If you can spare a downtown lunch hour today and Thursday, the Canadian Opera Company's free concert series in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre at the Four Seasons Centre is particularly compelling this week:
TODAY
Three Toronto musicians widely recognized as masters of their instruments -- Lucas Harris (lute), Wendy Zhao (pipa) and Bassam Bishara (oud) -- are getting together at noon for a fun compare-and contrast.
Click on the image at left for full programme details.
+++
THURSDAY
Toronto Symphony Orchestra cellist Winona Zelenka offers an hour's worth of unaccompanied cello by Bach. Britten and Cassadó.
Click on the image at right for full programme details
I was deeply touched by a documentary video posted by the Guardian about a brass band made up of children who had all found themselves living in the streets of Kinshasa, in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The personal histories of these children are heartbreaking, but their joy and sense of newfound community and hope, as found in literally banding together, is a testament to how collaborative musicmaking can overcome the most seemingly insurmountable of obstacles.
The documentary lasts only 10 minutes, but it made my whole weekend. You can view it here.
Never, ever underestimate the power of mentorship.
Thanks to helping hands, a boy raised among the nearly 1 million Palestinians living in refugee camps in the Middle East, grew up with a love of classical music. He learned to play the viola and, since 2003, continues to mobilize every interested person and spare musical instrument so that Palestinian children can have access to the multi-faceted benefits of music.
You can read and listen to a condensed version of the story of 31-year-old Ramzi Hussein Aburedwan on NPR.
Aburedwan and his music organization were the subject of a 2006 French documentary film, It's Not a Gun. Much of his success is due to the French connection, which began at the Conservatoire in Paris. Every June since 2002, there has been a music festival in Angers, which initially gave Aburedwan a voice, and helped him launch his massive project with donated instruments and volunteer musical visitors only a year later.
The first harpsichord in Palestine arrived thanks to him. He inspired the creation of the first festival of Baroque music in his native land, in 2004. Now, more than 500 children have access to music instruments and teachers in safe schools.
Because there is such a heavy French connection in all this, most of the stories about the project and Aburedwan have, so far, been written in French. If you can read it, you can visit the Al Kamandjati website for much more information.
What I find most inspirational in all this is the long chain of helping hands that helped replace the stone in an angry 8-year-old's hand with a viola, that helped that viola become part of an orchestra, that linked up to interested people around the world, and then reached back to where it started, finding more lost 8-year-olds, whose lives will be forever changed for the better.
Here is a short video profile of Al Kamandjati school life made last year by Saed Karzoun:
Now, a jazz combo from one of the Al Kamandjati schools tackling some Miles Davis last month:
There are many green-tinged, sweat-stained people who would like to see us using less air conditioning and restore some of the laziness of our great-grandparents' summers. But, for an inner-city dweller surrounded by sun-baked concrete, glass and steel and cut off from a refreshing breeze from across yonder pond, Long Island iced tea can only go so far.
Perhaps hearing music in a hot temple or under a smog-coloured sunset is not your cup of tea, but that's where the best musical bets are at the moment, with the Toronto Summer Music Festival (which uses air conditioned spaces), still a couple of weeks away:
TONIGHT -- 7 p.m. -- Johannes Brahms's lush, late Quintet for Clarinet and Strings is the main attraction in the Toronto Music Garden, which should be a few degrees colder than the rest of downtown. It's performed by the Madawaska String Quartet and clarinettist Jerome Summers. Free.
TOMORROW -- 7 p.m. -- There's a new string quartet in town: Ars Longa Vita Brevis (which you could translate as too much art, too short a life), made up of violinists Pam Hinman and Carolyn Blackwell, violist Brandon Chui and cellist Lydia Munchinsky. They're mixing traditional rep (Smetana's String Quartet No. 1) with new music, including something by talented Toronto writer-composer Colin Eatock. Eastminster United Church, 310 Danforth Ave. (a couple of blocks from the Chester subway station). Admission is $10 for students, $20 for the rest of us.
SATURDAY -- 7 p.m. -- Beaches Baroque (Tafelmusik members Lucas Harris (lute) and Geneviève Gilardeau (violin)) are back with music by Leopold Weiss, at Beaches Presbyterian Church, 65 Glen Manor Dr. Free/pay-what-you-can. After the concert, you can go enjoy the dusk views from the Beach boardwalk, which is only one block south.
SUNDAY -- 2 p.m. -- Mount Pleasant Cemetery is presenting a Sunday-afternoon concert series for the second summer. There is a big, white tent set up on the beautifully manicured lawn behind the main visitors' centre parking lot. There's no street noise and only the occasional cemetery jogger to distract you. This afternoon's program has the Op. 18, No. 6 String Quartet by Beethoven and Debussy's Op. 10 Quartet, played by Matthias McIntyre and Valerie Gordon, violins, Rory McLeod, viola and Sebastian Ostertag, cello. Free.
