From Bach tributes to Bohemian Rhapsody
Vancouver-based Franch-Ballester and cousin sharing beautiful clarinet music with everyone
From balconies to porches to social media platforms, musicians are finding new and creative ways to get their music to an audience.
Jose Franch-Ballester, an international clarinet soloist based in Vancouver, has been producing and posting videos of his performances of classics and contemporary music.
“For many years, I’ve been producing my own content and videos and investing in audio and video equipment,” said Franch-Ballester. He is also a UBC music prof.
“When we got an email saying that we couldn’t go back to teach, I had the idea of grabbing my camera and a pair of mics, thinking maybe I could do something from home.”
Franch-Ballester began making and posting the videos shortly after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. He is often accompanied by one of his students, Bernardino Assunçao, who also happens to be his cousin and is staying with the musician.
“I thought, ‘Why don’t we record a duet and send it to our family in Spain?’ We posted it online and a lot of people responded, and asked us to do more,” Franch-Ballester said.
The videos have found viewers at home, in Spain and all over the world.
While Franch-Ballester does the production, Assunçao does the arrangements, sometimes with additional help from other students and colleagues.
“This takes a lot of hours,” he said. “Every single day we’ve been putting our energies towards this project.”
When we talked to Franch-Ballester, he was readying his 57th video. The videos have amassed over one million views in total and include selections from the classical repertoire, as well as movie music and the occasional pop/ rock cover (such as Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody).
“We want to appeal to a larger, broader audience,” Franch-Ballester said.
Some of the most popular include Homenaje a Manuel de Falla and Tribute to JS Bach, both by Hungarian clarinetist Béla Kovacs; Estudio Nº 27 (Joropo), by Colombian composer Mauricio Murcia; Star Wars (The Rise of Starwalker), by John Williams; Tenebris Monasterius, by
Spanish composer Saúl Gómez; and Moto Perpetuo, by 19th-century Italian violinist Nicoló Paganini. The online forum allows Franch-Ballester to promote work by contemporary Canadian composers, and he has premiered pieces by his colleagues Dorothy Chang and Stephen Chatman. In fact, his solo performance of Chatman’s Sweet Tomorrow has reached 45,000 views. “If you divide that into how many concert halls that would fill, that’s a lot of concert halls.”
Before COVID hit, Franch-Ballester had been scheduled to play a number of concert halls himself. As we’re seeing, the current crisis is having a profound effect on artists and arts organizations.
“Music organizations are brainstorming on how we reinvent ourselves, how we can endure and present our content,” he said. “We didn’t need this pandemic, but the arts sector was already facing this problem. Arts organizations are getting less money as donors get older. Now it’s going to make us confront that struggle more.”
He hopes people will emerge in a post-COVID world (or living-with-COVID world) with new appreciation for the arts.
“I think art starts by giving to our community,” he said.
“I have seen so many artists come out on their balconies, playing music for the neighbours.
“In my hometown in Spain, they will get on the roofs and balconies and sing and play together. Musicians around the world have been sharing videos and posting art. We’re not doctors, we don’t work in hospitals, we’re artists. With the little thing we can do, we can hopefully make peoples’ lives a little happier through this gesture.”