Esprit Tunes the World

Posted on October 15, 2012 by barczablog

Tonight Esprit Orchestra, led by Conductor & Music Director Alex Pauk, marked the beginning of their 30th season with a program celebrating the excellence of Canadian music, a concert titled “The Tuning of the World”.  Of the five items presented by EO, two were world premieres of works commissioned for the occasion, with the three living composers present to accept the audience’s grateful applause.

wolf-manIf commitment is the measure of an orchestra, Esprit are the finest ensemble in Toronto.  Every moment of performance was urgent and intense, sometimes leavened with humour, and spiced with an affectionate rapport between the players and their public.

Koerner Hall was already energized by the launch of R Murray Schafer’s autobiography My Life on Earth & Elsewhere before the concert began.  The centrepiece of the evening was the premiere of Schafer’s Wolf Returns, a composition lending a sense of occasion to Esprit’s celebration.

Wolf Returns brought some of Schafer’s site-specific energy into Koerner Hall, with five sections:

  1. Wolf Chant
  2. Chant for the Spirits of Hunted Animals
  3. Mosquito Chant
  4. Healing Chant
  5. Rain Chant

Each chant was supplied from the upper rear of the auditorium by a chorus often chanting unaccompanied.  While Schafer has sometimes written edgy dissonant music, that’s not what you get with Wolf Returns, a composition feeling like a happy valedictory from a mature composer.  The first few minutes are like a powerful toccata for full orchestra, tonal but syncopated.  The voices from the back came and went throughout, deconstructing the formality of our concert experience, making the performance feel like a happening.  While it may seem like an irrelevant consideration, I can’t help but think that Schafer’s fun and boisterous composition deserves to be heard and played by orchestras all over the world.  I would think the aboriginal overtones of the chants and the frequent pentatonic sound make this a wonderfully accessible piece, especially congenial for an American audience, although I’d think the piece would be welcome anywhere.  I hope to hear it again.

The most reflective composition of the evening came from Pauk’s partner Alexina Louie, namely O Magnum Mysterium: In Memoriam Glenn Gould, a 1982 composition presented in a 1999 re-orchestration.  Originally conceived as a work for 44 soloists, I couldn’t help thinking of a similar piece, namely Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen.  Like Strauss’s work, Louie’s composition is powerfully inter-textual, pushing our buttons with poignant quotes from other compositions.  I may have been especially softened up, sitting 5 feet away from Louie, watching her face for much of the performance; I didn’t know the piece, so when it’s tranquil but profound ending snuck up on me, I was moved to tears, amplified by her reactions.

When I first read the program for the concert, the thing that won me over most emphatically was seeing Colin McPhee on the program.  Sandy Thorburn posted a whimsical question on Facebook a year or two ago, asking us to nominate the greatest Canadian composer.  After a few people posted some of the famous composer names I said Mychael Danna (nobody had posted a film music composer and HELLO Mr Danna isn’t just alive, he’s a colossal success). Then i posted McPhee, who may be relatively unknown but he’s my personal favourite.

McPhee is perhaps the most under-rated Canadian composer, known to have influenced Benjamin Britten’s composition of Death in Venice.  He seems like a missing link in mid-century connecting Debussy (known to have been influenced by hearing Javanese gamelan music) and Glass, even if an unknown unheard composer can’t really be much of an influence, can he…(?)

This is my first time hearing Tabuh-Tabuhan in person, a piece i love to pieces.  And maybe i am not the only one, as EO took up this score with visible delight.  I always treasure moments when you see players’ heads bobbing or smiling; I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many such moments as I did tonight.  I couldn’t help thinking that Pauk gave us this bon bon as a special treat: one of the sweetest pieces I’ve ever heard, and by that I mean, phrases as cute as bunnies or kittens frolicking, endlessly curling arabesques of cuteness.  EO played every note lovingly as if sprinkling us in icing sugar.

I don’t want to ignore the first two items on the program, although they were good rather than the ecstatic level I experienced in the last three items presented.

Icarus

Icarus

We began with John Rea’s marvellous Ikaros agog…Daidalos on edge, a work that is more symbolist than impressionist, taking us to the heart of some fascinating images.  Daidalos is the great constructor who sadly lost his son when he flew too close to the sun, a kind of early Faustian bargain involving science.  Speaking as one who is sometimes infatuated with technology, I believe I understand what Rea was hinting at in his program note and in his composition, that began with organic phrases in the strings resembling wind or breathing (both the outer and inner world at once) overcome more and more with mechanical rhythms and clockwork sounds.  This understated work does feel like a cautionary tale, one that is contemporary yet universal.

Xenakis’ brief For the Whales followed, a wonderful etude for the strings, sounding very similar to the organic parts of Rea’s composition and therefore a logical work to follow it on the program.

Esprit’s season at a glance | My interview with Alex Pauk

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Second At Bat

Posted on October 13, 2012 by barczablog

I raved about the new Canadian Opera Company Die Fledermaus when it opened last week.  Tonight I had the privilege of another look with a slightly different cast.

Some things inevitably work best the first time.  A joke with a surprise can’t get the same response if you know that it’s coming.

Opening night of Christopher Alden’s production felt edgy, a combination of fin-de-siècle hedonism, the psychology of wish-fulfilment with a dark authoritarian side to it and Strauss’s original froth.  From where I sat I was particularly captivated by the two women wearing the same clothes, namely Rosalinde and her maid Adele.

James Westman (seated) as Frank, Jan Pohl as Frosch and Mireille Asselin as Adele (Photo: Michael Cooper)

Tonight I felt quite a bit different.  Mireille Asselin assumed the role of Adele on a night I attended in the company of my wife.  I wonder if my more conservative take on the piece might be owing to the unconscious context I had brought with me…(?)

Where opening night I saw Adele as a site for class-warfare, and pondered the empowerment of women as I watched, Asselin’s Adele was less the revolutionary, and more the charming imposter at a party (in other words, more or less the way the role is written).  Did I see less edge because I was caught up in the most bourgeois elements of the story this time?  I was watching how Eisenstein & Rosalinde played out, noticing how they went opposite directions in the so-called reconciliation at the end of the operetta (when it’s all blamed on champagne).