FREE WORLD MUSIC IN LONDON (ONT.) VICTORIA PARK
Sunfest returns for the 15th year in downtown London's Victoria Park. The festival kicks off today, running to Sunday night, with an amazing program of performers that span just about every genre of indie and world music out there.
If I had the time, I'd make the trip to hear La 33, a big band of energetic 30-somethings that represent a new wave of urban salsa from Bogotá, Colombia. They're at the Galaxie Stage on Saturday at 10 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. Sunday at 10 p.m., they move to the TD Bandshell.
The Sunfest website is colourful, but a bit frustrating to navigate.
In honour of our first week-long heatwave in years, here's La 33 with their own take on "Roxanne" as well as a bit of their own music, "La rumba buena":
All hail conquering hero Geoff Smith, who has overthrown the tyranny of the fixed scale at the keyboard.
So many times when I hear a concert that blends Western and Eastern traditions, I think about how the Eastern instruments inevitably have to be played or tuned to adjust for Western ears. We should be in the post post-colonial era, but the West still wields its power in unexpected ways. But no one ever expected that true globe-spanning new music would ever come easily.
Digital audio generation allows composers and performers to adjust sound in micro-tones, but most serious artists prefer playing on acoustic instruments.
Enter British hammer dulcimer master and composer Geoff Smith, who has devoted this first decade of the 21st century to a true hybrid acoustic instrument that can accommodate any musical tradition that you can tap out on its keyboard.
Smith calls his invention a "fluid piano." I think he must've called it that because everybody knows what a piano is. His gizmo really is a fluid clavichord. It is shaped like one, has a wooden (instead of a piano's heavy cast iron) frame and the strings are struck by a little wooden dowel, not a felt-covered hammer.
There's also a section of the strings at the other end, between the bridge and the hitch pins, that can be plucked like a harp.
The cool part is in the tuning. There are traditional tuning pins for each note's two or three strings. Those are adjusted in Western style (more often than a modern piano's because wooden-framed instruments are much less stable than metal ones). Between the pins and the hammer are sliders, which allow each note to be adjusted fluidly across a full tone, allowing the performer to literally mimic any scale from any musical tradition. There's another set of sliders to allow similarly fluid tuning for the harp string segment.
It is simple, straightforward, brilliant.
There's a detailed article in yesterday's Guardian, along with a companion video:
I find it ironic that Toronto's Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra is far more progressive in its programming than most of the city's other large music presenters -- including some of those who specialize in new music. An openness to new ideas and a collaborative spirit go a long way. It also helps that they have a resident creative mastermind in bassist Alison MacKay.
The orchestra and its companion Tafelmusik Chamber Choir, with guest soloists, reprises one of its original programmes today at 7 p.m. at the Royal Ontario Museum, as it presents a combination of very new and very old music in honour of the Dead Sea Scrolls: Words That Changed the World exhibition, which runs to Jan. 3.
Here is what I wrote in my Star review of the original concert programme, presented at Tafelmusik's home base of Trinity-St. Paul's Centre in March, 2008:
In one grand gesture, it brings together Christian music and religious traditions with those from the Arab and Jewish worlds, using the sensual tapestry ofthe Biblical Song ofSongsas the meeting point.
This ambitious project is the brainchild of Tafelmusik double bass player Alison Mackay, who is parlaying the meeting of cultures, religions and musics into a cross-city festival in May.
If last night's stunningly well-done effort was any indication, this should single-handedly do more for Toronto's self-identity as a cultural meeting place than any other effort in recent memory.
The program consisted of read excerpts from the Song of Songs and impressively executed Hebrew cantillations (chants) from the same texts by Temple Sinai Congregation cantor Gershon Silins.
It also included Baroque-era settings of the story by Buxtehude, Bach, Purcell and Monteverdi; instrumental interludes; and group and solo performances by oud master Bassam Bishara, percussionist Suleiman Warwar on dumbek and singer Maryem Tollar, who also plays qanun.
There were two gorgeous, unaccompanied motets by Healey Willan, a Toronto musical fixture until his death in 1968, as well as the world premiere ofFrom the Song of Songs, a three-part work by Toronto composer Christos Hatzis that incorporated all these forces, as well as the evening's tenor soloist Rufus Muller.
The program's weakest link was the Hatzis work, which should have been entitled Parody of Parodies for its musical pastiche. But the assembled forces performed it with conviction and panache.
The high point was an improvised collaboration between Lucas Harris on lute and Bishara playing oud. Like Christians and Muslims, these two instruments have more commonalities than differences.
