Features

Award-winning, Ottawa-born composer/conductor Brian Current has had his works
performed and broadcast in over 35 countries. His honours include a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Barlow Prize for Orchestral Music, and Italy’s Premio Fedora Award for his chamber opera Airline Icarus.
The Premio prize led to a fully staged production in Verbania, Italy in 2011.

Current is one of Canada’s busiest men of New Music, and November is a particularly rich month for his activities. As artistic director of the New Music Ensemble at the Royal Conservatory’s Glenn Gould School, he will be conducting two of his students in a concert at the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre on November 20. On the afternoon of November 25 at Mazzoleni Hall, Current leads an all-star cast in his opera-oratorio Airline Icarus, which will be followed that evening by a commercial recording session. Finally, on November 30, the Banff Centre’s Gruppo Montebello performs the newly minted chamber ensemble version of Current’s piano solo Sungods, titled Sungods 2012.

The WholeNote met up with the 40-year-old Current at the Royal Conservatory before a rehearsal of his New Music Ensemble.

Directories can make for dry reading. Just think about the proverbial telephone book. On the other hand, if you delve into the lives lived behind the names, things start to get a lot more interesting.

A similar example is The WholeNote’s Blue Pages, the magazine’s 13th annual directory of musical organizations throughout the GTA and beyond. Each group submits a short profile, and while certainly not dry reading, these snapshots are still very factual.

My specific assignment was to write “a personal point of view on what’s in the directory.” What follows is my journey into “the blue”— to get behind the names, as it were.

At first instance, one is lost in a sea of choirs, instrumental ensembles, opera companies, presenters, churches and service organizations — 26, small print, double sided pages, to be exact. In order to negotiate a way into this mass of material, I came up with the idea of asking questions inspired by the Blue Pages.

The upcoming Toronto International Film Festival (September 6 to 16) features several movies that use music in interesting ways. A handful deal explicitly with the (fictional) lives of performers and teachers. One touches on the therapeutic value of choir singing. In others, innovative sound design pushes the boundary of what we may think of as music but the results make for unique cinematic experiences. Here at The WholeNote, we’ve sifted through the 289 feature length films of the 37th TIFF program and zeroed in on those titles that we think our readers might find appealing.

A Late Quartet may be the first fictional film about chamber music’s most beloved configuration since Fabio Carpi’s The Basileus Quartet (1982). It’s certainly the only one built around and permeated through and through by Beethoven’s Op. 131.

As might be expected, this month’s 80th anniversary of the birth of Glenn Gould (and the 30th anniversary of his death) are not passing unnoticed. A lot of the planned activities fall into the range of what one might conventionally expect — concerts of Gouldian repertoire (such as the gorgeously conceived “Bachanalia” at Koerner Hall, September 24), cd and dvd releases, book launches, academic conferences and the like.

One of these upcoming events, though — the one that inspired this story — is as unconventional as Gould himself: “Dreamers Renegades Visionaries: The Glenn Gould Variations” will take over University of Toronto’s Convocation Hall for two jam-packed days September 22 and 23. With an audience of likely well over 1,000, and an astonishingly diverse lineup of over 50 presentations and performances, all under 20 minutes in length, it’s the kind of perfect cultural storm usually reserved for elite gatherings like TED and ideacity. Except that it’s going to be at a fraction of the cost, especially for students.

So who is to thank for GGV, as participants seem to be calling it?

Summer’s turning out to be another scorcher, beckoning with promises of endless sun-kissed days filled with music festivals. There’s always an embarrassment of riches on display, but the ones brimming most with energy and enthusiasm, abuzz with imagination and excitement— the most toe-tapping and hum-inducing — seem to be the open-air concerts.

Everyone loves them: families with boisterous young children, courting couples, friends exploring new music, aficionados revisiting old favourites, thrill-seeking tourists seeking out novel experiences. And then there are the homing pigeons, the ones who return season after season, the ones who think they know all the best-kept open secrets, and very often want to share them!

This column is being launched in that spirit of sharing, of shining the spotlight on the obvious, and the not-so-very obvious: on the role that programming plays in the myriad musical discoveries that everyone shares, and the personalities that shape the journeys we all take. These are the people who work tirelessly behind the scenes to create a very public experience. They might even be people with very public personae or, equally, very private ones. What they all share, unequivocally, is a sense of passion, an infectious enthusiasm and the ability to get things done.