If I were to contrast Braid & Asselin, it’s to acknowledge that each has a particular strength that is the lynch-pin of their performance, influencing how everyone else comes across.  I think Asselin is more operatic than Braid, tossing off her coloratura perfectly, the high notes like dots of whipped cream arcing through the air.  Braid’s focus is more dramatic, her facial expresssions and delivery more extreme, and her reading more intense than Asselin’s, changing her relationship to Eisenstein (her boss) and the drama around her.  I was surprised at how different they felt, and how viable each one is.  The show with Ambur Braid has more instances of dark truth, while Asselin’s is lilting Viennese operetta, light and frothy in the usual ways without any genuine threat.  I think the fan of operetta coming to Fledermaus might be more comfortable with Asselin and her stunning vocalism.  I think the COC brass chose Braid for opening night because the charisma of her performance is electrifying.

Hm, or is the difference me, sitting alone opening night (and totally smitten by the parallel tales of gorgeous women and their empowerment?) vs sitting with my wife tonight (and so, caught up in the sad story of a failed marriage rather than the parallel stories of women)…? I don’t know. But isn’t it wonderful to have two wonderful performers each taking the role & the operetta in a different direction as a result.

Tonight I must again credit the COC Chorus as the other ‘star’ of this production, particularly once they’re decorated by Constance Hoffman’s costumes.  Their energy levels tell us what Alden is trying to do, whether he’s seeking the mad joys of hedonism, the pathos of travesty or world-weary sadness.  His Fledermausketeers sound & look marvellous.

Tamara Wilson sounded quite good in spite of having announced a cold via Facebook.  The one tiny bit of evidence was her brief visit to the high note at the end of her Csardas (held longer last week); otherwise she again sounded magnificent, with a big powerful sound, a fluid line, and an uncanny ability to play comedy.  My biggest laugh tonight was over one of her lines, which I won’t give away (stealing that from you if you might see the show), except it’s a brilliant exchange with Asselin in the first part of the work, when Adele is still in maid’s attire.

I have to mention three other performers.

James Westman is a pleasure to watch and to hear in a role that I’ve hardly noticed in the past.  Singing the part of Frank, it must have been a shock to be told he’d have to cross-dress for part of the role.  While I’ve superficially given away a bit of a gag, it doesn’t in any way prepare you for Westman’s subtle performance, excellent delivery of his lines, and superb chemistry with everyone else on stage.

Michael Schade (Eisenstein) and Laura Tucker (Prince Orlofsky) plus bat girls. (Photo: Michael Cooper)

Speaking of travesty, I want to speak a bit more about Laura Tucker as Prince Orlofsky.  Tucker raised her comic intensity much higher tonight from the comparative subtlety of opening night.   I have to wonder if this is simply a matter of getting comfortable in a role, finding her way and discovering new nuances, but Tucker was always fascinating to watch and quite lovely to hear.

Similarly Michael Schade is also getting comfortable with his Eisenstein, a role that’s not terribly flattering in this production, and lacking the conventional closure of a happily ever after.  Schade makes Eisenstein genuinely three-dimensional, a fascinating & quirky beast who’s a likable scoundrel, even as he’s caught red-handed by his wife.  That intangible aura he brings –making us LIKE Eisenstein–is essential (although again, with the feminist reading i brought to opening night perhaps i wasn’t so sympathetic); otherwise we won’t care about the couple, won’t worry about their possible reconciliation at the end.

Hm, tonight’s show was a gentler comedy. While husband and wife do not kiss and arrive at happily ever after (if that’s a spoiler i gave it away already), curiously this configuration (with Asselin as Adele) makes eventual reconciliation feel possible, whereas the other cast with its edgier humour and in-your-face politics (the women but also Jan Pohl’s quirky Frosch) aren’t just funny, but have serious undertones as well (as noted in a pair of earlier reviews of the first cast: Fledermaus: just like our century | The bat came back ).

Die Fledermaus continues until November 3rd at the Four Seasons Centre.

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10 Questions for David Fallis

Posted on October 12, 2012 by barczablog

David Fallis is surely one of the most important musical minds in Canada.  He is Music Director for Opera Atelier, a long-time member and Artistic Director of the Toronto Consort, and director of Choir 21 (a choir specializing in 21st century compositions).

Fallis teaches in the Graduate Department of the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto.  On the one hand Fallis is an important scholar-conductor, leading Opera Atelier’s productions of Lully’s Armide (including its tour to Versailles and later, Glimmerglass this past summer), and historically informed Mozart operas encompassing Die Entführung aus dem Serail, The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni, The Magic Flute, and La Clemenza di Tito.  But Fallis has also commissioned contemporary composers with the Toronto Consort,  led Christopher Butterfield’s Contes pour enfants pas sages this past spring, and leads R Murray Schafer’s The Love that Moves the Universe with Soundstreams tonight in Toronto (a concert I’m sorry to miss). And Fallis is also the historical music producer for the TV series “The Tudors” and for “The Borgias”

The occasion for this interview might be the most interesting operatic project in the Toronto area this season, namely the Opera Atelier production of Weber‘s Der Freischütz.

I ask Fallis ten questions: five about himself and five about his role in preparing the Opera Atelier production of Der Freischütz.

1) Which of your parents do you resemble (what s your nationality / ethnic background)?

David Fallis

Conductor David Fallis

A bit of both, really. People say they see my Dad in me, but they’ll see my Mum’s brothers in me too. A bit of a mix – mostly Irish, some English. Way back, a little bit of German.

2) What is the BEST thing / worst thing about being a music-director?

Best: Chance to work with great musicians – great singers and players – and to do great
music!

Worst: Sometimes you have to make decisions that won’t keep everyone happy.

It’s a good life.

3) Who do you listen to or watch?  

Wow. Well, I don’t have much time for watching TV as much as I’d like to get into these series. Listening to relax all together – I love the Jazz bassist Ron Carter, a great player. I like going to live concerts. I don’t listen around the house. If I have time off, I’ll go to a live concert. If I really need calming down, I listen to Bach organ music.