The two masters played off each other's themes and variations, weaving a magic that not only buried religio-cultural hatchets, but helped us see that all the hatchets actually come from the same shop.
Although Healey Willan is not prominent on the programme, he looms large in Toronto music history. Here is his anthem, Rise Up, My Fair One (the text comes from the Song of Solomon), sung by Newfoundland's Quintessential Vocal Ensemble, led by Susan Quinn (there is no video in this clip). It is on tonight's programme:
Did you know that the United Nations is in the midst of a conference to discuss safeguarding endangered elements of cultural heritage?
Thought not.
Did you know that Canada didn't submit anything for consideration?
Yesterday (Sept. 29), in Abu Dhabi, UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) began discussing how to protect "intangible heritage" in its Intergovernmental Committe for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, struck in 2003 to take an inventory of cultural activities that help define a nation.
"It will describe intangible heritage elements on the Urgent Safeguarding List and the Representative List, as well as select good safeguarding practices," says the relevant UNESCO news web page.
Reading through the material, written in the worst kind of bureaucratic brain-mush, what quickly becomes clear is not that there is any realistic way of ensuring survival of elements inside a living culture (by nature of being a living organism, it is in a process of constant evolution, which implies an element of birth and death), the list of submissions by different countries is a fascinating catalogue of what each nation's bureaucrats consider important.
According to the BBC's news feed, the meeting today officially entered the Argentinian tango on the heritage list, as it goes through a total of 111 submissions.
Here is a section from UNESCO's guidelines on "inventorying cultural heritage:"
Intangible cultural heritage takes many forms. The Convention explains that it may be expressed in a number of domains, including but not limited to:
Oral traditions and expressions including language as a vehicle of the intangible cultural heritage;
Knowledge and practice about nature and the universe;
Traditional craftsmanship.
It goes without saying that many elements of intangible cultural heritage might belong to one or more of these domains.
The main purposes of the Convention are to safeguard such heritage, to ensure respect for it, to raise awareness about its importance and to provide for international cooperation and assistance in these fields. Countries that ratify the Convention (known as States Parties) take on the obligation to safeguard the intangible cultural heritage present on their territories. At an international level, the Convention establishes two Lists, the List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding and the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The goal of these Lists is to call attention to those elements of intangible cultural heritage that are representative of human creativity and cultural diversity and especially those in need of urgent safeguarding.
The Convention focuses on the role of communities and groups in safeguarding intangible cultural heritage. It is concerned with processes and conditions rather than products, placing emphasis on living heritage that is performed by people, often collectively, and communicated through living experience. It deals with heritage that communities themselves deem important, and strives to contribute to the promotion of creativity and diversity, and to the well-being of communities, groups, and society at large.
I want to remind you that Canada didn't submit anything. Imagine how Tanya Tagaq and her fellow Inuit throat-singers must feel, not to mention all the other custodians and practitioners of arts specific to Canadian heritage. To be fair, the United States also appears not to have any submissions present, nor do several western European countries. Why?
Despite daily reminders of how Canada continues to neglect cultural heritage on so many levels, our politicians and bureaucrats find it easier to send body bags to First Nations communities than to give their cultural output a place on the world stage.
Perhaps the body bags were a metaphor...
And that doesn't even begin to address our country's post-colonial heritage, which includes Acadian culture, Quebec folk traditions, East Coast fiddling, Métis communities, and, well, the list goes on and on.
Perhaps someone involved in federal culture-policy decisions could explain Canada's absence on the UNESCO list?
The original list of submissions, which grew by 21 after it was posted on the web, includes photos and video clips. It's a fascinating trip around the world, and a valuable archival resource. It's great that UNESCO saw fit to make this information public.
Here is one of the video submissions, on Vietnam's Nha Nhac, or court music:
Here, just because I can't leave it alone, are sisters Karin and Kathy Kettler, who are from Kangiqsualujjuak, Nunavik, showing off authentic Inuit throat singing at the 2008 Richmond Folk Festival:
In the fall issue of Early Music America, columnist Thomas Forrest Kelly asks readers to help him come up with a definition of early music. In asking the question, he raises some interesting points, but, for me, none more interesting that bringing up the living tradition, meaning music whose performance and style are familiar to musicians of today.
Kelly brings it up so that he can present early music as outside the living tradition, something that needs to be reconstructed. "We seek to recapture the performing styles -- including improvisation, ornamentation, and other expressive effects -- that have been lost in the modern performer's training to be an exact reproducer of notes on a page."
But let's take a wider view, for a sec.
In Elizabethan England, for example, people would have had the folk song, madrigals, consorts and church music, unless they happened to have access inside someone's palace gates. Living tradition in that context is pretty narrow.
