Features

Opening night of a concert season is something of a landmark moment, and one likely to have presenters and concertgoers alike on the edge of their seats. The first show of the year acts as a beginning of sorts, setting the tone for the season ahead. And yet, a season opener is also in many ways a culmination of the great work of preparation – the not-always-visible efforts of the myriad people who shape a musical project into its final, public form.

We spoke with some of those behind-the-scenes music professionals whose work is just that – to ensure that each concert of the season, for both audience and performers, happens just the way it should. Opening night, when the houselights go down and the curtain rises, is in fact a very different sort of landmark for each individual involved – and for some, just another day on the job.

What follows are conversations with a cluster of industry experts: the acoustician working on the The Isabel, the hall in the new Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts at Queen’s University; the principal Toronto Symphony Orchestra librarian backstage at Roy Thomson Hall; and two individuals whose sets and surtitles respectively, help give opera in Toronto its visual presence. As each prepares in his own way for the onset of another season, they divulge the secrets of the job and reveal just how crucial that behind-the-scenes clockwork can be.

So, as you enjoy your musical firsts of the upcoming concert season, be sure to keep an eye (or an ear) out for the handiwork of some of these industry experts. While you may not see them onstage under the spotlights, you’ll know just what, at that moment, they might be up to.

In his 2005 article “Ghazal Original” British music critic Ken Hunt reckoned that Kiran Ahluwalia “has the potential to become one of the great ambassadors of Indo-Pakistani diaspora music, not [just] from Canada, [but] from anywhere…” (fRoots Issue 269). With each new album she has come closer to fulfilling that promise; two JUNO Best World Music Album awards (and several nominations) later, Ahluwalia has proven her perennial appeal to audiences and critics alike. In 2009 the Songlines/WOMAD Best Newcomer of the Year Award heralded her as an international world music star of growing stature. Various World Music charts over the years have echoed that trend. Her 2011 cover of the qawwali song Mustt Mustt, by the celebrated late Pakistani qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, recorded with the Malian group Tinariwen, has garnered an impressive 314,000 visits on YouTube.

Since Ahluwalia‘s first CD in 2001, her string of album releases, accompanied by evolving instrumentation and stylistic components, has been called “one of global music’s most interesting adventures.” It seems that each new album marks personal growth, the expansion of her careful listening to yet another geo-cultural zone of our world. She has also shown a continued eagerness to contest the borders of her musical comfort zone in live performance. For instance, last year she shared the Harbourfront Centre stage with the rising Inuk throat singer Tanya Tagaq as well as divas from other musical traditions. On other occasions she’s sung with electronica groups Eccodek and Delerium, with an Afghan rubab player and a Cape Breton fiddler. She has performed her compositions, as arranged by Glenn Buhr, with the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra. The list of genres she’s collaborated in also includes Portuguese fado, sub-Saharan percussion, Pakistani qawwali, and most recently, African blues. Incorporating just one culturally “other” element in one’s music can be problematic on several levels, yet she integrates each new element with seeming grace and ease.

A rare wedding of the arts – poetry, music and dance coming together in the spontaneous combustion of improvisation – is taking wing across Canada this fall, with nearly 50 performances in nine provinces (all but Prince Edward Island) and over 30 cities, stretching from early September to the middle of November. It’s called The Muted Note, and it’s a remarkable tour for a work so subtle in its refractions and spontaneous in its creativity.

The poetry of P.K. Page is one of the great accomplishments of Canadian poetry, lucid work that possesses a sense of language and the world in moments of exchange and transformation. (Page had a rare gift for expression, developing a parallel practice as a painter under the name P.K. Irwin.) Lately two young artists, composer/trombonist Scott Thomson and singer/choreographer Susanna Hood, have used other arts to extend Page’s work, interpreting it in new dimensions. As Thomson says, “Page’s poems are what the show is about. The songs and dances extend directly from the verse, and are composed and improvised in order to animate and activate it. We’re looking and listening for the connective tissue that makes poetry, song and dance one thing.”

Rooted in free jazz, Thomson and Hood began an intense exploration of the work of saxophonist Steve Lacy a few years ago. Lacy had a unique gift among jazz composers and improvisers for setting text, working with poetry from the ancient Lao Tzu to Beat Generation outliers like Bryon Gysin and Robert Creeley. Thomson – the founder and curator of Toronto’s longtime creative music performance space Somewhere There – formed a quintet with Hood and saxophonist Kyle Brenders called – both pragmatically and allusively – The Rent, specifically to explore Lacy’s work.

When I first launched “Hopera: an evening of local craft beer and song,” people assumed that this was an attempt on my part to elevate beer and make it seem more upscale by pairing it with an art form as grand as opera. This was not the case at all.

As bodies begin to fill the sea of burgundy and beige chairs in legendary Massey Hall, the excitement for tonight’s show is palpable. Daniel Lanois has the opening slot for Emmylou Harris at the end of their tour celebrating the reissue of 1995’s Wrecking Ball, for which Lanois also owns producing credit. As I watch the diverse crowd trickle in, the instrumental pre show music seeping out from surrounding speakers catches me. I think it is Lanois’ music but I can’t say for sure. That guess is put to rest as Lanois appears on stage walking with purpose and perfect timing to be seated at his pedal steel. There is a smooth transition from the speakers into a live continuation. Everyone’s focus has redirected and for the first time since I can remember, there is not one illuminated cellphone in my peripheral. This crowd is here to listen.

For the duration of the first song, Lanois hasn’t looked up once, he is in the sound, and we are all there with him. His fingers move with precision against the strings and I get lost in the story that is created by them and the sounds, reminiscent of an open vintage jewelry box. The crowd’s expectations are undoubtedly safe here; he knows what he is doing. Lanois knows music like few others and this opening set is a chance for us to be reminded that not only is he a master of shaping the sound of others but he too owns his own space as an award-winning musician and songwriter.