4) What ability or skill do you wish you had, that you don’t have?

Oh, well. One always wishes you could have even better ears – people talk about having perfect pitch, which is a nuisance really. I’d love to be able to hear music even better. You stand in awe of people who can understand music perfectly. It’s a good exercise to try to write a piece, for any musician, because you really understand how difficult it is.

5) When you’re just relaxing (and not working) what is your favorite thing to do?

In the summertime, my favourite thing is to get outside. Even as simple as getting out to the garden, or out of the city. I love tramping around ponds and all sorts of places. In the wintertime, I’m not a great winter camper, so I do enjoy going to live theatre – straight theatre. Since there’s so much musical theater in my business, I like to go see straight theatre a lot.

Five more about being the music-director for the upcoming period production of Weber’s Der Freischütz with Opera Atelier.

1) How does preparing & conducting an opera in period performance (particularly of an opera you’re performing for the first time) challenge you?

Of course you really have to know it from the inside. I spend a lot of time with the text – with the words – so I get to know exactly what’s going on.  I’ve done this many times; I go to a native speaker because they can catch innuendo or implications I miss.  In Italian or German operas there are a lot of Dante or Biblical references that are lost in translation. If you don’t know the original it doesn’t pop out at you. You don’t always get it as a non-native speaker.  Passages have a variety of meaning.

This is a bigger orchestral piece and you have to know how all the parts are going to fit together. All the tricky connecting points where you go from one tempo to another or one mood to another. And there is a lot of this in this piece.

The Wolf’s Glen scene has a lot of short bits and the singers actually speak over music at this point.  Usually the orchestra stops when there is spoken dialogue. They call this melodrama; where the orchestra plays through the spoken passages. The music has to synchronize with the talking.

Here’s an example of the melodrama from an old recording.

I also listened to Weber’s other operas Euryanthe and Oberon. I listened to them years ago but didn’t know them very well, so I listen to them and some of his contemporaries too. You like to have context for the piece. I spent quite a bit of time reading about 19th century performance practice – e.g. how they handled trills and how they handled the staccato marks. There’s quite a bit of change in this period. And of course, this is something Tafelmusik is interested in too. We want to make it sound plausible from the 19th century point of view. In the so-called early music movement, we started out by spending quite a bit of time on the Baroque. It was so far away that nobody knew what it was like at the time.

But now, people are saying that about the 19th century. Just because it’s closer to us in time doesn’t mean we know more about the performance practice. We can’t assume that the way we play it is what they had in mind. Even the size of the orchestra. The size in Dresden (where Weber worked) is a bit smaller than some other Romantic orchestras of the time so it worked out for us.

2) What do you love about historically informed performance?

Well, I’m curious I guess, really, about how things might have sounded. I should say it doesn’t mean that’s the only way to play it. You stand in awe of the genius of the great composers, so naturally you wonder what was in their minds. And of course, Mozart didn’t have in mind a modern piano. They had in their mind’s ear the instruments and sounds of their period. I want to see if I can get inside the mind of the composer, so understanding what was available at the time and how the instruments sounded and all those kinds of things are important in understanding what the composers wanted to say.

3) Do you have a favourite work that you’ve conducted?

I got asked once at a Q&A at the end of a lecture what my favourite piece was. And I said, “I try and love the one I’m with.” I have a list of favourite composers and a list of favourite pieces, but I wouldn’t want to have to choose one.

4) How do you relate to period performance as a modern man?

Well again, it arises out of curiosity. If you travel geographically around the world and you hear music from India or Egypt or Mali and you think, “Wow, this is incredible music” and it’s wonderful to be taken into this other world. With this, you’re having fun travelling to another world chronologically. And, if you’re interested in music you’re interested in different kinds of music, and there are lost of different kinds across the globe and across the ages. And you start to notice differences and similarities. Chinese opera sounds

J E Gardiner

John Eliot Gardiner

quite different from German opera.

5) Is there anyone out there who you particularly admire, and who has influenced you?

I’m not sure I would think of anyone particularly. I love to hear great singers, great pianists,… in terms of this repertoire: John Elliot Gardiner has done a lot of recording of this type of period.

My first piano teacher was a man named Court Stone and I had a choral instructor Lloyd Bradshaw – they both had a lot to do with why I went in to music at all.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

David Fallis leads Opera Atelier’s new period production of Der Freischütz in Toronto at the Elgin Theatre opening October 27th, running until November 3rd.

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Dichterliebe

Posted on October 11, 2012 by barczablog
rebuilding Regent Park

A picture from the ground-breaking for the Regent Park Project

Are you seeing Dichterliebe from Coleman Lemieux & Compagnie (CLC) at the Citadel this week?  It’s a multi-media collaboration, and excuse me if that description is so common that it’s almost unintelligible; I’ll decode it in a moment.

But you notice I said “see” and not “hear”? if you’re going to see Dichterliebe the best preparation you can make is to first hear Schumann’s song cycle.  That’s because Dichterliebe  is an adaptation of the song cycle using a dancer, and at times asking both the singer and even the pianist to move.  Employing a different choreographer for each of the sixteen songs, I interpret this piece as a kind of celebration of the new space created on Parliament Street adjacent to Regent Park, a neighbourhood struggling to be reborn.

Baritone Alex Dobson

Baritone Alex Dobson

Schumann’s Dichterliebe (a title that translates as “A Poet’s Love”) based on poems of Heinrich Heine, is a high-water mark in the genre of the song cycle.  The words tell a story in a series of static snapshots, progressing from anticipation and new love through a kind of satisfaction & bliss through a period of disappointment, heartbreak, traumatic struggle, and eventual recovery.  The unity of words & music were unprecedented, the composition pointing to the imminent invention by Wagner in the next decade of the Gesamtkunstwerk: the total artwork unified across multiple disciplines.  We take it for granted that the set & costumes, direction, text & music should all pursue the same strategic objectives –and by the way, this translates to most modern media such as films or computer games .  In Wagner’s time this was a new ambition that hadn’t been put into words.  How much stranger –and more brilliant—Schumann’s achievement, that he took the words of this series of poems and gave them musical settings that describe a perfect emotional arc to match.  Wagner’s ideal for opera that he articulated in the 1850s was already there in Schumann’s 1840 cycle.

