Features

“I wanted to begin with The Galileo Project, which is the one I mostly closely identify with Jeanne. And Galileo begins with Vivaldi,” Alison Mackay explains. It is February 15 and we are chatting, via Zoom, about an upcoming April 2 Tafelmusik concert, curated by Mackay and Christina Mahler, as a tribute to Jeanne Lamon who, at the invitation of Tafelmusik’s founders, Kenneth Solway and Susan Graves, become the ensemble’s first music director just two years after they founded the ensemble in 1979. She remained at the Tafelmusik helm till 2014, by which time the ensemble had grown from a quirky and belovedly Birkenstockian niche player in downtown west Toronto music scene into what Neil Genzlinger, in a June 26, 2021 New York Times obituary for Lamon, described as “one of the world’s most acclaimed baroque ensembles, … striving not only to present centuries-old music as it was originally heard, but also to reach modern audiences.

“Never was that more evident,” Genzlinger continued, “than in ‘The Galileo Project: Music of the Spheres,’ a multimedia performance piece, conceived and scripted by Alison Mackay, the ensemble’s bassist, featuring the music of Vivaldi and others, projections of astronomical and other scenes, an actor providing narration, and an unfettered orchestra.”

 “Unfettered orchestra” refers in part to the players having memorized their parts, so free to move around the performance space, something that was to become a Tafelmusik trademark over the ensuing years, in a series of story-driven thematic programs which reached deep into the times and places in which baroque music, the re-emerging with startling parallels, convergences and sometimes hard truths. We got to hear it differently. Unfettered by old assumptions.

On February 18, 2022 a post in my Facebook feed stopped my scrolling in its tracks. The Tranzac Club announcement exclaimed, “Please welcome Matthew Fava, our new (and first) Executive Director!”

Accompanying it was a photo of Fava, mic in hand, in a black T-shirt emblazoned with “ann southam is my hero” in a lowercase sans-serif font. Fava starts at the Tranzac on March 3, the post continued, “leading our operations, budgeting and implementation of our strategic plan, programming and staff management.”

Part of my initial surprise was due to the fact that I’d only known Fava as the personable Director of the Ontario Region at the Canadian Music Centre (CMC) for over a decade. From that position he encouraged and nurtured numerous creative music projects and communities in our province. 

What happens when you combine a cornucopia of talented musicians with a decidedly off-the-wall idea? A magnificent new work presented by Tapestry Opera, titled Gould’s Wall, featuring the talents of director Philip Akin, writer Liza Balkan and composer Brian Current.

Brian Current dreamed for years of creating a project using a wall in the Atrium, the enclosed space that joins the Royal Conservatory of Music (RCM) and Koerner Hall in Toronto. It took a conversation with librettist Liza Balkan (followed by a few years of writing and workshopping) to create the work, and the alchemical processes of director Philip Akin to animate it into being.

Gould’s Wall tells the story of a young artist as she struggles to develop her career. For Balkan, the building itself was the inspiration. The presence of pianist, composer, broadcaster Glenn Gould is everywhere. His photograph is on the walls. The namesake Glenn Gould School resides here. “The desire for mastery in music, the constant practising and the revelling in music and the vibrancy of it – it seemed that wall, what lives around it, through it, in it, behind it, is connected to pursuing excellence,” Balkan says.

Nineteen-year-old opera student Charlotte Siegel is getting frustrated as she sings an aria from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro over and over again in a cramped rehearsal studio at the University of Toronto. She wants to impress her new teacher and is concentrating hard on getting every element right. But the more she tries, the more her body tenses and the notes get stuck in her throat. 

“[Singing] is not a gentle thing,” says her teacher, Frédérique Vézina. “It’s like jumping off a cliff – you have to just let go.” 

Siegel takes a deep breath. She turns off her brain and lets her instincts take over. The song’s energy pumps from the ground to her face; every part of her vibrates like a pitchfork.The pounding pulse of the music takes over her being, annihilating her worries. The moment shimmers. Times like these, when the “controlled scream” of opera whisks her right out of herself, make all the effort worthwhile. “It’s the most luxurious feeling in the world,” says the soprano. 

Learning to immerse herself in the moment has benefitted Siegel in both music and life. But it hasn’t been easy. Like many musicians, Siegel tends towards perfectionism, over-analyzing situations and undercutting actions.

Letting go is another of many life lessons that music and her mentors have taught her: learning to communicate and collaborate have bolstered her confidence both in singing and in general. “I question who I would be if I hadn’t had those experiences,” says Siegel.

After nearly two years unable to perform, the lucky among us found it was possible in the latter part of October 2021 and into November to begin rehearsing with larger groups. We saw friends and colleagues in bands and orchestras, large and small, grinning in Facebook and Instagram selfies – duly masked (except during the selfies) and double vaxxed of course. But as Omicron swept through, lots of ground was lost where live performance was concerned. 

Here are four – I hope inspirational – stories from this particular variation on the two-year musical rollercoaster ride.

Labyrinth Ensemble: Winter Launch, Spring Concert

Responding to venue closures, last year the multifaceted Toronto music organization Labyrinth Ontario created a summer video series in parks across the city, in several small-scale outdoor summer concerts, and in October took part in the Music Gallery’s X Avant festival. More significant, perhaps, was the late year launch of its 14-musician Labyrinth Ensemble, long a dream of Labyrinth Ontario’s founding artistic director Araz Salek. Playing some 20 instruments in more than a dozen “modal music” genres among them, LE musicians were finally able to rehearse in-person in early November with Montreal-based guest vocalist, oudist Lamia Yared.

The ten-day intensive focused on the study of the history, forms and other musical aspects of classical Arabic music, learning repertoire and fostering a sense of ensemble, culminating in a sold-out debut concert at the Aga Khan Museum on November 13, 2021 that I was honoured to attend. Under Yared’s able on-stage leadership, the group unravelled a series of elaborate classical Turkish and Arabic musical songs and instrumentals, a notable few in complex metres. An impressively democratic, if inherently risky, element was that each musician was given a solo feature. You can view the entire concert on the Aga Khan Museum’s Facebook page.