Conductor was Canadian composers’ champ
You might say that it all began with a Strauss waltz.
Then again, you might say that the seeds of Victor Feldbrill’s career as a conductor were sown even earlier, at a rehearsal of the Harbord Collegiate Orchestra, when the teacher-conductor handed his baton to his youthful concertmaster so the instructor could walk out front and listen to the orchestra.
The native Torontonian was a violinist then, as he was when Sir Ernest MacMillan subsequently handed him a baton to conduct the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in Strauss’s “Artist’s Life Waltz.”
The year was 1943, he was soon to be stationed in London with the Royal Canadian Navy (still as a violinist) and — following part-time studies at the Royal Academy and Royal College of Music — to return to postwar Toronto and a long professional life facing orchestras.
It is never easy to explain what makes a real conductor. When I was in university a popular textbook was Max Rudolf’s “The Grammar of Conducting” (I still own a copy). I later had the opportunity to hear Rudolf himself conduct in Cincinnati, thanked him and was promptly told that following the conducting diagrams in his book was the barest beginning.
He was right, of course. Two conductors can use those same diagrams and produce greatly different results.
On another occasion I asked a member of the TSO what he considered to be the role of a conductor and, with the cynicism born of long experience, he replied, “to not get in the way.”
Feldbrill did not get in the way. He knew what it was like to play in orchestras and knew better than to treat them without respect for their knowledge.
His own knowledge was acquired more on the front lines than academically. Conducting is something you learn by doing, and he started doing it regularly while still in school.
Did he become a great conductor? No, he became a valuable conductor, championing the work of Canadian composers more than any of his contemporaries did. He knew the composers on a personal level, worked with them on their premieres and during his decade as music director of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra starting in 1958, he set a precedent that has sadly not been followed of making Canadian music a regular feature of his programming.
He did conduct internationally, mostly in England and Japan. In the latter country he became the first Canadian guest conductor at Tokyo’s National University of Art and Music in 1979. Throughout the 1980s he conducted and taught regularly in the Land of the Rising Sun.
It was back home in the true north, strong and free, that he made his mark, teaching and conducting at the University of Toronto and appearing with orchestras, both youth and professional, across the country.
His association with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra was particularly close, not only as a frequent guest but as sometime director of youth programming and founding conductor of the Toronto Symphony Youth Orchestra.
Although he never became the orchestra’s music director — recognizing that he was too much the hometown boy to be considered for the job — he stepped up at a critical point in its history, following the 1973 death of Karel Ancerl, to act as resident conductor during the search for Ancerl’s successor.
I think it broke his heart when the then-manager of the orchestra finally terminated his annual appearances at Roy Thomson Hall. He last conducted a full concert at the age of 83.
Seven years later he was still conducting at an Arts and Letters Club celebration of his 90th birthday. I was one of the speakers at that occasion, remarking that critics and conductors have at least one thing in common: we tend to outlive everyone else.
When he died in Toronto on June 17, Victor Feldbrill was 96.