Hallelujah for Ivars Taurins, singalong Messiah
Among the inevitabilities of a Toronto Christmas, count the appearance on the stage of Massey Hall of a lightly bearded figure in a long white wig and 18th-century finery conducting his audience.
Yes, you guessed it: The man happens to be Ivars Taurins, done up in a costume he made himself as the composer George Frideric Handel, and the occasion is Tafelmusik’s annual singalong Messiah.
The idea of having an audience sing along through Handel’s greatest hit with the Tafelmusik Chamber Choir was not his.
It came from Ottie Lockey, Tafelmusik’s managing director, and to discourage its implementation, the violist-turned conductor responded that he would preside over this dubious enterprise only if she let him dress up as Handel. To his chagrin, she agreed. The rest, as they say, is three decades of history.
This season also marks three and a half decades of history for the Tafelmusik Chamber Choir, which the ersatz Handel formed at the suggestion of the period instrument-playing orchestra’s visionary co-founder, oboist Kenneth Solway, and developed into one of the finest choral ensembles in the country.
“It wasn’t fully professional at first,” he recalls.
“We could afford to pay only the section leaders.”
Today, a fully professional 22-voice ensemble, it is preparing for its Nov. 2-6 season opening at Trinity St. Paul’s Centre, with a program including music by Rameau, Lully, Zelenka and, not surprisingly, Handel.
At the point of its founding, Taurins was Tafelmusik’s principal violist, but as Solway knew, his principal violist also had a longtime interest in vocal music dating back to his childhood, listening to the Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole and Tony Bennett records in his parents’ collection.
Graduating next to Schumann Lieder, sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and English songs sung by Robert Tear, he began his formal music studies on the piano, then the violin and, ultimately, the viola, the instrument that seemed best suited to the size of his hands.
“But I was never much interested in the solo repertoire,” he admits. “I wanted to make music with other people.”
By Grade 3, he had recruited some of those people to form a string ensemble sufficiently impressive for their teacher to personally bankroll a recording. And by the age of 16, he experienced a musical epiphany listening to a period instrument recording by Concentus Musicus of Vienna of a Telemann concerto for four violins.
“Hearing the sound of period instruments was like being shot into outer space,” he laughs. “It was a different world and I thought to myself, I’m home.” Well, almost home. As a music student at the University of Western Ontario, he encountered the British-born conductor Simon Streatfeild, discovered his own aptitude for conducting, founded another ensemble and wound up assisting Streatfeild in the preparation of a performance of Handel’s Acis and Galatea for the National Arts Centre.
His commitment to period performance was confirmed through a year of postgraduate study in The Hague, followed by an invitation from Solway to come back to Toronto and join a fledgling Baroque orchestra known as Tafelmusik (the German
“Hearing the sound of period instruments was like being shot into outer space.” IVARS TAURINS TAFELMUSIK CONDUCTOR
name for table music, honouring its composer, Georg Philipp Telemann).
Although still to be heard on many of Tafelmusik’s recordings, like so many players of his Cinderella instrument (Simon Streatfeild being one of them), he eventually turned to the baton, conducting orchestras — he leads the Calgary Philharmonic in an annual Baroque series — as well as choirs.
“Kenny realized that Tafelmusik needed a choir,” he acknowledges. “The heart of the 17th and 18th century (musical literature) is sacred music. To perform only instrumental music, you don’t give the whole picture.”
So, each season, Tafelmusik’s Toronto offerings include four repeated programs with choir and orchestra, one of them devoted to Handel’s Messiah in both traditional and singalong formats.
Because of the high cost, touring for the choir has so far been minimal, although the Montreal Symphony Orchestra’s Kent Nagano was so impressed by his Toronto colleague’s work that he invited him to bring his singers to Montreal to perform Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony for the opening of the orchestra’s handsome new hall, the Maison symphonique.
“It’s an ongoing relationship,” Taurins says. “I found Kent Nagano an artist who really understands choral music.”
The admiration appears to be reciprocal.
Nagano is not the first conductor to be impressed by the native Torontonian’s remarkable ability to draw from his singers vocal colours specific to the words being sung.
And speaking of Beethoven’s Ninth, The Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra itself recently released a recording of the symphony with the Tafelmusik Chamber Choir as the concluding installment of its Beethoven symphony cycle conducted by another favourite maestro, Bruno Weil.
“I like the excitement of creating something homegrown to be proud of,” Taurins says of his choir. He has obviously succeeded.