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“It’s an amazing work and I have been nervously and excitedly awaiting this performance all year, since I heard about it, in fact,” says Beckwith. “But I am still wondering whether it’s going to live up to expectations – not the music itself or the orchestra, they are marvellous, but wondering if, and how, it can really connect with our audience. It’s not enough just for it to be done. It deserves to be done right.”

Parsing what “done right” means to Beckwith in this case is a rigorous exercise. It means, for one thing, assertive outreach to the communities that should be there to witness it, because it is part of their collective history. It means rising adequately to the challenge of assembling an adequate chorus of authentically Russian-sounding basses (“the bass soloist’s cheering section” as Beckwith describes them), so that they are sonically on the same page as Bolshoi-trained bass soloist Petr Migunov. It means ensuring that the TSO, and all concerned, understand the historical importance of using Yevtushenko’s original uncensored texts. It means program notes that address what the monumental work meant in its own time (no easy task, in a part of the world where people’s histories often lie buried at different depths in the same piece of land). And perhaps the greatest challenge of all, it means trying to figure out how to enable “our audience,” most of whom will not understand the language being sung, to immerse themselves fully in a work of art whose universal truths are so completely grounded in the particular.

So let’s back up a bit, shall we? Fortunately there’s a good starting point for all this in The WholeNote itself – a review written by columnist Bruce Surtees in October 2014 of a Praga SACD release of a recording of the very first performance of this work. Here’s what Surtees wrote:

On December 18, 1962, defying admonitions from Premier Khrushchev and the Soviet Presidium, the first performance of Shostakovich’s Thirteenth Symphony was given in Moscow and dutifully ignored by the press. The composer had set five of Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poems, including the recently published Babi Yar, the subject of which was anti-Semitism and the well-documented, wholesale massacre of Jews in Kiev by the Nazis in WWII. Further performances were banned until Yevtushenko altered the text, which he did, but not before December 20 when there was a repeat performance with the original text…with Kirill Kondrashin conducting the Moscow Philharmonic, two choirs and Vitaly Gromadsky, bass and speaker…More than a performance, this is a declamation. I know of no other recorded performance to come even remotely close to the intensity and impact of this significant and valuable document.

“It’s a piece I’ve had a hankering to be connected to ever since then,” Beckwith explains. “I was an exchange research scholar in the Soviet Union, way back in the 60s. In fact I arrived a month after the first performance of this symphony. It was in Moscow on December 18, 1962, and I arrived in January of 63. As part of the official academic exchange, since my topic had to do with Russian choral culture, I was attached to the choral department of the then Leningrad, now St. Petersburg, Conservatory and I soon found out that the choir of the school was looking forward to participating in the Leningrad premiere of the work – one of the most unusual choral works ever, written entirely for Russian basses and being a bass myself I was assured that I would be asked to join the chorus! It was tremendous, unexpected, the highlight of my stay in the Soviet Union.

“Except unfortunately the performance never took place.”

In Beckwith’s view the fact of the work falling into instant disfavour and the resultant censorship was all about the words, not the music. “Of course it was all about the poem in this case, not the music. Although I suspect musical censorship in Russia at least, and probably elsewhere, is usually about the words. In this case, of course the words are the music. The music exists only powerfully to project the words.”

As Beckwith explains it, the spark for the work was Shostakovich reading Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s recently published poem Babi Yar. “It starts with this very powerful statement,  ‘On Babi Yar, there are no monuments’.”

The “no monuments” remained true until 1976, Beckwith says, but not for want of trying. “It’s not true that no attempts were made,” he says. But there was no agreement as to what exactly should be said.

From that one poem, and then others by Yevtushenko, “at some point Shostakovich went on to say why don’t I make this into a larger work, which at some point he decided to call a symphony.”

 “If not a symphony, what would you call it?” I ask.

“I would call it a civic oratorio,” he says “although even that…a cantata, maybe…or something like that. It’s for a powerful, male, no-nonsense singer to deliver the text backed up by a cheering section. The choir is really his support – his cheering section. Occasionally taking part in some of the events being recounted they become participants briefly. But most of the time commenting, echoing or reinforcing what the singer is saying. The whole idea is to say this is ‘the people’ talking through the singer.”

