From Russia to Vienna, with the love of music
Music, as the Bachs and Mozarts have amply demonstrated, can become a family business and, in Toronto, no family better exemplifies this truth than the Zarankins.
Boris and Inna Perkis Zarankin had music in their families before discovering the 88 black-and-white keys they have made their own. But it was the piano that brought them together back in Soviet days, when her father took Inna to one of Boris’s recitals and told her, “That is the man you should marry.”
Four years later, she did. After all, who wouldn’t fall in love with a man who turns up on your doorstep with the score of Mahler’s First Symphony, arranged for piano four hands, and suggests you sit down and play it with him?
Despite their impressive credentials — Boris studied with Regina Horowitz, Vladimir’s sister, as well as at the Moscow State Conservatory, and Inna even played piano four hands with her fellow conservatory student Vlado Gergiev in Saint Petersburg (or Leningrad, as it was then known) — they eventually bumped heads against the glass ceiling reserved for Jewish artists in Russia and decided to emigrate.
Although exit visas were intended to lead to Israel, they went first to Vienna, considering Germany their final destination.
That was when Boris’s uncle, a doctor and dean of medicine in Edmonton, heard them play and persuaded them to aim instead for northern Alberta.
And so, on Feb. 2, 1979, they arrived in Edmonton in minus-40-degree weather, with their daughter Julia and very little English, to begin the Canadian journey that eventually brought them, by way of several years in Vancouver, to Toronto. Along the way they acquired a second daughter, Ilana, and a career in playing and teaching (they came to Toronto initially to teach at the Royal Conservatory).
In Toronto, they suffered an attack of nostalgia for the Vienna they knew for less than a year, where they had encountered a phenomenon little known in the Ontario metropolis: the salon concert.
Designed for intimate settings, with Viennese pastries and informal talk thrown in, these exercises in chamber music, organized as the Off Centre series, have become their distinctive contribution to the musical life of their adopted city for the past 20 years.
Indeed, a gala June 7 afternoon concert in the CBC’s Glenn Gould Studio aims to celebrate the anniversary with an extensive series of artists, including soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian, baritone Russell Braun and no fewer than three Zarankins.
Daughter Ilana, now a soprano with a voice capable of “vaulting to vertiginous heights” (according to the New York Times), has joined the family business, following sister Julia, whose PhD from Princeton University has fertilized her popular introductions to Russian music and literature.
Russia is only one of several countries celebrated thematically in the Off Centre concerts, with Austria a perennial presence thanks to an annual Schubertiade, devoted to the music of one of the Zarankins’ favourite composers (an enthusiasm further reflected in Boris’s wellreceived CD recording of piano music by Franz Schubert).
Off Centre has moved from venue to venue over the past two decades, with next season’s concerts scheduled to take place at Trinity St. Paul’s Centre.
The format has evolved as well, with various hosts (including Julia’s mentor at Princeton) adding informational calories to the culinary kind supplied by the intermission pastries.
What has not changed is the enthusiasm of the Zarankins for their special kind of concert-giving. “We had an urge to create something and educate ourselves by going beyond the format of a recital,” explains Boris, whose passion for cultural history mirrors that of his wife and informs the research behind each program. “Before you get into a piece, you need to know how it was conceived.”
This season, Off Centre has given birth to a new mini series at the Music Gallery titled “derange” and inspired by the French word for “taken out of time.”
Curated by Ilana and her drummer spouse, Nico Dann (son of the noted violist Steven Dann; yes, the family continues to grow), these concerts deliberately mix musical genres.
Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, the Zarankins feel flattered that their thematic program ideas are being taken up by others. Nevertheless, their own series continues to set an example. And don’t forget the pastries.