sinfonia Toronto, and the Odin Quartet. She also plays in Toronto-based mariachi ensemble Viva Mexico Mariachi, and has performed alongside David Usher, Shad, K-Os, the Trans-Siberian Orchestra and Stevie Wonder. As an educator, Iveniuk works frequently as an adjudicator, and teaches at the University of Toronto and at the Regent Park School of Music.

We last spoke in 2020, when I interviewed several Black classical musicians for The Conversation. All of the musicians revealed how they negotiated their way through the predominantly white spaces, the many gaps in information on how to move through the pipeline, and regular hostilities experienced within the field, into professional classical musicianship. 

Since then, Iveniuk has been at work on several new projects: a new album with the Odin Quartet, a concert appearance with Montreal’s Ensemble Obiora, and multiple teaching and consulting projects throughout the Greater Toronto Area. Dedicated to her practice as a classical music performer and educator, she engages with a broad spectrum of communities – bringing with her a vision of classical music as an offering that should be available for all.

There is an intriguing beauty that lies in the parts and processes of trees that we don’t see. We observe a tree’s life story from looking at it aboveground, but what’s beneath – the understory – often goes unseen.

Musicians Germaine Liu (based in Toronto), Nicole Rampersaud (based in Fredericton), and Parmela Attariwala (based in Vancouver) are committed to building—and telling the understory of—a new, nationwide artistic network. Funded by the Canada Council for the Arts and in partnership with Toronto’s MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art), Understory is a new online improvised music series that features artists from across Canada.

In an interview with the co-founders, they explained that they were very deliberate in their choice of artists for their inaugural 2021/22 season. “We’re trying to expand what improvisation is, and who can occupy that space,” they say. “The kind of person that we’ve invited is open and respectful of their colleagues.” For the Understory series, above all else, they value “artistic agency so long as it’s respectful.”

Unlike live group improvisation, Understory features recorded layers of improvisation. “It is not traditional improvised music – nor is it intended to be a replacement for real-time, ‘playing (dancing, singing, rhyming, painting) together in one space’ improvisation,” they say. Each online concert features two sets, each by a different trio of artists. Each trio performs three improvisations, so that each artist has the chance to record the first layer of a track, overtop of which their collaborators contribute additional layers of sound and/or visuals. The artists are given three weeks to co-create their works; in the fourth week, Evan Shaw works his video editing magic, and audio engineers Mark Zurawinski and John D.S. Adams polish the sound.

On July 16, 2021, live music was permitted to return to indoor stages in Ontario, for the first time since fall 2020. Gigging musicians were suddenly able to resume work that has largely been impossible for the past year; clubs, long empty, have resumed presenting shows, albeit in a more limited capacity than before the pandemic. For musicians and venues, however, the transition to a “new normal” has involved as much caution as catharsis, as the forced sabbatical of the pandemic has allowed for a drastic rethinking of the relationship between space, labour, and compensation in the performing arts. In Toronto, the first glimpses of post-pandemic music-making have arrived amidst unique, and rapidly shifting, financial circumstances in the local live music industry: ballooning insurance costs for venues, shifts in financial models for presenters, and a change in expectations for musicians returning to gigging life.

There is a tendency, in any gig-based industry, to say yes to every opportunity for which one is available, even when the conditions – remuneration, time commitment, atmosphere – may not be ideal. For gigging musicians, this tendency is further exacerbated by a professional expectation that one must maintain a certain amount of visibility in order to remain relevant; a need to stay on the scene. (In the age of social media, performing this visibility has become easier than ever before: even the most artistically, financially, and personally unsatisfying gig can yield a compelling Instagram post, helping to maintain the narrative that a musician is a vital part of the community.)

To say “no” to even the most unappealing gig is much harder than it seems. Sure, the show you were just offered only pays $50, and is in a tiny, poorly-ventilated bar on the other side of town, and you have to bring your own amp, and the manager refuses to turn off the hockey game on the giant TV right above the stage as you’re playing, and a patron once started drunkenly playing your guitar when you went to the washroom on a set break. But the bandleader who hired you has a tour coming up next summer, and just got a Canada Council grant to fund it, and you weren’t available for their last gig, and what if the sub they hire to replace you this time has a better vibe with the band and takes your spot permanently? Also, that $50 can pay for that brunch you’re going to tomorrow (even if you do end up spending $30 on an Uber home at 1:30am). So: you take the gig.

On July 23, I was invited to Koerner Hall to watch a hybrid in-person/livestream event presented by JazzinToronto, in collaboration with the Royal Conservatory of Music. The performance – a double-bill featuring Heather Bambrick, in quintet format, and the Jane Bunnett Maqueque Trio – was the culminating event of JazzinToronto Live: A Community Celebration, a multi-day festival that also presented shows in mainstay local venues, including the Tranzac, the Emmet Ray, and Lula Lounge.

I had not entered the RCM building since the start of pandemic lockdown measures last March. Though the conservatory has been open in a limited capacity for some students, staff, and teachers, the facilities have been closed to the general public. The inaccessibility of communal indoor spaces has been one of the enduring minor tragedies of the past 16 months; as in many of my post-pandemic fantasies, I imagined that returning to a major concert venue would be a boisterous, celebratory affair. The reality of the gradual return to normal, however, was much different. As one of 50 attendees, the experience of walking into Koerner was unreal, the cavernousness of the hall complicated by the many cameras, avatars of our virtual compatriots streaming the show at home. (At the time of the show, it had been but a week since live music was permitted to resume in Ontario; large indoor venues are still mostly closed.)

As the event started, a sense of familiarity quickly set in, dispelling, to some extent, the lingering sense of the uncanny. The house lights dimmed; the audience hushed; Ori Dagan – the evening’s emcee, and a representative of JazzinToronto – gave some background information on the festival, listed major sponsors, and appealed to the audience for donations.