It’s important to Beckwith to convey that even though that poem was the spark for the work, it was only the springboard. There are in fact five movements, each based on a separate poem, and each encapsulating a different facet of life in the Soviet Union so recently out of the Stalinist doghouse.

“The second movement is Humour – humour after the Holocaust, now there’s the opera composer’s sense of timing! Then there’s At the Store, anchored in the realities of postwar life, particularly women’s life; then there’s Fears, the poem that Shostakovich asked Yevtushenko to write for the emerging work. ‘Fears are dying in Russia’ it says, and catalogues them (although it goes on to list some that are a little newer, perhaps blunting the idea that they are all dying.”

“And the fifth?” I ask.

“The fifth, Career, is wonderful capstone about careerism” he says. “About the great careers of men of science and daring who risk all, including opprobrium, persecution etc. to stick to their guns, Galileo for example. And they are contrasted with the apparatchiks and sellouts, careerists who flourished through the Stalin era, and just as completely today in Moscow…and Washington, I dare say, and, who knows, just maybe even in Toronto.”

As for Beckwith’s checklist of what “done right” will mean, there’s room for cautious optimism on some fronts. The Elmer Iseler Singers and Amadeus Choir bass sections are the core of the bass cohort, with Beckwith and Iseler/Amadeus conductor Lydia Adams working closely together, using Beckwith’s system of transcription (another lifelong passion of his) to enable English speakers to get the sound of the Russian words right. “She reached out to me,” he says, “which was great, or I would have been after her to do it!”

Recruitment of other singers is under way, although it remains to be seen whether Beckwith’s healing vision of a bass cohort made up of singers from the Russian, Ukrainian and Jewish communities can be realized. All concerned are now aware of the nuances of which texts get used. And as for enabling “our audience,” most of whom will not understand the language being sung, to immerse themselves fully in a work of art whose universal truths are so completely grounded in the particular, well we will all have our part to play in that as the next six weeks unfold.

David Perlman can be reached at publisher@thewholenote.com

Many of you know me as the person who does display-ad bookings for this magazine. Others might remember me as the writer of the World Music column from mid-2004 to early 2011. In addition, I’m an oboist, a longtime member of the Niagara Symphony, and freelancer around the Toronto area. A year and a half ago, I did something no musician should do – I left my instruments, oboe and English horn in a single black rectangular case, in my car. Mind you, I’d been doing this for years, on all those highway stops on the way to gigs, catching a quick bite to eat, or a coffee. Why lug around more than I needed? And besides, who would know what that is anyway – the case isn’t shaped like a violin or cello, nothing to give away its contents or value.

It was September 11, 2014, and I had just driven back to Toronto from Ottawa. It was a Thursday evening and the traffic on the 401 coming into the city was heavy and slow, making the trip longer than usual. I picked up some groceries, dropped off a passenger, then instead of going home to unload my car, decided to head to The WholeNote office to catch up with some work. It was around 8pm, and I parked on Lennox St. just off Bathurst, south of Bloor, across from the Midas automotive shop. I grabbed my purse, a bag of food, and my WholeNote-related work satchel, and headed up to the office nearby. I’d glanced at the instrument case on the back seat of my trusty 1995 Toyota Corolla wagon…naw, too much to carry…and who’d know what that was anyway.

I guess I had a lot to do at the office; it was 11pm when I returned to the car, got in and drove home up toward St. Clair Ave. There was a chill in the air, but I was too tired to register the fact that there shouldn’t in fact be a breezy chill, since all my windows were closed. I parked in my usual spot behind my building and began to unload on the driver’s side. You can imagine my shock when, lo and behold, no instrument case to be found! And my blue backpack containing an old computer was also missing. Then I noticed the shattered glass, and the entirely missing rear passenger-side window.