It’s already a bit radical to imagine Dichterliebe turned into a dance piece, where –in the Wagnerian tradition—you get a single vision from a choreographer imposing their ideas on everyone else, who then function as the puppets under that domination (and maybe you can see why Hitler was so attracted to Wagner).  But why hand the choreography of the sixteen songs to a group of choreographers, rather than one man or woman?  why turn this unified song cycle into something else?

Because CLC sought to celebrate the building of the new space as a microcosm of the new Regent Park.  Here’s what I read about the Citadel on the CLC website:

The Citadel has been chosen by Bill Coleman and Laurence Lemieux as a place to research, create, learn and welcome dancers from around the world. A former dispensary of the Salvation Army, located in the middle of Regent Park in Toronto, The Citadel has been carefully renovated by CLC to create an inspiring work environment for the choreographers of the company and the dance community. The Citadel is also home to the The YogaBeat, an initiative offering pay-what-you-can yoga classes to the community.

The production embodies the Regent Park ideal in miniature, where instead of one boss, everyone shares the leadership roles.  Among the sixteen choreographers, they used the new building’s Project Manager & its Architect, a student from First Nations School, a playwright, a theatre director, and a pair of fashion designers, to go with a series of dancers & choreographers.  Some of the names are well-known, lending lustre to the proceedings.

  • Alex Poch-Goldin
  • Ken Gass
  • James Kudelka
  • David Earle

But the stars work as equals alongside those who are not so well-known.

Forgive me if a parse the message in such obvious terms, but it’s quite lovely and deserving to spread much further than this small neighbourhood in the process of being re-built and re-imagined.  The sharing of disparate visions in collaboration is a kind of enactment of community at work rather than one where a solitary vision is imposed upon everyone.  This implies a tolerance of diversity.  Everyone works together even though the roles bring different skills and perspectives to the table.    And yes, it’s a multi-media piece because it’s part-dance, part-drama, part-song cycle.  That Dichterliebe works so well may be an indication that this adaptation is a brilliant idea.  I made the earlier suggestion about coming with the music echoing inside your head because there’s so much to look at.

There’s baritone Alex Dobson, singing most delicately in this small space, but occasionally popping out full-sized notes that take one by surprise.  Dobson is note perfect, mostly gentle & ultra-refined with a gorgeous rich tone that I’ve missed.  I last heard him in The Midnight Court by Ana Sokolovic, although I understand he’s been singing a lot in Montreal.  But his operatic sound is something different; this is a chamber sound, modulated to match the accompaniment and the intimacy of the space.

Pianist Jeanie Chung more than held her own in this unorthodox version of the Schumann cycle that challenges the pianist in a few of the songs.  Her usual role was complicated by the need to supply music not just for a singer but for dance as well.

Laurence Lemieux

Laurence Lemieux, co-artistic director and co-founder of Coleman Lemieux & Compagnie (click image for more)

I mention Laurence Lemieux third only because of my own prejudices, coming to Dichterliebe as a lifelong accompanist of baritones (there’s one in my family) and as a pianist.  Her contribution in collaboration with the assembly of choreographic talent is perhaps the most remarkable part of the work, something genuinely new.

I found myself thinking of François Girard’s 32 Short Films About Glenn Gould, or Wallace Steven’s poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.

There’s so much going on at times –given that one could watch the piano player, the singer or the dancer—that I regret that I couldn’t take in the most physical, the most genuinely new part of the performance.  Meaning no disrespect to either Chung or Dobson, but what they did in Dichterliebe is not so very different from what they would likely do in a “normal” presentation of the cycle.  Lemieux’s part is so much newer, yet i couldn’t help regularly watching piano and singer.

I suppose that’s normal, but it means I am not competent to do more than ohh and ahh over the fascinating combinations, the variegated surface of this multi-faceted jewel.  Sometimes I felt pathos, other times exhilaration, and a few times, I laughed out loud.

There’s a kind of inter-disciplinary thing I thought I saw, when at one point Lemieux sneered “singers!”, ironically dissing the oh so serious Dobson.  She was coming from a modern place of commentary & in effect creating a gloss on the older piano-vocal text.  The audience –listeners and watchers alike—were surely divided, because often we didn’t know whether to watch or listen, and in the end we tried to do both.  Considering that there are three performers, the piece is astonishingly rich.

The program, to be repeated Thursday Oct 11th through Saturday Oct 13th, also includes Dobson’s presentation of some of the songs from Schubert’s Schwanengesang (literally “Swan Song”) accompanied by Chung, and Chung playing solo in the soulful last movement from Schumann’s C major Fantasy as a kind of overture.  The work bears repeated watching.  I know I’d have a better appreciation if I saw it again.

http://www.colemanlemieux.com/ for more info about the artists & a link to buy tickets.

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Thanksgiving and sanity

Posted on October 8, 2012 by barczablog

According to the proponents of Positive Psychology –a relatively new movement in mental health—gratitude is useful if not essential to mental health.

Martin Seligman, author of Authentic Happiness, is one of the key figures in this movement that seeks to place the focus on psychology on understanding the nature of happiness and wellness instead of the usual focus in dysfunction.  This feels especially apt after watching Dr Falke floating above the stage in the COC Die Fledermaus, a community of unhappy people unable to find or even define “happiness,” seeking solace in pleasure.

One might ask, to quote Peggy Lee: “is that all there is”? 

While i want to be respectful of Peggy Lee (wherever she might be) and the people who wrote this song, the sentiment “Is that all there is” is about as far away from my sensibility as you can get.  The subtext for this song is a kind of fundamental boredom.  I love the circus, and would never say “is that all there is to the circus”.   Even when it’s not life and death, artists put themselves on the line, and it’s a beautiful thing: so long as you take a moment to notice.

