Summer festival a springboard for special talents
People often talk about six degrees of separation. Between Jonathan Crow and the Toronto Summer Music Festival the number is even smaller.
As a student at McGill University (1995-98), violist Douglas McNabney was the first chamber music teacher for Crow, the festival’s new artistic director. And when McNabney succeeded Agnes Grossmann as artistic director of Toronto Summer Music, one of his first invitations to participate went to his former student.
When, after six years on the job, the McGill professor decided to step down he also nominated that very same student to be his successor. And when that student put together his first season, which opens Thursday and runs to Aug. 5, one of his invitations to participate went to McNabney.
McNabney’s Aug. 3 concert, by the way, is typical of this year’s festival, a 150th birthday salute to Canada featuring some of the country’s finest musicians.
Until a collapse onstage during a recent tour removed him from their active ranks, Anton Kuerti numbered among the most distinguished of these musicians, a worldclass pianist and a founder of what is still one of the country’s leading summer music festivals, the Festival of the Sound in Parry Sound.
The Aug. 3 Kuerti tribute concert features mezzo-soprano Laura Pudwell, violinist Barry Shiffman and cellist Joseph Johnson, as well as McNabney and pianist Jane Coop in a program reflective of Kuerti’s own musical taste: Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann and Brahms.
Not exactly avant-garde, you may argue, but then, Toronto Summer Music has never been a contemporary music enterprise.
True, Jordan Pal’s specially commissioned “Octet” will receive its premiere, but the bulk of the programming is devoted to the traditional chamber music repertoire, performed at a high standard.
To set that standard, this year’s opening concert at Koerner Hall presents a program of Haydn, Beethoven and R. Murray Schafer (the stunning Third Quartet) played by Canada’s flagship string foursome, the St. Lawrence String Quartet.
And throughout the remaining three weeks, concerts range from a recital by the distinguished Finnish soprano Soile Isokoski and another by the musician Crow calls “Canada’s greatest violinist of all time,” James Ehnes; to a Bach Celebration in which Ehnes teams up with, among others, Crow and the festival chamber orchestra; to appearances by the National Youth Orchestra under Jonathan Darling and the National Academy Orchestra under Boris Brott.
Crow characterizes the festival as a reflection of his own musical career, which began as a pre-teenage violinist in his native Prince George, B.C., playing chamber music, and as a member of the Prince George Symphony Orchestra.
“I’ve always felt lucky that I’ve been able to do pretty much what I’ve wanted, solo playing, chamber music and orchestra,” he says.
“Even as a member of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, one of my first concerts was nothing less than Mahler’s Second Symphony under Zubin Mehta. And everything I do makes me better at the other things I do.”
Among those other things these days is playing in the New Orford String Quartet, acting as much admired concertmaster of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and teaching at the University of Toron- to Faculty of Music.
And speaking of teaching, one of the identifying features of Toronto Summer Music is its academy, a training program for emerging professionals in which the fellows, as they are called, work alongside mentors — this year including the noted Argentinian cellist Alberto Lysy and TSO principal violist Teng Li — and perform alongside them in a series of free concerts at Heliconian Hall.
This year also includes a series of free Kids Concerts and pay what you can, hour-long so-called Shuffle Concerts as well as master classes with Ehnes, Isokoski and Coop.
“For me, the whole festival grows out of the academy,” Crow says. “We are helping prepare the next generation of listeners as well as performers, so we produce programming for all ages. We are trying to encourage everyone to come to classical music.
“When I came to Toronto I was surprised why everything seemed to close down and start up at the same time. In Montreal, the summer was actually our busiest season. So this festival fills a gap. I don’t think we are competing with anyone.”
In typical festival fashion, Toronto Summer Music is also acting as a springboard for special talents, this year including Nikki Chooi, recently appointed concertmaster of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, and the Rolston String Quartet, most recent winner of the Banff International String Quartet Competition.
Moreover, everything has to be done on a budget of less than a million dollars. Crow smiles: “We are experienced in making money go a long way.”