Without going into too much detail, my feeling from Toronto police was that this was not a high priority for them. Though they assured me they were taking the case seriously, being “theft over $5,000,” it was three weeks before any investigation began. To make matters worse, the instruments were not insured. In the meantime, I needed to borrow an English horn for the opening concert of the Niagara Symphony season only a week away. (I still had my old Greenline oboe; the stolen one was a new Lorée). Gary Armstrong owner of Gary Armstrong Woodwinds, came to the rescue, and when I entered his Queen Street shop the day after the theft to pick up an instrument, he informed me he’d had a call from someone at Knox Presbyterian Church on Spadina, saying they’d found some of my stuff in their dumpster area in the laneway behind the church. They knew to call Gary, because of a repair receipt containing his info, and my name, that they’d found. I raced over – in addition to the receipt that I’d left in the pouch of the instrument case, there was my Niagara Symphony music, a reed case with my name on it, and the blue backpack, but no computer and no instruments or case. But now I knew exactly where the thief had been after the theft, to dump items that might link me to the instruments. And, there were surveillance cameras on a private garage in the laneway facing the dump site! I contacted the homeowner, but by the time police got onto the case and then waited for the camera owner (the homeowner’s son) to return to town, the footage from that evening had been erased!

I had an outpouring of support from friends and colleagues on Facebook. I posted my instrument serial numbers, which were in turn shared by colleagues to their contacts, including music stores and instrument dealers. The WholeNote ran a monthly classified ad with all the info. I posted the theft to a couple of online stolen instrument registries, looked in pawn shops, and had help from friends checking sites such as eBay and Kijiji. Time passed. Life went on. I eventually bought a used English horn, and continued to play my 20-year-old reliable Greenline oboe. I thought about my stolen instruments a lot, imagining them rotting in landfill somewhere, or perhaps enjoying a new life in China, never to be traced again. Or perhaps they were nearby, in the possession of someone wondering what to do with them.

And then the miraculous happened! Twelve days ago at the time of writing, I got a phone call from a music store not far from Toronto – they had my instruments! Someone had brought them in for appraisal. After exchanging some information, I was able to pick them up from that region’s police station. The music store wished to remain anonymous here, fearing that eventually word might leak out, deterring would-be thieves or individuals in possession of stolen instruments from bringing them in for repair or evaluation, so I am respecting that wish. But thanks to a community of individuals who spread the word, and to the on-the-ball employees of that music store who smelled a rat and checked their internal system, I have my precious instruments back, and in good condition I might add. Miracles do happen, with a bit of help from friends.

The decade of the 1990s witnessed a flourishing of Canadian musical creativity, in terms of both the composition of significant new works and the growing maturity of several organizations that commissioned and presented performances of them. Two New Hours, the contemporary music program I created for CBC Radio Two, turned 12-years-old on New Years Day, 1990. We had already commissioned over 100 new Canadian works, and were just “hitting our stride,” as the saying goes. Included among the many outstanding Canadian works whose world premieres were yet to be broadcast on Two New Hours in the 1990s were Glenn Buhr’s Cathedral Songs, Harry Freedman’s Borealis, Jacques Hétu’s Concerto for Trombone and Orchestra, Alexina Louie’s Shattered Night, Shivering Stars, Murray Schafer’s Concerto for Accordion and Orchestra, Harry Somers’ Third Piano Concerto, Ann Southam’s Webster’s Spin and hundreds more works of exceptional quality. It was already clear that the investment CBC had made in new musical creation was yielding large-scale returns.

In November 1990, in a live network broadcast from Quebec City on both CBC Radio Two and Radio-Canada, Chris Paul Harman, then a 19-year-old, became the youngest Grand Prize winner in the National Radio Competition for Young Composers. At the end of that decade, the Grand Prize went to Brian Current. In both instances, Harman and Current were subsequently voted top young composers at the International Rostrum of Composers in Paris, launching their careers on the international stage. It was clear that CBC’s investment in identifying and developing emerging young Canadian composers was providing a high-power talent pool for the future.

Karen Kieser (1948–2001) was head of CBC Radio Music as the 90s began. Karen was a firm believer in the CBC’s role as an institution that developed Canadian musical talent, not only to assure that there would be Canadian artists of international standard available to future CBC programmers, but as a fulfillment of the Broadcasting Act, the cornerstone legislation that created the CBC, and which is still in force today. The effort that Karen put into talent development in the 1980s planted the seeds for an explosion of musical initiatives in the 1990s. She was particularly supportive of the CBC’s talent competitions and she made it a priority to increase their public visibility by investing in the promotion of the concerts and broadcasts of the CBC/Radio-Canada Young Performers, Young Composers and the choral competitions.

