At first, about two weeks ago, when the postponements and cancellations of events in March and April and beyond started to trickle in, we thought the best thing to do would be to take them out, as though they had never been planned. But as the trickle turned into a tide, we changed our minds about that. We have an explanation for why, and I’ll get to that. But with “Flattening the Curve” rapidly taking on the weight of an Eleventh Commandment, you will I hope forgive me my mild moment of rebellion in meandering a bit on my way to the point.

Ruth Vellis

I don’t remember when exactly Ruth Vellis’ first phone call to me was, but I can call to mind even now her bright clarity on the phone, every time we spoke thereafter: “Hello, this is Ruth Vellis speaking. I have read your magazine forever. I used to pick it up at St. Stephen-in-the-Fields, right across the road from here, if I got there before they were all gone.”

“Here,” across the road from St. Stephen’s, as she explained, was Kensington Gardens retirement home. “I am 96 and not going to concerts right now, but I still love to read about them, so I can decide which ones I would have chosen to go to. I enjoy doing that.”

From that moment on, without fail, Chris Malcolm our circulation manager made a point of dropping off Ruth Vellis’ personal copy at Kensington Gardens. And every time, over the ensuing years, Ruth would call me (most often, I suspect, at times when she could just leave a message) to say thank you, and the message would be the same: “I am 97, 98, 99, … going to be a hundred soon, I am a hundred now … And I still love to read about the concerts I am not going to, because I enjoy choosing which ones I would have gone to if I could.”

Just as I cannot remember clearly when that first phone call was, I cannot (or perhaps choose not to) remember when they stopped. 

But in this singular moment in time, we offer you, our readers, this magazine in the same spirit. Here are, to the best of our ability, the concerts none of us of us will be going to right now, so that you can enjoy deciding which ones you would have chosen to go to, and so that you can, if you so choose, reach out to the artists and presenters in question to express your sense of connection to them, in whatever way you best can.  

It is our hope that for the community that this issue (our 240th in an unbroken chain stretching back to September 1995) will serve a specific purpose – as a record of what the bright normal would have been, and therefore a useful starting point for compiling an inventory of what has been lost in the April that would have been.

Red Tide

As soon as word of cancellations and postponements started trickling in, we implemented a “cancelled/postponed” filter for our online listings. It is important for readers to note that the  CANCELLED/POSTPONED notices in the listings in this print issue are just a snapshot – a frozen moment in a fluid situation, reflecting information received by us only up to Friday March 20. Do not assume that because something listed here doesn’t say cancelled that it is happening. 

We will continue, to the best of our ability, to keep updating our listings information on a daily basis, including, whenever that may be, the moment when among the “cancelled” and “postponed” notices, we start to see signs that the tide has turned as things are rescheduled and new dates are announced.

Staying in Print, But Not Only in Print 

As you know, if you are turning pages as you read this, we are staying in print, but matching the number of copies to the distribution points (many forced to shutter temporarily) still available to us and to you. But we have a vigorous online, e-letter and social media existence as well, and I urge you, if you haven’t already done so, to avail yourself of these. A print publication that lumbers into existence nine times a year is ill-equipped to deal with the ever-changing, fast-moving pace of things, as a resourceful community in danger acts and reacts in the face of this unprecedented challenge, finding hope and beauty in hard times. Cues and clues to this digital realm, for artists and readers alike are dotted throughout this issue. I daresay most of you have time for a more-than-usual amount of reading and re-reading, so please seek them out.

The virus that went viral

Last Sunday morning around this same time, Jack and I were walking through a largely deserted Kensington Market, and ran across Maggie Helwig, poet, novelist, social justice activist, and minister of St. Stephen-in-the-Fields Anglican Church at College and Bellevue (yes, the selfsame St. Stephen’s at which Ruth Vellis used to pick up her copy of The WholeNote during her concertgoing days). “Shouldn’t you be in church?” we teased. The answer was that the diocese had instructed the suspension of all church services, but – thankfully, from Maggie’s perspective – not the suspension of other aspects of her ministry, in this inner city parish where the worlds of the least and most afflicted in our society most starkly intersect. 

