PRIDMORE’S PASSION
Local soprano takes the stage Sunday
Give me a word or a colour and then I would try and produce something vocally that would coincide with what you asked me to do.
Helen Pridmore is returning to her roots during a Sunday concert in Regina.
“I thought it would be fun to show people that I can still sing classical music,” said the soprano. “That’s what I studied when I was at university, you study classical music, and it’s not like that ever goes away, right?”
If singing classical music is like riding a bicycle, then Pridmore lately has chosen other modes of transportation.
She began classical voice lessons as a child in Saskatoon — “I actually remember when I was about 11 or 12 saying to my mom, ‘I want to learn how to sing so that I can make people cry.’ ”
She’ll draw on her training as she performs Sunday in Regina, accompanied by pianist Katherine Dowling.
But, in more recent years, Pridmore has preferred new music and improvisation. The latter is probably not what you think.
“Most people, when you say improv in music, they think of jazz, right?” said Pridmore. “So you know, the jazz players will have a tune that they set up, and then everybody takes a turn kind of playing around with that tune, and then they come back to it.
“What I do is what we call free improvisation. So it just means you make up on the spot, something. So you could give me a word or a colour and then I would try and produce something vocally that would coincide with what you asked me to do.”
At the suggestion of the word “angry,” she improvised a short example, beginning with a growling, gnashing kind of sound, that progressed in pitch to an ear-piercing high note, then back down to growling.
“It doesn’t really have a melody even; it’s just taking the idea and using your voice — or you could do it on the piano or you could do it on your saxophone or guitar or whatever instrument you play — to try and express that.”
She teaches this style of performance at the University of Regina, where she’s an associate professor in the music department.
“It teaches you a lot of things about being creative and being free, which are great things to be,” said Pridmore.
Because this is her focus, “I don’t sing classical music as often anymore. … In the music world, they tend to be a little bit separated. It’s kind of like you could say, ‘Oh I’m a pop singer, or I sing country music,’ you know. You probably could do both, but you kind of tend to do one style or the other. So I tend to do new music.”
When Dowling joined the conversation, she took a seat at the piano in Pridmore’s office, a donation from first U of R president William Riddell. Behind the piano is an anatomy chart from the 1940s, depicting the head and throat — important body parts for a singer, as a nearby coffee mug’s message conveys: “Voice, the only musical instrument made by God.”
Pridmore and Dowling met long before they became U of R colleagues. They were each at an artists’ residency at what is now the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, about 13 or 14 years ago.
When Dowling returned to her home city in 2017 to teach at the U of R, after time away in Toronto, Montreal and New York City, it gave them more opportunity to collaborate.
Dowling is proficient at performing classical music — although, “when we talk about classical music, we’re really referring to things written like today, and then going back well over 400 years,” she said. “It’s just this phenomenal diversity and richness and abundance of material with which to engage. I really love chamber music, so playing with another person.”
Each August, she performs in the Netherlands with the 13-piece Gruppo Montebello chamber ensemble.
She often accompanies students and visiting performers, including Rob Kapilow during a Cecilian Chamber Series concert last weekend.
But she doesn’t have to go far to find one of her usual collaborators.
“He’s actually my husband,” she said of Clark Schaufele, with whom she’ll perform “four hands” on Feb. 9 in Regina.
That style involves “two pianists at the one piano and you can make really a lot of noise,” she added. “It’s funny because in the 19th century, pre-tv, pre-record players, people would just sit down in the evenings and play music together, and actually four hands, as it’s known, was one of the favoured versions.”
Pridmore and Dowling ’s concert will present a breadth of music.
“Handel I think is the earliest, and obviously Alain Perron is alive right now, he’s our colleague. So that would be at least 300 years range, maybe more,” said Dowling, “so there’s really something for everyone in that sense.”
Pridmore is particularly interested in working with composers who are still alive.
“You can’t text Mozart and say, ‘Oh, what do you think about this song?’ But I know lots of Canadian composers, I can send them an email or a text and say, ‘Hey, I’m working on your song, I have a question about the second page. What do you want?,’ ” she said.
“And I love that because that’s a real collaboration, instead of just cold dead pieces of paper that had existed for 100 years,” said Pridmore, who will sing in Italian, French, German, English and Czech.
“I think I finally got the Czech memorized. Because I don’t speak Czech, so I have to sort of learn it just by sound.”
All of the pieces they’ll play were written specifically for voice and piano, said Dowling.
“There’s a huge, huge collection of music for voice and piano, like, I can’t even tell you; you could never even sing it through in your whole lifetime,” said Pridmore.