Among her many accomplishments, we owe the existence of Glenn Gould Studio to her. Her formidable determination ensured that it was included in the plans for the Canadian Broadcasting Centre, against all odds. As crunch time approached to finalize the plans for the Broadcasting Centre in the late 1980s, Karen battled those planners who considered a dedicated music studio to be an unnecessary frill. I remember that dark Friday, when word arrived that the “performance studio,” as it was then labelled, had been officially purged from the design plan. It was a temporary setback, as Karen counterattacked, rallying support and seeing to it that a world class music production facility would be in the music department’s tool kit when the Centre opened in 1992.

Karen moved to the new Canadian Broadcasting Centre in 1992, not as head of Radio Music, but rather as executive director of Glenn Gould Studio (GGS). One of her first production decisions in this new capacity was to set aside budget for programming contemporary music. She asked me to conceive and produce concerts that would broaden the range of otherwise standard classical repertoire she was offering in GGS-sponsored concerts. A highlight of that first season was our presentation of the percussion group, Nexus: Bob Becker, William Cahn, Russell Hartenberger, Robin Engelman (1937–2016) and John Wyre (1941–2006). All were eager to exploit the perfect acoustics of the new hall, and to accomplish this, we designed a concert titled “Classics of Contemporary Percussion.” The program included Drumming (Part 1) by Steve Reich, Third Construction by John Cage, Rain Tree by Toru Takemitsu and The Birds by William Cahn. The sold-out concert was a brilliant success, a fabulous broadcast, and it certainly showed off the Nils Jordan-designed acoustics of Glenn Gould Studio.

Encounters: In 1993 Karen also asked me, as executive producer of Two New Hours, to create a new music concert series at GGS in partnership with Lawrence Cherney, who was busy transforming his organization, Chamber Concerts Canada, into Soundstreams Canada. With Karen’s support, Lawrence and I created Encounters, a series of concerts pairing music by a significant Canadian composer with works by a composer who was internationally recognized. The series was co-presented by GGS and Soundstreams Canada and broadcast on Two New Hours. In the first season we produced concerts in GGS that paired Canadians Ann Southam, Michael J. Baker and Barry Truax with Estonian Arvo Pärt, American Terry Riley and Englishman Gavin Bryars, respectively. Encounters was a successful format, both for concert and radio audiences, and the series continued to the end of the decade. A highpoint of this collaboration was in 1997, when Soundstreams expanded the Encounters concept and produced the Northern Encounters Festival, a large undertaking described as “a circumpolar festival of the arts.”

Another signature feature of the new Canadian Broadcasting Centre was the Barbara Frum Atrium. The design team had conceived the ten-story, glass-topped atrium as a public space, where people could gather in a friendly atmosphere. There was always a notion that the space might serve to host performance events, but it wasn’t until 1995 that the appropriate grand statement was realized. In 1993, on the heels of the success of the Winnipeg Symphony’s New Music Festival, I asked WSO composer-in-residence, Glenn Buhr, to compose a piece of music that would be an expression of musical community building. The work would be designed as a surround-sound symphony for performance in the Barbara Frum Atrium: on the ground floor, up in the balconies, and with antiphonal brass groups sounding from the very top floors. Glenn responded to the challenge and he began composing Cathedral Songs, a work that included the Toronto Symphony, Nexus, the Toronto Children’s Choir and the Hannaford Street Silver Band. In March of 1995, these forces were assembled for a concert titled Cathedral Songs, in which the eponymous composition by Glenn Buhr had its premiere. Each participating group performed separately in the first half of the concert, and then all together in Glenn’s composition in the second part. The Atrium’s 700 seats were full, and the concert was broadcast live-to-air, yielding an audience of thousands of listeners across Canada. The concert, the broadcast, the new work and all the other pieces performed that night made a statement. Canadians, creating together and aspiring for excellence, can achieve greatness. Alec Frame, vice president of CBC Radio at the time, told me, “I wish that concert could have gone on forever!” It was a highpoint of Canadian music in the 90s, and there was still half a decade to go!

David Jaeger is a composer, producer and broadcaster based in Toronto.

