Features

Facing the darkness, whether metaphorical or real, is not an activity most of us are drawn toward; human struggle and tragedy is, in fact, often what we seek most to avoid in our pursuit of a happy life. Opera is renowned for its dramatic portrayal of the bigger emotions at play in these difficult aspects of human experience, letting the characters and music take us deeper into a more visceral encounter with life’s complex moments. In her opera Pyramus and Thisbe, which runs at the COC from October 20 to November 7, Canadian composer Barbara Monk Feldman takes a unique approach to the existential reality of having to face the darkness, both within and without.

I recently sat down with her in a local park for a conversation about the nature of the opera and how it came into being. Often an opera is created through a collaboration between a writer and a composer with the promise of a production at the end of a long and complex road. Not so with Monk Feldman’s Pyramus and Thisbe. First of all, the opera was written through a process of following her own creative instincts. A few years after it was completed in 2010, a colleague who plays in the COC orchestra encouraged her to send it to COC general director, Alexander Neef. She got a quick reply – a request to see the score – and from that point on, the production was underway.

The Ken Page Memorial Trust will hold its 17th Annual Jazz Fundraiser on Thursday, October 22 at the Old Mill in Toronto. This autumn jazz bash has become a local institution and as ever, will be conducted along the lines of a jazz party, combining some of the best American mainstream jazz artists with a cadre of Toronto’s elite musicians in an informal, but musical, jam-session format. The lineup of prodigious talent promises a jazz banquet and plenty of interaction between players of like instruments. The trumpeters will be Warren Vaché, one of the most lyrically inventive cornetists in jazz, Guido Basso and his sophisticated and mellifluous flugelhorn artistry and John MacLeod, who favours the cornet and is equally well-versed in traditional and modern jazz styles.

The recent funeral service for Marion Aitken (1935 - 2015), the late wife of New Music Concerts’ artistic director Robert Aitken, brought back sharply into my mind the world premiere performance of Harry Somers’ Dickinson, which I recorded with New Music Concerts in 1975 for broadcast on the CBC Radio program Music of Today (1966–1977).Zen, Yeats and Emily Dickinson was one of the earliest works commissioned by New Music Concerts and the new work featured Marion, as a member of the Lyric Arts Trio, together with husband Robert and soprano Mary Morrison. The Aitken family chose to play Marion’s extended piano solo from this work among the many pieces shared at her funeral service, and hearing her brought back a flood of memories from the 1970s and 1980s.

The historic trade routes collectively referred to as the Silk Road, an interconnected web of maritime and overland pathways,  have, for centuries, served as sites for cultural, economic, educational, religious – and purely musical – exchanges. In that light, “silk roads” can be seen as a significant factor in the development of the ever-evolving hybridities that have shaped the face of the modern musical world.

In 1998 the Grammy Award-winning cellist Yo-Yo Ma proposed “Silkroad” as the name of his new non-profit organisation. That project, inspired by his global curiosity and eagerness to forge connections across cultures, disciplines and generations, has grown several branches, the first of which was the successful music performing group, Silk Road Ensemble (SRE). It has played to sold-out houses at Roy Thomson Hall in 2003 and 2009 and will return to perform at Massey Hall on September 15. (Serendipitously, Toronto audiences will have another opportunity to see the SRE up close this September. Morgan Neville’s feature-length documentary The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble graces TIFF’s red carpet, enjoying its world premiere.)

Wu Man’s view from the pipa. Chinese-born Grammy Award nominee Wu Man, widely hailed as the world’s premier pipa (Chinese lute) virtuoso, has a unique perspective on the SRE’s career. An educator, composer and an ambassador of Chinese music, she has a prolific discography of 40 albums and counting. She was among the first musicians to get the call from Yo-Yo Ma to help in founding SRE.