We talked about the strange time we are in. “We’ll never know for sure, whether or not all this was an overreaction or not,” I suggested. She nodded. “Unless, of course,” she said, “in spite of everything, it turns out to have been an under-reaction instead.”

Whether it’s the virus or the way the virus has gone viral that is most to blame for the tidal wave of impacts sweeping our society, is at this point immaterial. Moving forward, all we can do to help is to continue to tally those impacts, and our community’s responses to them, as best we can, in all the media available to us, so that you, our readers, can figure out how best to help, to whatever extent you can. 

I discovered researching this piece that Ruth Vellis died on December 11, 2018 at the age of 102. I am certain she would have enjoyed choosing which of the concerts in this issue she would have gone to if she could. As, I am equally sure, will you. 

David Perlman can be reached at publisher@thewholenote.com

Two pm this past February 8 was a Saturday afternoon, and my concert companion and I had barely had time to settle into our Roy Thomson Hall balcony seats with our beer and popcorn before the lights, already dim, dipped even more, and a fractional moment of quiet rippled across the cheerful din of the place, the way a passing cloud wiping the face of the sun high above a summer lake evokes a moment’s hush.

(You can always tell it’s February in Toronto when people like me distract themselves from a task at hand by starting to talk, out of nowhere, about the summer.)

Where was I? Ah yes. February 8, about four minutes past 2pm, in the balcony level of Toronto’s most imposing cultural hall of mirrors. The momentary hush that descended on the room when the lights flickered is turning into a ripple of applause as our conductor for the day, Jack Everly, strides briskly onto the stage.

If it’s less of a ripple of applause than one might reliably expect at that moment in the concert ritual, it’s certainly not because the crowd is smaller than usual – the place is, as far as I can tell from where I am sitting, pretty much its usual respectably crowded self. And it’s not because the audience is already settling morosely into an appropriate frame of mind for something portentous – there’s a palpable buzz and hum in the air. Mostly it’s less of a ripple than one might have expected, because the logistics of applause are complicated with a beer in one hand and popcorn in the other.

Toronto Symphony Orchestra members already seated on stage do their usual decorous bit to salute the maestro as he enters – they tap their bows carefully on their instruments; stamp their feet in a refined (and of course rhythmic) way; there are smiles all round.

Everly strides to the front of the stage, all affable business, picks up a microphone that just happens to be there, and invites us all to have a good time, cheer for our heroes if we feel like it, laugh or cry if we want to, and applaud or not as the mood strikes. And then, all business, he turns to the orchestra, all attention. The lights take a deeper dive, a deeper hush descends. He raises his baton … and the movie begins.

Calling it a “movie” in these splendid surrounds is, I readily concede, not the most formal way of addressing it. Film With Orchestra is how it’s titled on the cover of the TSO program book I picked up on my way out of the hall (I had a hand free by then).

Mind you, that’s not what it’s called inside the program. On subsequent closer inspection, on the page with the official production credits for the highly successful road show, it is styled A Symphonic Night at the Movies which neatly captures the middle-brow appeal of the thing: neither film as art nor “a flick at the bioscope,” as I would have called it as a nine-year-old child in 1962 (in another country) ten years after this particular movie was made.

Whatever one calls it, film with orchestra has become, for a whole bunch of reasons, a hybrid genre that is much in vogue. The TSO, for example, does four of them a year in its own season. Three of them, this season (two Star Wars movies and Home Alone, which has become a perennial Christmas holiday offering), are branded showcases for the astonishing film score output of composer John Williams. The fourth generally digs into film classics: last year it was, if I remember, Casablanca. Today it is 1952’s Singin’ In the Rain, starring Gene Kelly, Donald O’Connor and Debbie Reynolds.

I understand the appeal. For movie fans it’s a chance to get under the hood of an aspect of movie-making normally hidden from view. For millions of people, for whom orchestral scores, consciously or unconsciously, are intrinsic to the way we are programmed daily as to what to feel and think, it’s a revelation to see how the all-too-familiar sounds are made: a bit like actually seeing milk come from a cow rather than from a carton on a shelf. I like to think there are favourable statistics out there concerning how many people who came primarily for the novelty value of seeing a favourite film in a new context discover the orchestra as something worth revisiting in its own right.