The presence of both Australian composer/conductor/violist Brett Dean and Scottish composer/conductor Sir James MacMillan in Toronto for concerts the same week (March 5 to 12) creates the possibility of the artistic equivalent of a seismic event. Dean is the curator of this year’s TSO New Creations Festival at Roy Thomson Hall and MacMillan conducts Soundstreams’ Choir 21 at the Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre, as well as concerts in Waterloo and Kingston. Dean and MacMillan, both in their mid-50s, are both prolific composers and winners of major international honours. They’re also in great demand, conducting their music around the world; it’s a fortunate coincidence that they should both be in Toronto the same week. It’s also fortunate that the concert dates do not conflict: the New Creations dates are March 5, 9 and 12; the Soundstreams Toronto concert is March 8.

Another interesting coincidence is the fact that both these artists came into prominence in the early 1990s, the same time as many Canadian orchestras seized upon the new music festival format as a way of introducing audiences to contemporary repertoire. This happened first in Winnipeg, and in fact, this past January, the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra celebrated the 25th anniversary of their New Music Festival. The WSO’s festival has been so successful that it remains one of their signature events, one that has contributed to the rebranding of the orchestra, so much so that its last two music directors, Andrey Boreyko and Alexander Mickelthwate, were both attracted to Winnipeg on the reputation of the New Music Festival. The WSO’s concept of presenting new orchestral music in a festival format was copied soon after by orchestras in Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Edmonton and other communities. The music of Dean and MacMillan was first heard in Canada in such festivals.

The significance of the WSO’s bold initiative in 1992 cannot be overstated. It was the first time a major Canadian orchestra had committed its full organizational resources to the production of a week-long contemporary music festival, one that featured both new Canadian orchestral works as well as important international works. Music director Bramwell Tovey, composer-in-residence Glenn Buhr and the late executive director Max Tapper had contacted me in 1991 to ask whether I, as executive producer of Two New Hours on CBC Radio Two, would be interested in broadcasting music from the contemporary music festival they were planning. I saw this as an exciting opportunity and immediately promised that not only would we broadcast as many concerts from their festival as the Two New Hours budget could afford, but I would also be prepared to contribute an event which we would broadcast live, to show our support for the WSO’s innovative programming approach.

On Sunday night, January 19th, 1992, Two New Hours presented a contemporary piano recital by Christina Petrowska Quilico, live to air on CBC Radio Two, from the Centennial Concert Hall in Winnipeg. The recital included music by Canadians Omar Daniel, Steven Gellman, Peter Paul Koprowski, Sid Robinovitch and Ann Southam and acclaimed international composers Frederic Rzewski and Toru Takemitsu. The WSO’s production team, not sure how best to market a recitalist in their 2,500-seat hall, decided to put up risers on the stage, as the main seating area, in case the attendance was small. Those 700 riser seats filled quickly, and the WSO’s management team watched in amazement as another 1,000 people then took “overflow” seats in the main section of the hall. It was clear from that moment that the New Music Festival would be a great success. And needless to say, Christina played a brilliant program, cheered on, as she was, by the enthusiastic mob of listeners who surrounded her, which in turn made a wonderfully sparkling live broadcast.

The early success of the WSO’s festival attracted more than just ticket buyers. Composers, publishers, arts councils, soloists and indeed other CBC Radio Two network music programs also took notice. By the next year, the WSO’s New Music Festival could already call itself an international festival, thanks to the worldwide distribution of our CBC Radio broadcasts over the program-exchange protocol managed by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU). Through an alliance I built with other CBC radio music shows, we were able to broadcast all the festival concerts for the next several seasons. By the time the WSO’s New Music Festival celebrated its tenth anniversary the list of international “star” composers who had been featured incuded Americans John Corigliano, Aaron Jay Kernis, David Del Tredici and Christopher Rouse; Estonian Arvo Pärt, Englishmen Gavin Bryars and Mark-Anthony Turnage; Dutchman Louis Andriessen and Austrian HK Gruber. Literally hundreds of Canadian works had been performed. A memorable moment at the end of the 1996 New Music Festival was the spectacle of the usually taciturn Arvo Pärt, receiving an ovation on stage, and crying out, “Thank you, Winnipeg.”

