There’s an intersection in Prince George, British Columbia from which, no matter what direction you head, you will be on one of the roads the chamber opera, Missing, has travelled in its seven-year journey en route to Koerner Hall this coming July 24.
Go west. You are on Highway 16, travelling towards Prince Rupert on the Northern B.C. coast, around 700 km away. Go carefully. There are lots of trucks on the Highway of Tears. Before too long, you will pass, unnoticed, the point on the road described in the Prelude to Marie Clement’s searing playscript-turned-libretto for Missing.
HIGHWAY 16. JUST WEST OF PRINCE GEORGE. FALL. From the darkness the sound of rain falling. Then – a solid white painted line is slowly drawn through the aisle dividing the audience, and stage, like the white line of a long highway. There on the side of the highway, THE NATIVE GIRL, age 16, stands hitchhiking on the deserted road. There on the other side - lights up on AVA, age 22, as she drives along the highway. Jagged flashes of light and darkness move across her face. The Native Girl suddenly looks up at Ava – their eyes meeting and locking – suspended in time. Ava drives past The Native Girl. Time passes. The sound of a car skidding on the wet road, the sound of the car’s metal scraping, the sound of Ava letting out a low scream as the sound of the car crashes into the base of a tree on impact.
Head east instead. You are on the part of Highway 16 known as the Yellowhead Highway. In this direction, 700km will get you just past Banff, en route to Regina and eventually Winnipeg. “That’s the thing you have to realize about Prince George,” says violinist Jonathan Crow, artistic director of Toronto Summer Music, “it’s not really rural. It’s a town of about 75,000. Not nothing. And it has the additional advantage of being far from everything else – a day’s drive to Edmonton, South Calgary or Vancouver. Or Banff. ‘Prince George, the capital of Northern B’, they call it.”
Head south. You are on Highway 97, BC’s longest, 700km away from Vancouver (unless you miss your turnoff in which case you could end up in Seattle). Vancouver’s York Theatre was where Missing first saw the light of operatic day, presented by City Opera Vancouver, in November 2017, after which it moved to Victoria’s Baumann Centre for Opera for a further six shows. Writing about that first production for The WholeNote, Roberta Staley said this:
In the hands of librettist Marie Clements of Vancouver, an award-winning Métis writer, director, producer and playwright, words become as powerful as arrows, each one piercing deep-seated emotions, from guilt, sorrow and enlightenment among white viewers to – for Indigenous members of the audience – grief and a sense of vindication from having the suffering of one’s community acknowledged and honoured in a public setting.
And about the music she wrote:
The power of Missing’s libretto is magnified by the equally spare music of Toronto-based JUNO Award-winning composer Brian Current, whose sublime score – conducted here by Timothy Long – soars and plummets in unison with the fierce complexity of emotions that are brought to bear through the telling of … two linked, but very different, tales. One is the suffering of an Indigenous family whose daughter, a high school student, goes missing while hitchhiking along BC’s Highway 16 … the other a masterful rendering of the chasm that divides Canada’s European and Indigenous cultures …expressed through the near-death experience of Ava, a law student from Vancouver, whose car goes off the road during a nighttime drive along Highway 16.
Following that 2017 premiere, Missing took the next step on its journey with the announcement that in November 2019, Pacific Opera (in partnership with the Victoria and Prince George Native Friendship Centres, Regina Treaty/Status Indian Services, Regina Symphony Orchestra and Prince George Symphony Orchestra) would remount the opera: at the Baumann Centre in Victoria, the Regina Performing Arts Centre and at the House of Ancestors “Uda Dune Baiyoh,” at 355 Vancouver St. Prince George, a block from Highway 16.
Now, derailed for almost five years by COVID and its aftermath, Missing is on the road again, buoyed by the ongoing involvement of a majority of the opera’s cast and creative team, and continuing to evolve, as befits a work of art which tells an unfinished story that demands to be heard.
To complete the circle, let’s head north on Highway 97 from where our stories intersect. You can stay on 97 all the way to the BC/Yukon border, 1200km away. But in this context you don’t have to go very far – a matter of minutes – to the Prince George Conservatory where Jonathan Crow, at the helm of Toronto Summer Music for the last time, made his musical start. “It wasn’t yet the Prince George Conservatory back then,” he says. “It started with the school board offering a free Suzuki program and my parents were like ‘This is amazing – a chance to put our kids in music lessons!’ So we did music lessons, right?” The free program only lasted a couple years, but there were enough parents in Prince George who wanted to continue that it morphed into the Prince George Music School, and then eventually the Prince George Conservatory of Music.
Crow’s involvement with the violin wasn’t one of those “love at first sight” storybook things. “I didn’t even know that I was going to like violin. I actually wanted to play cello, but our car was too small. I know some kids hear a violin and know that this is what they want to do. I was not one of those kids.” Nor was he one of those BC hinterland kids who made regular pilgrimages to the Lower Mainland to study with the one teacher who shaped their lives. “In fact I didn’t even have one teacher for a long period of time. There were always teachers coming up to Prince George as a way to start their career. You know: do some teaching, play in the orchestra and other stuff, and then move on. But always incredibly dedicated and grateful to have an opportunity to teach and to play.” Crow too had wonderful opportunities to play, not least in the part-professional Prince George Symphony, currently celebrating 50 years of existence. “I was 12 maybe; you know, just this little annoying kid – I wasn’t that tall at the time – probably bothering all the people around me, but, you know, I got to play in a real orchestra.”
It also happened to be a time, he says, when the Canada Council offered really, really great touring support. “So, fantastic Canadian artists would come through Prince George. I mean [violinist] Scott St. John came through and played the Brahms Concerto with us. I’ve still got his signature on my music. As a 12 year old? Having the opportunity to not just hear but work with really world-class soloists.”
Listening to him talk about those years, I can’t help making a connection between the pedagogy of the Toronto Summer Music Academy, which runs concurrently with the festival, and its homespun Prince George precursor: free tuition; not just masterclass-style mentorship by guest artists, but the extraordinary gift of getting to rehearse intensively and perform in public with them. “Exactly,” he says. “You actually make a connection, right? You learn how that person works and you see different ways people learn. You learn to think about music, to talk about music, and to interact – beyond just being taught.”
“Like 12-year old Jonathan Crow did?” I ask. “Exactly like,” he replies.
David Perlman can be reached at publisher@thewholenote.com