As for die-hard fans of the orchestra, it’s a chance to spend time in the hall, indulging a passion, without any of the usual self-appointed distractions of having to instruct less couth patrons in the etiquette of cultural palaces – a chance to let our hair down, so to speak.

So I was expecting to have fun, and would have, even without the popcorn and beer. What I wasn’t expecting was the way this particular film in this context has stayed with me for the past few weeks, taking on an aesthetic shape and colour: posing questions
(and suggesting answers) about the relationships we cannot afford to take for granted in regard to the continually evolving relationship between artists and audiences.

Part of the reason it was so interesting is the pivotal moment in the history of film that is at one and the same time the reason for the film’s existence and it’s own major storyline – the advent of the talking picture. Stars of the silent screen died off, metaphorically, in droves; new stars were born; actors who could actually act, singers who could actually sing, and dancers who could actually dance were suddenly able to bring prodigious live performance skills to a mass audience. Studios acquired orchestras where previously movie houses had theatre organs or player pianos. Sound stages on an immense scale came into existence.

Memorably, February 8 in the RTH balcony, I found the inner story of the film being played out all over again, in a crazed, Escher-like version of itself: as though the fun-house mirrored twists and turns of Roy Thomson Hall’s intentionally disorienting lobbies and levels had been transported into the auditorium itself.

There was one moment, for example, where I found myself watching the TSO live on the RTH stage (with a pull-down movie screen most of them could not see above their heads), making beautifully synchronized music for an orchestra on the screen, reduced once again to silent-movie puppetry by technology’s latest twist and turn; while, to top it all off, on that screen an auditorium of people sat watching their orchestra accompanying the same stars that our orchestra was. Layers within layers.

There was a more fundamental moment for me, though, well into the movie’s second half. (Yes, there was an intermission to top up on popcorn and beer.)

It came during one of the film’s memorable songs – not one of the obvious ones, like the title song, that had dozens of audience members happily singing along, but “Would You” a lovely gentle waltz, masterfully positioned at the film’s moment of denouement, ricochetting from bathos to pathos, in a lovely arc:

He holds her in his arms,
would you, would you?
He tells her of her charms,
would you, would you?

I suddenly became aware that the person seated next to me was singing, completely comfortably and absorbed entirely in the moment. Not “singing along,” just singing. Not an audience member “joining in.” Nor aware, even for an instant, that she herself had an audience. Just feeling permitted.

And here’s the point: she would not have had that permission either in a movie theatre or in a concert hall. It was a gifted moment, arising from a uniquely oddball set of circumstances: the live audience watching the live orchestra brought the people on the silver screen to life in a way that film alone cannot. The privacy of the typical film-watching experience kept other audience members at bay, in a way that the typical concert environment does not.

It’s an alchemy we all, artists and presenters alike, need to seek.

After all, if, as the bard says, “all the world’s a stage,” then what’s an audience?

Three days later: Tuesday February 11, at the COC

“Oh, it’s a starry night!” my opera companion, delighted, turns to me and says, very quietly, as the Hansel and Gretel overture starts and the mysterious-looking panelled stage curtain we have been eyeing for the past ten minutes or so, speculating as to how its panels will part and divide, reveals what is behind it. Like lightning the person in the row right in front of us spins around. Her “SSSSHHHHH!!!” can be heard at least 15 rows back. Our slightly sheepish discomfort lasts all of the three minutes it takes for the same individual to take things to the next level by whacking the elbow of the person next to them with a rolled up program, for encroaching over the midline of the seat arm.

Thirteen years ago, approximately

In the selfsame balcony at Roy Thomson Hall. It is a performance of Bach’s St. John Passion. One of it’s great chorales “O grosse Lieb” has just commenced and someone, I would guess in his 80s, deep in the moment and alone with the music starts, quietly, to do what Bach instructs – to sing along. Someone turns to chastise ...