The success of the Winnipeg festival proved that a well-programmed and properly promoted new music festival could draw substantial audiences. It also made for exciting, irresistible radio programming. Brett Dean, this year’s TSO New Creatons curator, was featured as both viola soloist and composer in the 2003 edition of the WSO’s festival, including a showstopping performance of Styx, the dramatic viola concerto by Georgian composer Giya Kancheli. Dean had been introduced to Canadian radio listeners when we programmed his clarinet concerto, Ariel’s Music, on Two New Hours in 1995, after it was selected at the International Rostrum of Composers in Paris. At that time Dean was just emerging as a composer, having spent 14 years in the viola section of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.

But now, Dean and the aforementioned Sir James MacMillan are both recognized as mature composers, and we’ll have excellent examples of their best works during their respective appearances here, thanks to Soundstreams and the TSO. MacMillan will conduct a choral program with Soundstreams’ Choir 21 that includes his profound and powerful Seven Last Words from the Cross and his lovely setting of Robbie Burns’ The Gallant Weaver, along with works by Canadians James Rolfe and Murray Schafer and Norwegian Knut Nystedt. Dean and the TSO, with music director Peter Oundjian, will bring us Dean’s Viola Concerto (with Dean as viola soloist), his trumpet concerto, Dramatis Personae (Hakån Hardenberger, trumpet soloist) and the cantata, Knocking at the Hellgate (Russell Braun, baritone soloist), along with world premieres by Canadian composers Kevin Lau and Paul Frehner and other international repertoire.

March 5 to 12 promises to be a sublimely raucous and exciting week of new music in the community. I’ll definitely be going to it all!

David Jaeger is a composer, producer and broadcaster based in Toronto.

A brave little girl is wakened on a sweaty night in Nanjing by her father around 10pm. They ride double on his bike to the train station, about an hour through the city. They get on a midnight train and she sleeps a little – maybe on a luggage pile, or on some newspapers on the floor under a seat. They arrive in Shanghai at 6am and have a little breakfast. She has an 8am violin lesson. Then they travel all the way home again. And they do this every weekend.

Young Teng Li devoted much of her childhood to the violin. She was not yet a teenager when an important instructor at the Beijing Central Conservatory, who also taught viola, complained about the calibre of viola students in general and demanded that she switch because he wanted “the best.” It was a bigger instrument, the articulation more difficult,  the sound projection different. Li accepted the challenge and so began her visceral bond with an instrument that sings with an almost human voice.

At 16, speaking very little English, she auditioned for, and earned a place at, the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. Her new teacher, the renowned Michael Tree, offered this new challenge: he said he had no worries about her playing, but that she must also become the best human being she could. She was embarking on a journey during which competition and being “’the best” can push aside the physical and mental health of young artists, and the isolation of rigorous practice and study can turn out emotional and social misfits. Tree’s admonition hit the right note, and resonated – what she understood was that if you are not a good person it will show in your music.

Li was still a student when she was invited by Peter Oundjian to audition for the first viola chair of the TSO. She returned to play Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony under Oundjian’s direction and found herself hooked on the symphony. At the start of the 2004/05 season she became the TSO’s youngest player at the age of 21 and the orchestra’s first chair viola, a position she retains today.

She rose to this new challenge with the same combination of grit and grace that saw her through the earlier ones: the sheer volume of repertoire; the numbers of rehearsals and engagements; earning the trust of the other players whom she is quick to credit for helping her learn on the job. The outcome has, according to all accounts, been mutually rewarding. Alongside her vigorous TSO schedule, including appearances as featured soloist she’s been establishing herself as a violist internationally, with regular engagements as soloist. She is busy as a chamber musician and collaborator, appearing in major international festivals and competitions. She is one-third of Trio Arkel, along with violinist Marie Bérard and cellist Winona Zelenka. She teaches at the University of Toronto Faculty of Music and the Conservatoire de Musique de Montréal.

Last summer she released her debut recording, 1939, with collaborators Meng-Chieh Liu (piano), and Benjamin Bowman (violin). The CD is an extraordinary collection of chamber works by Jongen, Ullmann, Hindemith, Hua and Klein. In the liner notes Li says “I wanted to showcase the works of different composers at that point in history to express how human beings from all walks of life can be affected during such horrific times.” (See Pamela Margles’ review in The WholeNote’s DISCoveries, September 2015.) 

Please see Interview, We Are All Music’s Children.