Rhapsodies for rat racers
They are Russian musicians, middle-aged and older, who play for thousands every day. But who knows their names? Who even lifts a weary head to see them?
The pairing of their instruments, violin and accordion, may be unusual in Canada, yet they go together like flashing eyes and a rose in the teeth. But who notices? Not the morning commuters charging between the GO station and the TTC subway at Union, immune to the waltzes, polkas and folk songs, the Bach and the Mozart. Their heads are down, and mentally they are already at their desks, fretting about spreadsheets and bottom lines.
Violinist Andrei Denga, 53, is celebrating 20 years as a subway musician this year. He started his musical training as a 7-year-old in St. Petersburg. Alexander Popov, 70, is an accordion player who toured the world as an accompanist for a Ukrainian choir and a ballet company. THEIR AUDIENCE IS HUGE. In a single hour during peak time,19,400 GO passengers cross the breezeway into Union Station to get on the subway. The TTC has some 150,000 passengers in and out of Union Station daily.
On a recent Friday, one of them was Patricia Mitsis, a music teacher from London, Ont., who has three minutes to spare between trains when she travels to visit her daughter. She takes those few minutes to listen to Denga, who plays like a man possessed. She mentions that three of her students have performed at Carnegie Hall.
Mitsis stands with her coat and suitcase, and tears tumble. Denga, in a black coat and beret, and his partner for the day, Popov, are playing Pachelbel’s magisterial Canon in D. (Denga’s regular accordionist, Eduard Kagansky, is away with his youngest son on March Break.)
“It brings you to the height of humanity and beyond, to heaven,” Mitsis says before hurrying off to catch her train to Ottawa. “This is a way of someone saying a prayer.”
Buskers rarely hear this kind of sentiment. But never mind, they are used to being ignored.
“I feel most are indifferent, so I play for myself,” says Popov. “I enjoy playing for my pleasure.”
Denga plays with his eyes closed, dipping and weaving as if in another world. “I go inside the music.”
He says this comes from the Russian tradition of performance. “You have to play every time like it is the last time in your life. People should feel that.” Few do. Recently, Denga was playing with Kagansky at the King subway station. They are among 79 Ttc-approved musicians playing at 25 subways stops. The teeming rush-hour crowds were long gone and at times the concourse was deserted, except for Shelley Xia and her 16-year-old daughter, Cathy. They were visiting from Vancouver and had a map in hand. They stopped to listen. “I like this song,” Xia said, her face luminous. Her daughter translated. “I am very moved.” She dropped a $20 bill in the violin case and, turning back to the subway, gave Denga a small, shy wave. The musicians are discreet about their earnings. That is, they don’t say. But Denga and Kagansky have earned enough to help put their kids through university. Someone once gave Denga $120. “But this was one time,” he says. Still, there are other benefits. “It’s a great thing,” he says. “I listened to another subway musician play a Bach partita and I thought, my goodness, so beautiful, playing what you want. You have a case full of money and no management. In the orchestra you have to be ready to play everything on your stand, you have to wear a fresh shirt; you have to do what the conductor wants, when the conductor wants. Here, you have freedom!”
HE TELLS THE STORY
about how he got his violin, the instrument he calls, “my darling.” An older woman watched him play at Queen subway station and complimented his skill, but asked why he didn’t have a better instrument. It’s very expensive, he explained. Her husband died three decades earlier, she said, and left a good violin that hadn’t been played since his death. Would he like it? He would. He didn’t believe it would come to pass, until he held the instrument in his hands. It’s valued at about $15,000.
Kagansky, 62, who came from Moldova in 1992, worked as a truck driver for General Electric until his retirement last year. He started playing with Denga last fall. He has some empathy for the people who pass him every day without a glance. “They are so busy thinking about work or family, so intense a life. We try to be like sunshine, to make them happy before they go to their cubicles and computers.”
Their music is a gift that ripples freely, even to the stone-faced passersby, he says. “Music is the best thing in our lives. It is from God, it is spiritual, it is the language of our soul. It comes from our heart, makes a big loop, and then comes back.”
At Union station recently, it was sharp and cold even in the concourse leading to the subway. Outside it was snowing, and Denga and Popov took a coffee break. They divide their earnings evenly, to the single penny. Popov waved goodbye to a reporter. “When you feel lonely, come back here,” he called.