David Perlman can be reached at publisher@thewholenote.com

There’s an improv class I take from time to time (that’s comedy improv, not musical improv, by the way) that’s good for lots of things.

Sometimes it’s good for when I am wracked with guilt and beating myself up for having messed up something really important, and need something entirely unimportant to beat myself up over instead – Beethoven called it Die Wut über den verlorenen Groschen, ausgetobt in einer Caprice and you should give it a listen sometime.

Sometimes it’s good as affirmation when I know I can do no wrong because in improv there are no mistakes other than believing there are such things as mistakes.

Sometimes it’s good as a way of affirming that there’s one evening in the deadline-driven world I occupy when I can, if I wish, make a stand and say “sorry I can’t save the world tonight, or go visit your aunt, or come to your concert, or write my editor’s opener that the printer is waiting for. Because. I. Have. A. Class. To. Go. To. (It didn’t work tonight, but what the heck.)

Sometimes it’s only good for some laughs during, and a couple of beers after.

But once in a while – perhaps in a very long while – it is good for life-changing revelations, such as the following.

It happens while you are shuffling your feet waiting to make an entrance (because it’s your turn), neither able to empty your mind and trust the moment, not even able to latch onto some carefully prepared nugget, so you can fake spontaneity even though you know you will feel like a fraud on the other side, because at least there would be another side.

It was, in short, the dark 6.45pm Monday evening of the soul. The moment you realize you have nothing. Nothing funny to say. No heart to wander out and mime making a cup of coffee in some imaginary room waiting for one of your fellow improvisers to rescue you. No funny walk that won’t make the pain in your back unbearably worse. Not even ice-cold terror. Trust me, it’s worse than forgetting your lines, because there’s isn’t even anything you know you’ve forgotten.. There’s just nothing. Nada. Nichts. Lutho. Semmi.

So what do you do in that situation?

[This is what’s called the big reveal, folks!]

What you do is you walk out and you say in no particular tone of voice, to no-one in particular “I got nothing.”

And just stand there.

Trust me.

Shout-Out No. 1:
Bowerbird Collective sent in a listing, very late, for a benefit concert, at Heliconian Hall on Sunday February 1 at 3pm. The title is self-explanatory: A Concert Raising Funds for the Bushfires in Australia, and the artists’ website, wheresongbegan.com, suggests an intrinsic relationship between their musical interests and the cause the concert will benefit. So check it out.

Shout-Out No. 2:
Summer personal enrichment starts in February, if you have the wit to plan ahead!
Accuracy in advertising requires me to say this particular announcement is a case of me advising you to do as I say, not as I do, because all I ever do in the summer is kick myself for not having thought about registering for stuff earlier when I had the chance. So do yourself a favour and check out pages 40 and 41 for a taste of what could be in store. All the programs here have early deadlines. There will be more in March. Make this the year you did.

Shout-Out No. 3:
Family Day in Ontario in 2020 is Monday February 17.
What better way to celebrate the four-day weekend (starting at 7pm on Valentine’s Day, Friday February 14) than with opera’s single most dysfunctional family! Opera By Request’s complete Ring Cycle starts on the Friday at College Street United Church, at Bathurst St. with Rheingold (a 7pm start). And it ends Monday, as it should, with Götterdämmerung. Start time on Monday is 2pm, so you should be exiting at twilight right on cue. It’s an astonishing undertaking for Bill Shookhoff’s intrepid outfit and guaranteed to be a version of the Cycle you will likely never see again. A story to tell your grandchildren, if you ever want to have any after this! Accompaniment is “piano and selected orchestral instruments” and that in itself should be something to behold.

Two cautionary notes: first, if you go to Rheingold on the Friday, Valentine’s Day, do not, I repeat not try to impress anyone by stealing the ring. Bad things will happen, trust me; and second, if you are still around at the end of Monday’s show, you might want to know that the nearest firehall is at College and Bellevue, just two blocks east.

Lots to read ahead! And lots, musically, as always, to see and hear.

