Tuckamore time
Chamber music festival turns 17
Seventeen years ago, Timothy Steeves and Nancy Dahn, better known as Duo Concertante, started the Tuckamore chamber music festival. The two-week festival — Aug. 7-20 this year — includes concerts by accomplished and up-andcoming musicians as well as brings together approximately 20 young artists and composers to study and perform.
When the festival started, music students in Newfoundland were fairly isolated from the outside musical community and this was one of few opportunities for them to interact with and be exposed to artists from other places.
The young artist program involves musicians and composers from as young as 14 to those in their mid-20s, from across Canada, the United States as well as Europe and the Middle East. The program is open to strings and piano players, who are arranged into ensembles to rehearse a work together to perform in the finale of the festival.
“I think the biggest thing that I’ve taken out of the festival is the idea of collaboration,” Dominic Greene, a Tuckamore festival young artist program alumnus who will perform in one of the concerts this year, says about the experience of building a musical relationship with people you have never met before.
“Always having the opportunity to work with different people all the time is really special because it keeps your mind going and going and going, and there are endless possibilities with regards to how to execute something musically or how to work,” Greene says about the opportunity the festival provides to work with new people.
During the festival, the young artists take master classes with the invited performers and Tuckamore faculty as well as perform during lunch-hour concerts and prepare traditional chamber works in their ensembles to perform at the end of the two weeks.
“It’s a wonderful opportunity for these young people to learn and see how to work at that level,” Steeves, co-artistic director of the festival, says about the chance for the young artists to gain experience working in a professional environment.
Three of the ensembles will be chosen to perform works by the young composers at the festival on Saturday.
“It’s really novel performing a piece by a colleague who you see every day,” Greene says about his experience performing a work by a young composer when he participated in the young artists program.
He noted there were a lot of advantages to being able to talk with the composer and ask them questions about technical and artistic aspects of the work.
One of the guest ensembles this year is the Rolston String Quartet. The quartet is composed of four Canadians from Ontario and B.C. who have been playing together for four years and recently finished a residency at Rice University in Houston, Texas.
The quartet was invited to play at the festival this year after winning the 2016 Banff International String Quartet Competition. This will be their first time performing in Newfoundland as an ensemble.
“It’s always a privilege to play the music that has been written for this specific instrumentation and to travel and engage with audiences,” says Jonathan Lo, cellist in the Rolston String Quartet. “It’s really going to be incredible, it’s just so vibrant and we can’t wait to jump in and see what’s going on.”
In addition to performing two concerts, the Rolston String Quartet will teach a master class for the young artists.
André Laplante is another accomplished guest who will perform and teach at this year’s festival.
“The concerts are great, but meeting the young artists is really exciting,” Steeves says when asked what the highlights of the festival are for him.
Greene and Steeves agree that their favourite part of the festival is always the finale concert, the chance to showcase all the hard work that has been done over the two weeks of the festival.
Entry to many of the concerts and master classes during the festival is free or by donation in order to make the festival as accessible to the public as possible.
The Tuckamore festival has begun to expand, not only to spaces outside of St. John’s — one of this year’s concerts will take place in Brigus — but beyond the two weeks during the summer with the Tuckamore Travels program, in which Steeves and Dahn, along with a young artist, bring chamber music to schools outside of St. John’s.
Thanks to a Canadian Heritage Canada 150 grant, they will bring a commissioned work to schools all the way to the west coast of the province.
“I think the school program is really exciting and I would love to keep doing it,” Steeves says when asked what he hopes for the future of the festival.
One day, he aspires to be able to involve more of the young artists in the Tuckamore Travels program.