Canada’s classical wares take expo’s centre stage
ROTTERDAM, NETHERLANDS— The Canadian maple cocktail? Well, you combine maple syrup and Angostura bitters. Koba Johnson neglected to specify what kind of hooch might beneficially be added.
The Canada Council representative was speaking recently at Rotterdam’s famous concert hall complex, De Doelen, at Classical/Next, an international expo for classical music at which, for the first time, Canada hosted the gala opening.
And quite a gala it turned out to be, with a musical program begun with the howling and growling of Tanya Tagaq, Canada’s best-known Inuit throat singer, who mesmerized her multinational audience with a range of vocal sounds perfectly synchronized with images of our barren north, projected onto a large screen.
Ah, no, I thought to myself, are we going to perpetuate the European image of Canada as Siberia with a smile? Happily, the answer turned out to be no. As soon as Tagaq left the stage, clarinetist Lori Freedman and her colleagues from Toronto’s Continuum launched into her Ensuite: Quelles Filles; the all-female Cecilia String Quartet warmed to Vancouver-based Jeffrey Ryan’s Quantum Mechanics III. Fusion and Megumi Masaki of Brandon University applied her pianistic skills (with film partnership) to Nicole Lizée’s Hitchcock Études.
And so the evening went, with tightly edited filmed comments by the likes of conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin and soprano Barbara Hannigan woven between the live performances.
The impact? According to Jennifer Dautermann, Classical/Next’s director, Canada raised the bar for such events.
The Canadian Music Centre’s executive director, Glenn Hodgins, could hardly have been more pleased: “When we began discussions with Canada Council about participating, we sensed this was an opportunity to help put Canada on the map. We brought in David Pay from Vancouver’s Music on Main as producer and partnered with Orchestras Canada to make it happen.’’ “It made me proud of my newly adopted country,” said Britain’s Anthony Sargent, newly appointed CEO of Toronto’s Luminato Festival. “The presentation really stuck in people’s minds. It was done at the highest international standard.”
But does Canada really need to enhance its cultural profile in Europe?
“People in Europe do not have a generalized sense of Canadian culture,” Sargent added. “They know specific artists such as Margaret Atwood in literature, David Cronenberg in film and Robert Lepage as a director, but they do not know they are from Canada.” And Canadian classical musicians? “The feedback here has been remarkable,” said Johnson. “We hope to do this again next year.”
The implication was clear enough. Where classical music is concerned, more work needs to be done.
During Classical/Next’s three days Canada was one of several nations with booths set up by musical organizations to propagandize on behalf of their music and its performers. There were also showcase performances during the daytime and evening hours.
Contemporary music was clearly Classical Next’s primary focus, although the chatty British pianist James Rhodes did manage to introduce some Gluck and Chopin into the proceedings.
Daytime conferences were similarly concerned with issues of the moment, whether “the Canadian Digital Content Initiative,” “New Ways of Selling Classical Concerts” or “All You Need to Know About the French Market.”
Classical/Next is a fairly new enterprise, only a few years old, so it was tempting to accept an invitation from the Canadian Music Centre to add three expo days in Rotterdam to an Amsterdam busman’s holiday.
But in Amsterdam, I heard Dutch operatic, orchestral and chamber music performances of such a high level that it was also easy to un- derstand what a challenge lies ahead for a country such as Canada, with a less-established musical profile, to make a European impact.
Canada used to invest substantially in sending its artists abroad. This policy has largely changed under the present government, which perhaps helps explain the delighted surprise expressed by so many people at the Canadian contribution to Classical/ Next.
Many years ago, a representative of the National Arts Centre Orchestra tried to interest the director of a major Italian festival in engaging the Ottawa-based ensemble. “Does Canada have orchestras?” was his reply. We seem at least to have progressed beyond that question.