And that’s something.

publisher@thewholenote.com

Very few topics stir the emotions of copy editors and proofreaders quite as much as the place and placement of the comma in written English. At The WholeNote we don’t quite come to blows about it, but only because we’re either too busy wrestling the next magazine into the dipping tank or, after the fact, too damned tired to fight. The formula: the number of correct opinions on whether or not to use any clearly optional comma is equal to the number of copy editors and proofreaders who examine the instance, plus one: the “plus one” being that the editor-in-chief, moi, is free to change his mind and does, resorting to quoting Ralph Waldo Emerson (A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds) or Oscar Wilde (Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative) whenever pressed, by a crew member close to counselling mutiny, to explain why what was perfectly OK two pages ago suddenly isn’t.

As to the definition of a “clearly optional comma,” and when it should be placed inside or outside quotation marks, these are questions which, if I am ever going to get to the point of all this, will have to be left for another day.

The point? That if I, dancing with my angels during the bright midday of my editorial soul, pause to examine my own fascination with the comma, what it all boils down to is whether in any specific context its use either helps or hinders the reader’s ability to hear the voice of the writer, including when and where they pause, or not, either to catch breath or to caress some particular phrase.

It’s analogous, perhaps, to the choices a conductor must make in terms of when to use a baton or set it aside, when to hold the orchestra tightly by the hand in order to help it across a busy street, or when letting it run free is the greater gift. Or perhaps it’s like the difference between the sound of a choir where the singers are grouped by voice type, rank and file, and the sound of an opera chorus where little heterogeneous knots of singers deploy all over the stage in the service of the story being told. Or like the difference between the sound of a “Hallelujah” chorus, or Frosty the Snowman for that matter, emanating from a sing-along audience, compared to the same things being sung by the choir on the stage.

For me it’s all about voices: about the way our writers make room wherever possible for the words of the people they are writing about; and about the extent to which their own individual voices shine through in what they write: whether, like me, they are vicarious observers of the scene or, as many are, passionate practitioners of the things they write about. Nothing gives me greater pleasure at moments like this, giving the pages about to go to press one final read, than hearing in my mind their individual voices, blending into a great collective musical murmuring from the heart, rising from these pages.

This struggle and friendship is very satisfying to watch, as well as fun. I got that first library job in Phoenix. “The reason I really love the stars, is because we cannot hurt them.” This time it’s a special project for her, one in which she’s invested her creativity on many levels. (It’s also been a special project for me.) Given my carol obsession, I guess I should be sympathetic to these arguments – but I’m not sympathetic to them at all. “Everything: concision, precision, savagery, nobility, discomfort, freedom, knowledge, sweetness... These words are more relevant to this music than to any other.” During the customary playing of The Last Post from the rear of the chapel, I was stunned to hear a real bugle, not a trumpet, being played, in full uniform, by the bugler from The Queen’s Own Rifles Band, flawlessly and with beautiful tone. Speaking about children and sing-along Messiahs reminds me, in a topsy-turvy roundabout way, of a column I recently wrote … One rarely hears such candour expressed by an up-and-coming performer. Messing with Winterreise is a growing and delightful industry within classical music performance. That the work had the incipient power to make me care enough to be pissed off about its deficiencies is a big deal though. Our neighbourhoods begin to look like those in cheesy TV movies, though perhaps without the requisite miracles. Listen to how the songs you know are transformed, revivified, re-presented in ways that break the cynical purgatorial cycle of streaming-platform playlists, emerging, finally, alive again.

Finally, here’s jazz columnist Steve Wallace on the act of giving inherent in jazz: The exchange is circular, as there is an unspoken pact between jazz players and their audience which goes something like this: give us your attention, your ears, and we musicians will give you our very best – or at least try to – and make some music, out of thin air.

