Brott proves innovation makes the show go on
The venerable Salzburg Festival is an exception. It is going on this year, complete with the participation of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.
It is a scaled-down festival — two operas instead of the usual seven — but Austria has been coping rather well with COVID-19 and Salzburg is a relatively small place.
Elsewhere, summer festivals have routinely closed their doors, some of them going virtual, like Ottawa’s Chamberfest, offering live steaming concerts (Chamber Chats: At Home); others, like Hamilton’s Brott Music Festival, undergoing something of a redefinition.
The festival has been a regular feature of Ontario’s summer season for 33 years, built around the creation of a seasonal orchestra, recruited by audition from across the country.
The idea was the brainchild of Hamilton’s leading man about music, Boris Brott, who happened at the time, in 1988, to live in the constituency of then Conservative federal cabinet minister Barbara McDougall (she was an MP from 1984 to 1993).
Although McDougall is said to have laughed at the idea when he contacted her for support, he reportedly convinced her that musicians are significant contributors to the economy, and a summer training orchestra should qualify for the federal government’s youth employment program.
The federal government has been supportive ever since. And around the orchestra’s concerts Brott has built an annual festival, involving soloists and chamber ensembles to augment the orchestral programming.
This year, of course, COVID-19 threw a spanner into his works. But rather than cancel the festival outright, thereby depriving young Canadian orchestral musicians of summer employment at a time when they most need it, he devised a seven-week online virtual training program for his National Academy Orchestra, including master classes and seminars with an international faculty, run on the Zoom platform.
In addition, he has partnered with McMaster University in a study of the impact that COVID-19 has had on the connectivity of musicians, using the university’s LR Wilson Concert Hall to record some of these musicians from the southern Ontario area.
Each year’s Brott Music Festival features a fully staged opera (BrottOpera) and, even here, adaptation rather than cancellation has been the chosen option, with a July 30 virtual production of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” presented on the festival’s Facebook and YouTube pages.
Unlike the Salzburg Festival’s presentations, it was a production with the singers performing from their homes to a pre-recorded piano accompaniment, an experiment that again showed how modern technology can be recruited to ensure that the show goes on.
Let’s not fool ourselves. Virtual is not real. Even in its popular Live in HD theatrical telecasts, the Metropolitan Opera has its hosts remind viewers that nothing really replaces an in-the-flesh visit to an opera house.
But as we scarcely need to be reminded, these are times of crisis, and keeping music and music-makers alive requires the kind of invention born of necessity.
Brott the inventor has drawn such major international figures as violinist Pinchas Zukerman and cellist Steven Isserlis into this summer’s pedagogical exercise, with such positive feedback from participants that plans are afoot to include virtual activities in future festivals.
As Zukerman remarked, “The virtual coaching experience with the young musicians was wonderful. I found that the level of playing was excellent and their enthusiasm remarkable.”
And what about the rest of us, who have exchanged practising for listening? Audiences in an estimated 46 countries have been tuning into the justconcluded 17 festival performances, and what is especially noteworthy is that the highest online engagement has come from the 25 to 34 age group, rather than the usual 55 and up for live concerts.
All Brott Music Live performances can still be viewed through www.Brottmusic.com, as well as on YouTube, where selected master classes with both the National Academy Orchestra and BrottOpera have been made public.
The Brott Music Festival calls itself “Canada’s largest not-forprofit orchestral and opera music festival, and is the only festival with a full-time professional orchestra in residence.” The claim may seem a little exaggerated this summer but, in the age of COVID-19, definitions are changing and Hamilton’s festival is helping show how they can.