So while I like a good drink as much as the next boy/girl (although I prefer beer and single malts to champagne), lots of people are listening to Seligman, an aging population seeking the meaning of life in something more enduring than food, drink & real estate investments.  Or in other words, if that’s all there is –the material pleasures of life– then of course, eat drink and be merry: because you’re already dead, not really living.

I’d like to think that we don’t just say “thank you” because it’s good for us.  I have no doubt that gratitude is healthy, just as I have no doubt that a sense of entitlement (being bored and expecting to be entertained)or perpetual rage (a nasty variation on entitlement) can’t be healthy.  Saying thank you, being grateful and feeling it from the bottom of one’s heart is a way of being alive, of knowing you are connected to something.  Do it at first because Dr Seligman tells you, as a pathway to rediscover your humanity.  But ultimately do it because you mean it.

So please, don’t think I am doing this –what follows in this space—because it might lower my blood pressure or win me brownie points with The Man Upstairs.  I am actually inclined to gratitude because I think it’s fundamental, the one sacrament from which all others proceed.  I never feel more alive than when i am connected to the sacred fire of artists creating, the colours and sounds of life.

I am alive, and that’s a miracle.  I take in the beauty around me, also miraculous.  Whether it’s sitting in a concert hall or in the presence of one of my kids, gratitude is the pathway to the miraculous.

With that in mind I am going to say thank you for a few blessings (among many) from this past year, in no particular order.

  • Stewart Goodyear…  I don’t know where he’s been all my life, and no we don’t have a romantic relationship even if it may seem that way.  But for me he burst on the scene with his plan to play all the Beethoven sonatas in a day.  I spent a good chunk of the late spring and summer playing Beethoven sonatas, measuring the feat by trying it myself (haha NOT nearly as well). As a result I changed the way I look at these pieces, as well as the music of many other people.  I am not sure about the way we currently program concerts, except that the newness of his Marathon was one of the most exciting things I’ve ever encountered on the concert stage.  His set of Beethoven sonatas –that I first encountered with a pair of youtube performances of the Hammerklavier sonata—are very original, and as far as I can tell, the best versions out there.  I wish more people would discover these, and I am eager to hear what else Goodyear might play in the years to come.  He’s so young,…!
    Thank you Stewart.
  • Against the Grain Theatre..  I like the excitement they brought to their projects.  Their La boheme in the Tranzac (a pub) gave me a word that I have been over-using.  I apologize for this –it’s a bad habit—that once I latch onto a new concept I beat it to death, looking for it everywhere.  Buzz has been my word for 2012.  Who managed to create buzz?  AtG didn’t just do it, they created the template, with interesting ideas in new places, with breathless audiences jammed into tight spaces.  Other people are now imitating them, but even so, they’re the prototype, and I am sure people continue to watch their every move.  Thanks for making theatre exciting.
  • Robert Lepage… Some people want to reduce him to his Vegas achievements, to see his Ring through that very narrow lens.  I am eager to see his production of Thomas Adès’ operatic setting of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, coming up in a High Definition broadcast in November.  I love that he challenges us with new ideas.  Thank you Robert for refusing to do it the way everyone wants you to do it.

    Tempete

    One of the flamboyant designs from Robert Lepage’s production of Ades’s opera The Tempest.

  • I am thinking again of Glenn Gould, whose 80th birthday was celebrated recently, 30 years after his untimely passing.  He’s still my prototype for the iconoclast, the daring artist.  Hunched over his piano he looks all wrong playing.  He fled the concert stage for whatever reason, to the privacy of the studio.  He makes it okay to be a nerdy artist.  Thank you Glenn wherever you are.
  • David Warrack is a national treasure.  I can’t possibly sum him up, but will only speak to the tiny window I have on his life, a man who has written 100 musicals or more, who conducts classical music, plays jazz, leads my church choir/plays the organ with no more effort than a walk in the park on Sunday morning –speaking of doing nice things to keep you sane—and is a brilliant teacher and mentor. Being around him is a chance to learn something, if not through a well-delivered anecdote, then through the example of his gentle musicianship.    Thank you David.

And thank you anyone kind enough to read my rantings in this space.  If you’re here reading: THANK YOU.

Posted in Personal ruminations & essays | 2 Comments

The bat came back

Posted on October 8, 2012 by barczablog

The bat came back: from the dead that is. Forgive me for invoking one of my very favorite animated cartoons (and Richard Condie). I said BAT not CAT.  

After many mediocre bats –productions of Die Fledermaus from the Canadian Opera Company over the years—my expectations were low.  While I expected an improvement this time I still was thinking of a frothy bit of fun.

The COC gave us much more than that.

Prominent among the resurrections is the laughing song.  While there are many versions, the one that has stayed with me longest in some respects summed up my low opinion of the operetta, namely Florence Foster Jenkins’ laughable laughing song.  She amuses me, ha ha ha. 

Ambur Braid has brought Adele back from the dead, banishing Florence once and for all because of the way the song is staged.  It’s full of defiance and could almost be sub-titled Adele Occupies the Stairway (Wall Street being a bit too far away for her).

Richard Bradshaw

Richard Bradshaw (photo by Michael Cooper)

I am reminded of Richard Bradshaw’s stated objective, which was to offer the best theatre in Toronto.  I’ve always found the goal impressive for its audacity.  For much of the past decade he did just that in a very competitive theatre town (until his untimely death…).  Fledermaus is in that tradition: tight, challenging, and easily the best thing I’ve seen on a stage in 2012, in a year that also included Einstein on the Beach.

I find myself unable to get certain moments out of my head.

The fluidity of the sets ties in to the psychological theme underpinning Christopher Alden’s interpretation.  Dr Falke is like Freud, his swinging pocket-watch a talisman of hypnosis and wish-fulfillment.  When the walls and floor (designed by Allen Moyer) are ripped asunder as if by an earthquake, Rosalinde’s bedroom –where we begin the adventures—is problematized.  Where are we?  Inside Rosalinde’s head, I would suppose.

