With the passing of Mary Gardiner on January 30, Canadian music has lost a true leader. Mary’s  extraordinary range of activities touched many lives and influenced many organizations.

Mary was an eloquent and persuasive advocate  for Canadian music. She had a gentle manner, but she was fierce in her determination to get things done. Her tireless work with the Association of Canadian Women Composers, the Alliance for Canadian New Music Projects, and the Canadian Music Centre left an indelible mark. To honour her achievements, the CMC and the Canadian League of Composers gave her their Friends of Canadian Music Award in 2003, and the Alliance for Canadian New Music Projects established a scholarship in her name.

As a composer, pianist, conductor and teacher, Mary accomplished far more than she would ever admit to. Her own compositions have been recorded, broadcast, and performed around the world.

Mary led by example. Her kindness, generosity, elegance, marvelous sense of humour,  unusual sensitivity, and reassuring confidence went far to help her accomplish so much. People listened to her.

A selection from recordings of Mary’s compositions can be heard on the Canadian Music Centre’s website: http://www.musiccentre.ca

We offer our deepest sympathies to her family.

Pamela Margles

Here's an artist, and a demo disc, worth talking about!

The intimate clarity Michelle Willis' Shining Bits and Pieces, an EP demo of original songs, captures and reveals every expressive nuance of the singer/pianists' silky voice. Twisting and turning, these songs explore the lyrics’ journey, creating musical textures that enwrap the listener. Shining does exactly that, glistening with freshness and energy.

The funky Quincy Jones-like groove of “Psychology” gives us a taste of Willis’ blues-R&B chops. She's able to make perfect sense of the quirky almost-anti-melodic semitone dissonance of “Rain,” and brings a wonderful spontaneity to “Weightless” and “Love Song.” Like other songs on this recording, “Open Hands” constantly entices and surprises with shifts of time, style, and texture. Backed by Heather Crawford (guitar), Charles James (bass), Shawn Rompre (drums), Kristjan Bergey (tenor sax) and vocalists Marla Walters, Janee Olivia and Andre Reid, Willis has a seemingly endless resource of vocal colours – breathy whisper, feline purr, bluesy growl, soulful wail – all used so naturally.

We’ll definitely be hearing more about this extremely talented singer-songwriter. In fact, you can hear her at the Rex this month, on February 9, 16, and 23, at 6:30 pm.

Frank Nakashima

On January 20, TrypTych gave the world premiere of Frankenstein by Andrew Ager, composer-in-residence at Toronto’s St. James Cathedral. TrypTych has previously presented individual scenes from the opera, but on the 20th and 22nd (when I attended) we were supposedly seeing the completed work. I hope this is not true. The 70-minute minute piece has so much potential and Ager’s music so evocative that it really should be at least half again as long.

William Whitla’s five-scene libretto adheres closely to Mary Shelly’s original novel and thankfully dispenses with all of Hollywood accretions of schlock that have so distorted the tale. The opera, like the novel, is not a horror story but a philosophical meditation on the relation of creator and creation. Again and again there were moments when I wished the librettists would pause the action and allow characters to reflect more fully on their situation. Victor Frankenstein and the Monster both flee the laboratory after the Monster’s animation, but we really need to know more how each feels about that experience. The Monster peers in at the family he has secretly been helping. This would be a perfect time to have him reflect on the peace he sees inside and the alienation he feels outside. The use of Milton’s Paradise Lost as a parallel text in the De Lacey family scene could be much more extended.

There are dramaturgical problems. Frankenstein and the Monster should not really have their central encounter while a boy’s body lies ignores on the ground. The deaths of Frankenstein’s wife and brother really don’t need to be shown in the final scene since they tend to pitch the tone into melodrama, which it had till then avoided.

Despite this, the opera is gripping from start to finish. I wanted more because what there was, was so enjoyable. The librettists have boiled the story down to its bare essentials which are even more timely now when mankind really can artificially create life. Ager himself played the score on a grand piano, where it sounded like a gorgeous post-impressionist tone poem, lush yet propulsive, where constantly shifting tonalities reflected the morally ambiguous world of the story.

Of the cast of eight, Stephen King was the clear standout with a bass-baritone voice of great beauty and power, whose fine singing and acting painted the Monster in the most sympathetic light. As Victor Frankenstein, tenor Lenard Whiting had some difficulty with the highest lying notes, but successfully replaced the caricature of the “mad scientist” with a more psychological portrait of obsession. Baritone Michael York used his well rounded tone to characterize and differentiate the anger of Victor’s father from the serenity of Old Mr. De Lacey. Michael Taylor and Melanie Conly beautifully sang a duet celebrating the married bliss of Felix and Agatha De Lacey. Eleven-year-old Charles Waddell clearly showed abundant talent as Victor’s nephew. Though Graham Robinson and Dawn Bailey were given little to do as Victor’s best friend and his fiancée, they did it well.

Director and designer Edward Franko worked wonders in staging such a work on a microscopic budget. The performance was enthusiastically received – but I still feel an expanded version would have a greater chance of attracting the interest of other companies.

Christopher Hoile

An important voice in jazz was stilled when John Norris died on January 31.

Born in Surrey, England, in 1934 he emigrated to Canada in the mid-50s, first to Montreal where he operated the Montreal Traditional Jazz Society from 1956 to 1957 before moving to Toronto where soon became involved with the Traditional Jazz Club of Toronto. In 1958 Coda magazine was established with co-founder, Bill Smith, followed ten years later by Sackville Records. Both became recognized as models of integrity and honesty.

He was an authority on jazz and a respected critic, writer, broadcaster and promoter who never once compromised his opinions and values. As well as writing regularly for Coda, he contributed over the years to many of the other leading music publications – Jazz Journal, Melody Maker, Downbeat and International Musician – wrote a jazz history series for radio and for more than twenty years taught a jazz history course at the University of Toronto.

An unassuming man, but unshakable in his conviction, not gregarious but comfortable among his friends, he had the respect and admiration of all the musicians who recorded for the Sackville label: artists ranging in styles from Willie "The Lion" Smith to Anthony Braxton. The label, from its humble beginnings, established  itself as perhaps the world's leading independent record company.

Jazz has lost a great friend, and a true supporter of the music and the artists who perform it.

Jim Galloway