Toronto Summer Music showed us a magic trick.

William Fedkenheuer played classical violin in the first half of the concert. William on violin and Orion Weiss on piano played a movement of Brahms, then a sonata of Beethoven and a sonatina of Dvořák.

And then after intermission he made a costume change, from formal to informal. And he transformed his violin into a fiddle.

Full disclosure: the magic is all in the perception. A violin is the same as a fiddle.

The title of the concert was “Two sides of the same fiddle”, as in the magic trick. Maybe I’m being provocative in my headline, but I felt just as there were two sides to the instrument, so too with the instrumentalist, the two sides of the Artistic Director of Toronto Summer Music, William Fedkenheuer. He’s both a violinist and a fiddler, and our concert was a demonstration of those two sides.

I’m intrigued as we get to know the new Artistic Director of Toronto Summer Music, the humble master of ceremonies who has emerged before concerts this year, the violinist, the fiddler: and the personality behind the festival.

We began with Brahms, the Scherzo in C Minor from the F-A-E Sonata, William on violin Orion Weiss at the piano. Then Beethoven’s violin sonata Op 30 no 3, then the Dvořák Sonatina Op. 100, B.183. This was the TSM premiere of Orion whose playing was wonderfully idiomatic, the ensemble playing between the two instrumentalists as effortless as if they were of the same mind.

William was playing a little game with us, as he suggested the violin that had played Brahms Beethoven and Dvorak in the first part of the concert had now changed through magic into a fiddle. He moved it about on the stage, a bit like a magic trick, the violin becoming a fiddle.

Of course it was the same instrument.

The second half of the concert, William was sometimes playing sometimes watching as fiddler Ben Plotnick showed us another way to play the violin (aka “fiddle”) and Eric Wright made comparable explorations of the cello.

While the title plays up the duality there are even more sides to William than these two. At one point, as he alluded to the excellence of the two fiddlers beside him onstage, he suggested that he was to be the equivalent of a fellow for the second half of the concert, a student learning from the master fiddlers. It’s a reminder of another big part of the Toronto Summer Music Festival, namely its pedagogical mission, training instrumentalists & singers at the TSM Academy. William is a mentor, a teacher, and curator at the festival where he also plays his violin.

William helped explain what Ben and Eric were doing, for those of us who might not recognize just how difficult their playing was. Eric’s cello was sometimes singing sometimes making a percussive sound that sets up rhythmic patterns as if he were a drummer, sometimes at the same time that he was also playing individual notes on another string.

And we had a further illustration watching two Fellows who joined for an encore of fiddling at the end of the concert, namely violinist Seeun Baek, and cellist Thomas Li joining William, Ben and Eric.

It’s early days. I am getting my first look at William and the new Toronto Summer Music Festival culture he is fostering. This was the second consecutive night when I was swept away by music-making crossing boundaries into other styles beyond the usual classical idiom. It was unpretentious, enthusiastic & genuine. I’m looking forward to seeing what’s next.