The locations in the story itself are wonderful departure points for Alden’s symbolism, considering that we go from bedroom –site of futility & frustration—to a wild party, and from there to a jail, and maybe more futility one might fear, especially because once in the jail we see Rosalinde’s bed again.  Or did they make a break-through? If we don’t get a happily-ever-after I’m pleased precisely because it’s not a glibly superficial ending to this problematic tale.  But Rosalinde and Eisenstein appear to have more clarity, more insight into themselves and one another.  Falke/Freud couldn’t ask for any more than that, nor could a couple going for counselling.

I’m noticing this partly because I’ve been playing with a young child, noticing how we erect walls in our lives that children don’t perceive unless taught to do so.  The limitations are in our own heads, as are the solutions to our self-imposed problems .

And identity is just as fluid in this world, among so many travesties.  In addition to Orlofsky –the only one who’s actually scripted that way—Alden (aided by costume designer Constance Hoffman) populates the stage with a world of ambiguities.  There’s Frank, played by James Westman, gradually showing us another side of himself at the party, in a lovely dress.  So too with several nameless figures in the chorus.  We’re in a place where you can be anything you dream of.  It’s a place where –as Frank seems to demonstrate—one may not even know who one is until one lets loose: to find oneself.  This is not in any way a portrayal that would ridicule travesty, but rather a place of great dignity, that seems to honour and respect difference & exploration.  Dr Falke’s laboratory –that I alluded to in my earlier review—is a highly sympathetic place, and one that is empowering even if one of the individuals finding himself –Frosch—is himself a colossal threat to everyone else.

While I suspect some may not have liked the ending, I think it made great sense precisely because there is no neat answer.  Frosch is the dark underside of human nature, and unlike the bat, is the real nightmare lurking in the dark.  I was happy to laugh it all off at the end because there is no simple answer.    Jan Pohl as Frosch includes a twitchy series of uncontrollable body parts in his movement vocabulary, echoing what we saw in Dr Strangelove (creepy! but funny).

I’m looking forward to seeing the other Adele in this production, namely Mireille Asselin, and having another listen to everyone else.

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The Gehry-Mirvish Legacy will not be outsourced culture

Posted on October 7, 2012 by barczablog

It’s counter-intuitive for Torontonians.  We’ve become a bit shell-shocked with all the new condos.  More condos must be bad.

Someone knocking down a theatre? surely a bad person.

Mirvish Gehry project

The Mirvish Gehry project for King St in Toronto

If anyone in Toronto has the right to knock down a theatre to build a money-maker instead it’s David Mirvish.  Mirvish is the son of Honest Ed Mirvish, the proprietor of Honest Ed’s, and the owner-rescuer of the Royal Alexandra and the Old Vic in London.

No, I don’t mean that after one generation of philanthropy we can now allow David to stomp on what his father has done and reap some profits.  Nope.  I think those who made knee-jerk reactions against David Mirvish and his announced plan to demolish the Princess of Wales Theatre should look again.

There are several reasons I’m inclined to trust David Mirvish.

First of all, I am no fan of the Princess of Wales Theatre.  Like so many other big theatres in Toronto it’s a glorified Walmart, housing imported products from abroad.  Okay, maybe the PoW is not a dollar store, but its wares are essentially outsourced culture.  Where a Walmart is full of cheap goo-gahs made in China or India, a theatre like the PoW fill its seats employing foreign creative talent, occasionally putting a few of our actors to work.  But I don’t like a theatre presenting American musicals produced abroad to compete with Canadian theatres, because I fear there are simply too few dollars from consumers to easily absorb this kind of import.

That Mirvish proposes to put up an art gallery on the site is a wonderful bonus, as it says in the project press release:

The new 60,000‐square‐foot Mirvish Collection will be a destination for viewing contemporary abstract art from the exemplary collection of Audrey and David Mirvish. The collection was built over 50 years, beginning when David Mirvish ran a globally recognized art gallery in Toronto from 1963‐1978. The Mirvish Collection comprises works by leading artists including Jack Bush, Anthony Caro, Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Larry Poons, David Smith and Frank Stella. The nonprofit Mirvish Collection, which will be free and open to the public, will present curated artist‐focused exhibitions that leverage the depth of the Mirvish holdings and will be available to other institutions. It will also host traveling exhibitions.

Wow…

King St

Podium, Courtesy of Gehry International, Inc. (click to read feature on the development in an OCADU publication)

There’s so much to it, including The Gallery, those gorgeous buildings (that Gehry called “sculptures”), and “a new multi‐floor facility for the OCAD University Public Learning Centre for Visual Art, Curatorial Studies and Art History, including exhibition galleries, studios, seminar rooms, and a public lecture hall.”

I believe both Mirvish and Gehry are looking at their legacy, the way they’ll be remembered.  This could be a bit like the Rockefeller Centre in Toronto, a natural nexus for the local culture.

I am a bit concerned about the infrastructure questions; do we have the wherewithal to take care of those additional thousands of people plunked down in the middle of the city?  Are there schools for the children, adequate services for the new condo-dwellers who will arrive?  I suppose there will have to be, won’t there (and people who know a whole lot more about such things will certainly think about it).  These people will suddenly represent some of the missing bodies in the seats that kept the PoW from being profitable, so Mirvish will share his profits with his (former) competitors, although I suppose many will go straight to the Royal Alex.

I have a very good feeling about this, a project unlike anything I can recall in the GTA.  We have had some lovely institutional construction recently (the AGO, the ROM, the RCM, several charming buildings at the U of T).  But a big gorgeous building from an entrepreneur, expressing faith in the city without benefit of a fund-raising drive or government help? That’s unheard of.

Mirvish believes in us.  Gehry believes in us.

And so do I.

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Fledermaus: just like our century

Posted on October 5, 2012 by barczablog

No matter how well they may sing, Johann Strauss Jr’s operetta Die Fledermaus requires its singers to act.  Although the music may be irresistible, I haven’t fully surrendered to any of the Fledermice I’ve seen.  No wonder it was usually done in English in the past (if memory serves: as it was a long time ago), as the skills were probably beyond the casts assembled here.