To all our contributors who month in and month out throw your voices into the thin air, and to all our readers who give us your ears, thank you for your gifts.

publisher@thewholenote.com

One of the things that the following random clutch of upcoming event listings have in common is that each of them was picked up as noteworthy by one or another of our writers this month. In chronological order: Loose Tea Music Theatre’s “Singing Softly” evening of Anne Frank Diary-based opera (Nov 2) was picked up by yours truly (still subbing for globe-trotting Christopher Hoile) in On Opera; soprano Maureen Batt’s “Crossing Borders: Traversía Latinoamericana” (Nov 5), featuring Batt and tenor Fabián Arciniegas in an evening of contemporary Canadian and Colombian repertoire, is the main subject of Lydia Perović’s regular Art of Song column; Hedgehog Concerts’ Pamelia Stickney recital of theremin sonatas by Alexander Rapoport (Nov 16) is the subject of a somewhat-off-the-usual-beaten-track feature by regular “We Are All Music’s Children” writer MJ Buell; Confluence’s “Evening with Marion Newman” (Nov 26 and 27) is our cover story; and Syrinx Concerts’ season-opening Schumann/Haydn/Mendelssohn piano trio recital (Dec 1) is the coda to Paul Ennis’ Classical and Beyond column. 

The other interesting thing these five wide-ranging presentations have in common is that they all take place in the same venue; for each of these five presenters – along with at least half a dozen others – Heliconian Hall (out of the more than 1,800 venues in The WholeNote listings database) was just the spot, this month, for a particular labour of artistic love.

The venue database: One of the many advantages of managing our concert listings through a database, as we have been doing for the past nine or ten years, is the resulting accretion of searchable data on the musical life of our region, just waiting to be mined by musicologists and consultants on this and that (so drop me a line if you’re interested). At a more practical level, it has resulted in a dramatic reduction of wear and tear on the wrists and fingers of our listings team (Santa Tecla be praised), not having to retype the names and addresses of concert venues every time, or re-search the postal codes that are an indispensable geocoding tool. 

As for the “more than 1,800” venues in our database that I just cited, the actual number, as of 3pm Oct 27 2019, was 2,133 places that have been used at least once, in our catchment area, for a public concert of one kind or another, over the years since we started the database. 

My 1,800 lowball estimate is because some of them are phantoms at this point  – crushed under the heel of condos, drowned in the tide of out-of-control land costs and taxes, or left high and dry by dwindling religious congregations in the host of faith-arts hybrid centres that are a crucial component of the performing arts infrastructure. Or they have simply changed names as they go, in the endless naming-rights quest for private sector sponsorships (from O’Keefe to Hummingbird to Sony to Meridian, for example). But it’s still a fine long list, reflective of how the human hunger to congregate counterbalances digital life’s invitations to physical isolation. 

Heliconian Hall: Back in January 2011 (around the same time our data-driven listings system was kicking in),  we launched an occasional series of articles in this magazine, called Just the Spot, in which we invited community musicians whose work we feature in the magazine to write about some venue that was particularly resonant (literally or figuratively) for them.  

In March 2011, recorder and period flute virtuoso Alison Melville, co-founder of Baroque Music Beside the Grange contributed the following: “Part of rural Toronto when it was built in 1875, the Heliconian Hall is located near the south end of Hazelton Avenue, situated amongst galleries, upscale offices and private homes in what’s now known as Yorkville. It’s the home of the Heliconian Club, an organization founded in 1909 for professional women in the arts and one of the oldest associations of its kind in Canada.” (At the time, BMBG was in search of an occasional venue, after losing predictable access to their previous regular spot at the Church of St. George the Martyr, once the Music Gallery amped up its multifaceted activities there.) 

“For me, the Heliconian is a delightful and unpretentious little oasis in a surrounding sea of consumer excess, and an intimate concert hall which I have known since I was a kid,” she continued. “I played my first ‘non-compulsory’ solo recital there, blissfully free from the pressure of university grading, and have made music there many more times since  … But perhaps what makes the Heliconian most appealing to musicians is its stellar acoustic and its intimate feel. With every seat occupied there’s room for 120, and the stage rises just a foot above the main floor, so there’s little chance of establishing that ‘us versus them’ feeling that many performance venues still seem to evoke. It’s a great place for chamber music, and it’s easy to get to, ... available for anyone to rent, at a very reasonable rate.” 

They all sound like resonant reasons to me. How many other Heliconian Halls are out there, I wonder?

publisher@thewholenote.com