Features

Am I just imagining it, or was musical life once much more tidily compartmentalized? There was the season (coinciding with the school year), on the one hand, and the summer on the other.  Within the summer there were festivals and concerts to go to , or summer camps and courses one could enrol in.

Nowadays along with overlap between the seasons, there is a blurring of the lines: between summer festivals and academies; between opportunities for music lovers to attend concerts in the usual way and opportunities to become involved in a hands-on way. For serious music students, if you take the summer to recharge your batteries, you have to wonder if you are losing ground between school years. For concert presenters and summer music educators, the challenge is to figure out how to bridge the gap without losing their identity.

Hamilton’s Brott Festival is an interesting example. Led by conductor Boris Brott, the festival has long boasted a busy annual summer season chock-full of orchestral classics as well as lesser-known works. This year has 11 planned performances so far between June 18 and August 14 (including Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, a concert spotlighting Italian and Italian-influenced works, a performance of a Viennese gala evening with works by Strauss, Lehár and Piazzolla and collaborations with the National Ballet and Festival of the Sound). Brott and his team show no signs of letting up.

Being the music. This is how Canadian-born soprano and now conductor Barbara Hannigan describes her approach to performing. Two questions come to mind: How does one do this? And what are the ingredients needed to so completely embody the music as to become it? George Meredith’s words from his poem The Lark Ascending that inspired Ralph Vaughan Williams’ work of the same name suggest one answer: “The song seraphically free, Of taint of personality, So pure that it salutes the suns.” Hannigan herself gives a hint when she states: “I’m happy with my performance when I know I’ve made the connection between breath and sound, when the whole body is singing.”

Fourteen years ago the then Toronto-based Hannigan appeared on the cover of The WholeNote magazine. At the time she was performing the lead role in the operetta The Merry Widow and her European career was beginning to take off. Now living in Amsterdam, with bookings four to five years in advance, she is returning to Toronto as the featured performer at this years’ New Creations Festival presented by the Toronto Symphony. In three concerts scheduled between February 28 and March 7, Hannigan will be performing both Canadian and North American premieres of works by British composer George Benjamin and Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen.

Looking at a forecast of dishearteningly subzero temperatures – and having only just left behind what was apparently one of the coldest winters on record – it’s admittedly a little hard to believe that summer is on the horizon. And yet, the summer months ahead are just where music presenters are beginning to focus their attention. Almost exactly midway through a busy concert season, it’s at this time of year that 2015/16 season announcements have started to surface and faculty positions for summer workshops are being finalized. At this point in the season, amidst their day-to-day workload, musicians are getting down to the business of filling in the blanks in their summer schedules.

The following story is based on a videotaped conversation at The WholeNote between Angela Hewitt and David Perlman on November 12, 2014 . Click the image below to view/hear the entire conversation.

As Pamela Margles notes in her review of of Angela Hewitt’s newly released Bach: Art of the Fugue in this issue of The WholeNote (page 77 of the print edition) “it was four years ago that Hyperion released all of Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt’s recordings of Bach’s solo keyboard works as a 15-disc boxed set. It was a huge project, but it didn’t include Bach’s monumental late work, The Art of the Fugue.”

“That is when everyone started writing to me of course,” says Hewitt. “You know, why haven’t you done The Art of the Fugue.” She hadn’t even performed it before then, she says, let alone contemplated recording it. “Growing up, it wasn’t even really considered a keyboard piece, or even anything you performed much. For one thing it had long been considered something of an academic work – Bach seeing what he could do with fugues, double fugues, triple fugues, mirror fugues. And there was the fact that in the first edition it was written as an open score, one voice per stave, like a string quartet.”

When it comes to our December issue, no topic it seems has the power to set the pigeon among the cats more effectively than the perennial popularity of Handel’s Messiah. Our choral columnist Ben Stein simply states that he is going to assume that the readers of this column need no urging from him to find a Messiah performance (and then goes on to talk about an admittedly interesting array of other choral events over the holidays and beyond. Our early music columnist Dave Podgorski is slightly less categorical proffering that from his vantage point, Tafelmusik’s sing-along Messiah and Aradia’s Dublin Messiah are the only two Messiahs in Toronto he thinks you need to see. (And like Stein goes on to talk about an equally interesting array of other musical options.) Even CD reviewer Hans De Groot, after singing the praises of a new CD of Messiah from the Boston Handel and Haydn Society (liberally laced with Canadian vocal and instrumental talent, I might add) feels it necessary to add the remark that when asked to review the recording, his first thought was: Another Messiah – who needs it? (Before going on to say that in this case, he couldn’t have been more wrong.)

Our experts notwithstanding, there’s something about Herr Handel’s 24-day opus that continues to captivate, year after year. This year we have scoured the listings and come up with 32 performances by 20 organizations. Five period-instrument groups account for ten performances. Nine modern instrument organizations offer a further 14. Two organizations serve up four performances accompanied by organ. And a further four give single performances that include excerpts from the work.