It’s therefore a great pleasure to be able to proclaim the excellence of the Canadian Opera Company production that opened tonight at the Four Seasons Centre.  It’s deep and it’s funny, it feels a bit decadent, and has undertones of madness & violence: just like our century.  Director Christopher Alden rips off the surface of this comedy of class disparity, exposing the disturbing psychological underpinnings of that wild & wacky period between the rise of Freud on the one hand, and the onset of fascist madness on the other.   While these images have been seen before, Alden, working with set designer Allen Moyer and Costume Designer Constance Hoffman, give us just enough gravitas to make these deeply satisfying laughs.  This is the best production from the COC in awhile, and possibly the best thing I’ve ever seen on the Four Seasons Centre stage.

Moyer dangles the key image above the stage, namely a pocket watch.  The watch signifies time of course, where the chronological framework of the story sets up a dreamlike assumption of new identities.  We’ve seen this sort of thing in stories such as Cinderella, where the dream represents a kind of wish-fulfilment, ended again by the arbitrary passage of time.

The watch signifies at least two other things.  Eisenstein carries a pocket watch, which plays an important part in the intrigue.  But for me the most powerful –and additional –meaning Moyer and Alden find in the watch is the association to psychiatry.

Are there bats in heaven? there ought to be. Michael Schade as Gabriel von Eisenstein and Laura Tucker as Prince Orlofsky (Photo: Michael Cooper)

Alden says in his program note (although it’s beautifully clear in the staging) that “Dr Falke seems a lot like Dr Freud as he invites Rosalinde, Eisenstein, Adele and Frank to the dreamy libidinous party”.  Falke wields his watch at key moments even though his control is as unnecessary as the superficial plot mechanisms Wagner uses of a love potion (Tristan und Isolde) or a curse (the Ring cycle).  We are watching a story about dreams & wish-fulfillment, where the good doctor helps each of these people explore their hopes & expectations.  No wonder, then, that Alden employs more bats than the Toronto Blue Jays, exploiting the overtones of something nightmarish and scary to probe deeply into this pleasure-seeking milieu.

But don’t get the wrong idea.  I would say it’s Constance Hoffman’s costumes as much as Moyer’s sets that set up this story, pulling it all into a wonderful parable about repression and truth.    Aided by the most impressive performance from the COC chorus since War & Peace, we visit a laboratory of dreams, where all our modern ills are grown for study or perhaps amusement.  I hope I haven’t given too much away, because the show is full of surprises, a few of which I stumbled upon via social media.

There are several wonderful portrayals with two upon which the entire evening rests.

Ambur Braid as Adele as “Olga”, directed by Christopher Alden, set designed by Allen Moyer, costume designed by Constance Hoffman (Photo: Chris Hutcheson)

In the first scene Tamara Wilson & Ambur Braid are instantly real, their German dialogue compelling as we’re instantly plunged into their dramas.  Although the stage will fill with personnel and imagery, we never really lose our interest in them.  While there will be diversions throughout, it’s their show through and through.

I wasn’t at all surprised by the excellence Tamara Wilson brought to Rosalinde, a young woman with a wonderful voice that can be powerful or delicate, and with a genuine flair for comedy.  But Wilson was matched by her maid Adele as portrayed by Ambur Braid.  I’d been expecting to enjoy this portrayal, but was not prepared for how fully she inhabited the maid- who- becomes –Olga.  While I’d seen the photos in the publicity, I was unprepared for the power (and comedy) of her transformation from the ugly duckling of Act I into the seductive Olga in Act II   Her rendition of the laughing song had a delightfully angry edge to it.

Jan Pohl as Frosch and James Westman as Frank (photo Michael Cooper)

But the excellence doesn’t end there.  Michael Schade brought his usual fluid German and effortless singing to Eisenstein.  James Westman was a suitably embarrassed Frank, Peter Barrett, a constant presence (especially when he was hanging above the stage) as Dr Falke, and Jan Pohl, able to steal the show whenever he wanted to as Frosch the jailer; he was a troubling spectre of what was to come, giving the part a decidedly brown-shirted aura.

Laura Tucker’s Prince Orlofsky was among the most successful among several examples of performed travesty, on a stage full of ambiguities.  Sets blended one room with the next, costumes were flipped off or pulled on at will, aiding Alden in creating the sense of subjectivity & dreams.

Conductor Johannes Debus & the COC Orchestra are their usual excellent selves, ably supporting a reading that never let the serious moments onstage hijack this joyful score.  We never forget for a moment that this work is all about fun & enjoyment.

I am expecting Die Fledermaus to be a huge hit, and look forward to seeing it again with  Mireille Asselin who assumes the role of Adele for half the remaining performances.

Further information

Tamara Wilson as Rosalinde, Michael Schade as Eisenstein and Ambur Braid (kneeling) as Adele (Photo: Chris Hutcheson)

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10 Questions for Arthur Wenk

Posted on October 4, 2012 by barczablog

Arthur Wenk is so multi-faceted he’s what would once have been called a Renaissance Man. I wrote about Wenk earlier this year in connection with the sesquicentennial of the birth of Claude Debussy: because among so many other achievements, Wenk is an authority on Debussy. But that’s merely one feather in a cap full of achievements.

Art holds a doctorate in musicology from Cornell University, masters degrees in psychology, information science and music theory, and an honours degree in mathematics and music from Amherst College. As a musicologist, Dr. Wenk taught in universities in the United States and Canada, notably the University of Pittsburgh and Université Laval, where he published two books in French. As a mathematics teacher, Art taught calculus and Advanced Placement Statistics at St. Andrew’s College in Aurora, Ontario.

Currently Art pursues careers as Oakville psychotherapist with Wilson Counselling Associates, Toronto church musician (at Jubilee United Church), and mystery writer.

In an autumn when, in addition to all those activities and the occasional lecture, Wenk will be busy playing a lot of organ recitals, I ask him ten questions: five about himself and five about being an organ virtuoso.

