Features

Life the way most working musicians across the spectrum knew it came to a standstill in March 2020. For Leah Roseman, a violinist with the National Arts Centre Orchestra (NACO) since 1997, the effect was immediate, manifesting itself from day one as “a need to engage with people and help.” Finding herself teaching online for the first time, she began recording videos of herself playing etudes, scales, orchestral excerpts, and offering tips about learning violin for her students. “I was just going to put them in some Dropbox file, but I thought ‘Well, I could just put them on a [private] YouTube channel.’ And then I thought if I made it public maybe people would stumble upon it.” And stumble upon it they did. Ultimately, Roseman created over 1,000 videos on her YouTube channel, attracting over 400,000 views, and laying the groundwork for her path to what I call “other-level pivoting.”

Whether they are physical or metaphorical, staircases take us from one place to another through a liminal space. But far from being “non-places”’ that we should take for granted, stairways are also entities unto themselves: they can effect a change in place or fortune, and themselves stand as symbols of class or power. In Staircases, her new production for Tafelmusik, Alison Mackay explores music with direct or inferred links to staircases and, as she puts it herself, builds a case about complex connections between the arts and economic issues.

For those reliant on public transit, Brampton may seem impossibly north. From this writer’s current location, it’s 1,063 km south. With that in mind, it seems fair to say that Brampton On Stage’s wonderfully diverse programming (music and otherwise) across five venues in that city make a compelling argument for downtowners to take the 43 minute ride from Union Station on the Kitchener or Brampton/Orangeville GO lines.

It was an inspiring moment for me – one that revitalized my love of music which can sometimes become dulled by too much media exposure. The moment I’m speaking of was listening to and watching one of violinist Lara St. John’s performances on YouTube and finding myself absolutely mesmerized by a full-on sensory experience where sound, image and raw emotion became completely intertwined, in her performance of Czardashian Rhapsody, by composer Martin Kennedy. Accompanied by pianist Matt Herskowitz, the two of them raised the roof with their joyful and outrageous performance of two Hungarian tunes, in a performance that is available on her album Shiksa released in 2015. By the end, I was left breathless and full of wonder at her incredible artistry.

Ottawa-born pianist Christina Petrowska Quilico is no stranger to awards and prizes, both as beneficiary and as benefactor. As beneficiary, among her earliest achievements was a New York concerto competition (she shared first prize with pianist Murray Perahia), at age 14, soon after commencing piano studies, on scholarship, with the legendary Rosina Lhévinne, at New York’s Juilliard School of Music. (“A promethean talent,” the New York Times proclaimed.)