A dancer recalls Boris Brott’s magic
The painful and shocking news about the sudden loss of maestro Boris Brott is unfathomable. Devastated, I join in the heartfelt tributes which accumulate in rapid and increasing crescendo — and extend my deepest sympathy to the Brott Family, whose overwhelming grief will be difficult to assuage, if ever.
Boris and I go back a very long way — right back to circa 1963 in fact, when the Toronto Star ran a full-page spread on the arts section cover with the headline, “New Faces.”
There he was, unruly curls, smile so wide and baton in hand, having made impressive debuts with international orchestras, and I for some reason, being singled out as a student to watch, at the National Ballet School. While we didn’t meet then, we did indeed cross paths and halls subsequently, as I set off on my professional career with the National Ballet of Canada and he led international orchestras with a youthful exuberance, (a hallmark his entire life), including at Covent Garden and Carnegie Hall.
Boris was a deeply committed Canadian, bringing music, making music, living music and insisting that music be for all. Here in Canada, we’d sometimes perform in our parallel professional capacities in concert and we’d chuckle about that early pairing of us. In his early years, Boris conducted for the Royal Ballet, he loved dance with its musical marriage.
I remember being in my kitchen one night around 1980 — when Boris called out of the blue — “Veronica,” he said, “I want you to dance ‘Bolero’ at Ontario Place with my orchestra. Do these dates in June work for you?”
Maurice Ravel’s immortal composition is a 20-minute tour-de-force with a melody and pulsating beat mounting to an inexorable and deafening climax. To dance solo to this score posed an extraordinary challenge of stamina.
Over several weeks, Constantin Patsalas took to choreographing it for me with a passion, while I kept dropping to the studio floor breathless.
That first performance in the Ontario Place Forum was unforgettable: encircled by rows of crowds, enveloped by orchestral surges, driven by Boris, who was my impetus and point of focus. My collapse at the final note was his and my triumph. A huge success, I danced Bolero again with Boris and several Canadian orchestras. And this was just the beginning — of a number of magical collaborations — many at Ontario Place under Boris’s baton and most important, his stimulation of new creations that launched the career of the talented young choreographer David Allan.
In more recent years, Boris would engage me to narrate — with the National Arts Centre Orchestra, Hamilton Philharmonic and his own Brott Music Festival.
It has been overwhelmingly moving to hear the floods of tributes describing Boris’s unique zest and profound and manifold impact on countless lives.
Above all, he was a music invigorator, an orchestral entrepreneur. The term “Pops” for Boris Brott spelled his life’s mission — music — for life — for people — for love.
His shining legacy will live on — the arc of his music was interrupted far too soon.