In 21st century Toronto, people can listen to -- and perform -- anything from any culture in the world, just as they can eat almost any dish from anywhere in the world. So what is our living tradition? The Canon According to Guitar Hero? Beethoven's Für Elise? Leonard Cohen's Allelujah (which seemed to be inescapable this summer)?
Can we find it at a Michael Bublé concert? Among the masters of Persian music? In fusion groups such as Tasa?
Of course, the answer is that, today, the living tradition is just about everything. People listen to Gregorian chant for meditation, and Hildegard of Bingen probably means more things to more people today than she did in her cloistered world more than eight centuries ago.
Kids in South Korea listen to the Black Eyed Peas. Kids in Toronto listen to Rain.
Life has never felt more diverse, nor our definitions more narrow.
Here are two random examples of what I mean. First, Japan's fabulous Yoshida Brothers mixing shamisen with Western rock. Second, a cute, homemade mash-up of Tori Amos's "Black Dove" and the first movement of Beethoven's "Moonlight" Sonata by Ted Hu:
It's a adult pop extravaganza at Roy Thomson Hall this weekend.
It'll be interesting to see how the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and Finnish vocal group Rajaton compare, in their ABBA-themed program tonight and tomorrow, with Portland, Ore. lounge-pop masters Pink Martini, who captivated a near-capacity hall last night.
The TSO has a long history of pops concerts, but the few I've ventured to over the last few years have given off the unmistakable whiff of being duty calls for these musicians. I hope tonight will prove different.
Pink Martini, on the other hand, is a study in enthusiasm.
Although the 12-member band has been around for 15 years, their Toronto popularity is recent, the rise, practically meteoric.
Three years ago, they made their fist visit here, performing to a couple of hundred people at the Phoenix on Sherbourne St. At the time, their publicist was desperate to try and sell some tickets. She sent me their second disc, Hang on, Little Tomato, and I was hooked by the end of the first track.
I interviewed both bandleader-pianist-arranger Thomas Lauderdale and singer China Forbes -- friends since their student days at Harvard -- and discovered two fun, quirky, earnest performers who wanted little more than to share their good time with whoever was willing to listen.
On a cold winter's night, the audience at the Phoenix burst into spontaneous dancing as Pink Martini performed its mix of originals and arrangements of popular songs from old movies -- all flavoured with dance rhythms.
In 2008, following a successful third album, Hey, Eugene!, Pink Martini filled Massey Hall. By last night, they had graduated to the biggest pace that this town can reasonably offer a small ensemble.
Three discs in a 15-year career is not much, so some of the band's repertoire is getting old, by live-performance standards. But there were no wrinkles, as Forbes, Lauderdale and the other band members performed them with energy and zest.
We were also given a couple of tastes of a new album. Lauderdale announced that the band had finished recording it three weeks ago, and that it would be out in 2010.
One of these samples, typical of Pink Martini's old-is-new plundering of various musical worlds, was a fresh arrangement of "Uska Dara," a Turkish song originally recorded by Eartha Kitt on a 78-rpm disc in 1953. (Forbes, in fine, strong voice, skipped Kitt's English-narrative interludes, which include her sighing "Oh, those Turks").
Looking around at the audience at Roy Thomson Hall last night, I was struck by the demographics-defying mix: There were hip 20-somethings as well as smartly dressed seniors, downtowners and suburbanites.
How many other performers can cut across all our boundaries?
ABBA could, in its day. So let's see if the TSO can capture some of the same magic.
For those of you not familiar with the pleasures of Pink Martini, here are two sips. The first is a (very old) video of the title track from their first album, Sympathique, written by Forbes and Lauderdale:
Here is one of my Pink Martini favourites, "Kikuchiyo to mohshimasu," an arrangement of a 1960s Japanese pop song about a one-night stand with a woman named Kikuchiyo ("She vanished/ Leaving only her sweet scent lingering softly/ In the fog..."), from the second album:
Sound Mind: A Classical Music Blog
John Terauds started at the Toronto Star as a freelance writer in 1988, and has been on staff since 1997. He began writing on classical music in 2001, and has been the full-time classical music critic since 2005.
He is also the organist and choir director at St. Peter's Anglican Church, a parish founded in 1863 in downtown Toronto.
If he's not listening to, writing about or playing music, it means he's either asleep, unconscious, walking his dog -- or all of the above.
TheStar.com
Copyright Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Toronto Star or www.thestar.com. The Star is not responsible for the content or views expressed on external sites.
Distribution, transmission or republication of any material is strictly prohibited without the prior written permission of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. For information please contact us using our webmaster form. www.thestar.com online since 1996.
Recent Comments