We’re at it again – as always this time of year, our summer issue becomes a point at which we check in with musicians from across our community who are headed “on the road” – or are staying in – for the summer months. We’ve asked local musicians of all sorts and kinds what they’re most looking forward to this summer, both as listeners and performers, and what their plans are for the 2014/15 season on the other side.
While it’s the same four questions every year, the overwhelming variety of responses we receive demonstrates just how unique each artist is, and just how far their summer travels will take them. For some insight on an array of upcoming plans – some international and some much closer to home – our publisher David Perlman sat down with TSO music director Peter Oundjian, on what he’ll be up to both on and off the podium this summer.
DP: For “On the Road,” our standard four questions are: first of all, what did we drag you away from for this interview?
PO: I have been rehearsing all day. We started the morning with Tchaikovsky 6 and we rehearsed that for a fairly long time. And then we did Rossini, La scala di seta. And then we had a lunch break except that during the lunch break the orchestra was being introduced to our new CEO, Jeff Melanson … I had a rehearsal with Jean-Yves Thibaudet on the James MacMillan piano concerto and the Shostakovich first piano concerto with Andrew McCandless, our principal trumpeter. So that’s the life of a music director. There are always plenty of different things going on.
DP: Next question is: what are you looking forward to most as an audience member, over June/July/August?
PO: Oh that’s an interesting question, because people like me aren’t very good at going to things! My son sings in a wonderful a cappella group on Martha’s Vineyard, called the Vineyard Sound …They put on a fantastic show, and they sing so beautifully and so in tune and in so many different parts. That’s always really entertaining and I’m sure we’ll go there. I will be going to the Caramoor Festival a little bit because it’s right down the road and I have a former affiliation with Caramoor, and I might hear some string quartet music there, it’s a beautiful location. And I may also go to part of their jazz festival because I love it. You know, if I go for real entertainment then obviously orchestral music, I can’t stop being curious about how they’re doing it and why they’re doing that, and why not … And if I hear a string quartet that’s in some ways a little too nostalgic for me, although I can certainly enjoy that very much. I love going to piano recitals or classical guitar recitals or things like that and I also love to hear jazz and other different musical forms.
DP: And as a musician yourself, what are you looking forward to over the summer?
PO: Well first of all I’m looking forward to not being “on the road” for a while! But most importantly, I’m very very excited about the European tour that the Toronto Symphony is going to be taking in the middle of August for about ten days. It’s the first European tour in 14 years for the orchestra, so it’s really a very, very significant moment for all of us. And we’re going to be going to Grafenegg, which is a beautiful festival close to Vienna, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, and we’ll be playing at Rheingau, a wonderful German festival. We’ll be in residence at the Helsinki festival for a couple of days … And then the final concert is sort of on our way home, we’re going to stop in Iceland at Reykjavik, which has a beautiful concert hall called the Harpa, because every window is shaped like a harp, and it’s sitting right there on the Atlantic ocean: this stunning place with a great sound.
DP: Last of the mandatory four questions is: what are you already embroiled in now, for the other side of the summer? What are you already working on in your spare time for your next season?
PO: …On the other side, the opening of next season we have a lot of wonderful things which everybody can read about. But the bigger planning … you know it’s very interesting because the Toronto Summer Music Festival started to emphasize just this summer exactly what’s been on my mind for the last six months. Which is how fascinating it is … the sort of eruption of 20th-century musical language. By the early 1920s, you could suddenly no longer have any idea when music might have been written, if you listen to it now. If it was Schoenberg and the beginning of serialism, well you’d think, my God, that could have been written tomorrow. It seems so modern to us …At the same time, you still had Rachmaninoff and Strauss writing in very honest Romantic language most of the time and then other Romantics developing, like Samuel Barber and so on. And then the sort of polytonal-but-non-modernists like Shostakovich and Britten, and then you had the people who were so influenced by folk music … So, I think it’s a very interesting period. And I think it’s one that we should get our audience everywhere in Toronto excited about. I feel that we as a group of arts leaders in the city need to do a really good job of engaging people who live in Toronto in what is fascinating about the world of art. We have to work harder at it now because we’re so distracted. I mean, which of us doesn’t sit with some kind of a gadget and just go from one YouTube video to the other, from one Google piece of information to the other. Sometimes you learn a lot. And sometimes it’s just purely mindless. But the fact is that you’re distracted and you’re entertained. So we need to work very hard at either being part of that – which is part of what we need to do – but also by just creating something that they’ve got to say, “now, that I actually have to see! Because I wouldn’t be doing that alone, I want to go out and share that with other people.” And this is the sad thing that I think is happening to society now. People don’t go to bookshops anymore. And talk to somebody who knows a lot about books and look at a lot of books and be around people who love books. And sit, and read a few pages and say, “wow, that’s interesting.”
DP: Well, the difference between the opposable thumb and the “app”-osable thumb is a whole shift in the evolution of the species.
PO: That’s very very true. But one thing that we have to realize is that this device-oriented society is a very lonely one. Potentially. And we need to understand that it’s got to be all about community. And this does not really bring us together. We should use it more to bring ourselves together, rather than to pretend that we are together. That’s my view.
Peter Oundjian and the TSO aren’t the only ones hitting the road in the coming summer months! Click here for a full directory of interviews from all of this year’s “On-the-Roaders,” with answers to the same four questions from dozens of local musicians.