1) Which of your parents do you resemble (what s your nationality / ethnic background)?

Arthur Wenk's parents

Arthur Wenk’s parents

I’ll let you judge resemblances. My father’s family was German, my mother English. Dad compiled an extensive genealogy that included a witch burned in Salem, Massachusetts in the 17th century. The photos in the background show my Dad atop Machu Picchu and my mother with a llama in Peru. My photo was taken on Mount Washington in New Hampshire’s White Mountains.

Arthur Wenk

Arthur Wenk

2) what is the BEST thing / worst thing about being an organist?

The worst thing about being an organist, throughout my career, has been competing with conversation during the Sunday morning prelude. I thought I’d have to suffer this annoyance indefinitely until, with the advent of a new organ at Jubilee, it occurred to us to do away with the prelude and replace it with a series of evening organ recitals. This has resulted in a joyous liberation!

3) who do you listen to or watch?

I regularly read The New Yorker magazine, watch “Big Bang Theory,” and listen to the novels of Carl Hiaasen on my iPod, along with podcasts of CBC “Ideas” and “Vinyl Café.” I see as many movies as I can, and have enjoyed lecturing on film at Jubilee for the past two seasons.

4) what ability or skill do you wish you had, that you don’t have?

I might have been unwilling to answer that question in the past, but now I’m thoroughly at ease with my limitations while continuing to admire the strengths and accomplishments of others who do things I couldn’t begin to do.

5) When you’re just relaxing (and not working) what is your favorite thing to do?

I read and read. When I came to Canada I thought I should become acquainted with the two dozen novels that any Canadian has read. It took some doing to put that list together, but it began a major project. I mean, how can you read just one book by Robertson Davies or Margaret Atwood? Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon set me off on another large-scale project. Between project books I read murder mysteries and work the New York Times crossword puzzles.

Five more about being an organ virtuoso

1) How does programming and playing the organ challenge you?

Edwin H Lemare

Edwin H Lemare

Since becoming inspired by the career of Edwin H. Lemare I have explored a new repertoire, including challenging organ works by Widor and Vierne and transcriptions of orchestral works, pieces I never would have learned as a church organist.

2) what do you love about playing the organ as a church musician and in concert?

My church organ playing now consists of a three-minute prelude, a two-minute offertory, and a three-minute postlude. Within that narrow compass I enjoy presenting a wide repertoire of what might be called sacred organ music. Our new Phoenix organ has led me into a new career as concert organist, and between Sunday evening recitals and Thursday noon recitals, I shall be playing fourteen different programs this season. I spent twenty years concertizing as a pianist, but playing organ recitals represents new territory.

3) Do you have a favourite piece for organ that you play or that you like to hear?

The new organ at Jubilee has led me to relearn pieces I haven’t touched for nearly fifty years: the Liszt “Ad nos” Fantasy and the Dupré Prelude and Fugue in G Minor. I have also enjoyed many hours trying to master the Final of the Vierne Symphony No.1. At Christmas I love returning to the Bach Canonic Variations on “Vom Himmel hoch” and his five-part fugue on the Magnificat.

Art also described his greatest triumph as an organist

When I was a graduate student at Cornell, Karel Husa, our composer and conductor, directed the Buffalo Symphony and the Cornell University Glee Club in a performance of the Janacek Glagolithic Mass, a work that includes two challenging organ solos. At the rehearsal, when it became evident that the local organist engaged for the performance simply wasn’t up to the job, Mr. Husa called me over and said, “Art, can you play this?” “Sure,” I said, with the arrogance of youth. The building contained a room with a practice organ, so I spent an hour learning the movements in question and that evening came out of the choir to perform them. For years I held the experience as a treasured memory. Now that I am older than the hapless local organist, unable to deal with the complex rhythms of a twentieth-century idiom, I realize that I could as easily be he, and no longer feel so smug.

4) How do you relate to the organ as a modern man?

I don’t. As I play virtually all of Bach’s organ music I relate to him as one might to a beloved uncle. Endeavouring to “channel” Edwin Lemare, I put myself back in the early years of the 20th century. And performing the virtuoso music of the French Romantics puts me in touch with a tradition before the invention of electronics and recordings. I like to imagine living in an era in which hearing music meant that someone was actually performing it at that moment.

5) Is there anyone out there who you particularly admire, and who has influenced your playing and your thinking about the organ?

Charles Tournamire

Organist Charles Tournemire

My teacher at Cornell, Donald R. M. Patterson, acquainted me with French Baroque music, which I have only recently begun to explore at length thanks to the Phoenix instrument. Hugh Giles, who taught me Franck, explained that since he had studied with Tournemire who had studied with Franck, I was getting it “straight from the horse’s mouth, by way of the colt.” Vernon Gotwals put me in touch with Baroque performance practice. I greatly admire the performances of Gordon Turk, whose CDs have helped to guide me into new areas of repertoire.

Wenk also recounts his earliest memory of an organ.

The instrument at our church had three indicator lights: white, meaning that the blower was on; green, for the crescendo pedal; and red, for sforzando, or full organ. On Easter, at the last stanza of “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today,” all three lights would be on, a moment of surpassing musical excitement. Even today I feel an exhilaration at the sheer sonic power of full organ.

~~~~~

Arthur Wenk’s autumn is a busy one:

  • Concert dates:
    “JOSEPH” Concerts (Jubilee Organ Sunday Evening Program Hour) (Sundays at 7:30 p.m.), free admission at Jubilee United Church:

    • 30 September
    • 28 October
    • 2 December
    • 20 January
    • 17 March
    • 14 April
    • 19 May
  • Music at Midday (Thursdays at Noon), free admission at Jubilee United Church:
    • 11 October
    • 8 November
    • 13 December
    • 10 January
    • 14 February
    • 7 March
    • 4 April
    • 9 May
  • Lectures:
    • November 4: “Salome, Jokanaan and the Organization of the Opera,” Toronto Opera Club, Edward Johnson Building, University of Toronto, 2:00 p.m.
    • November 14, “Singin’ in the Rain,” Jubilee Lecture Series, 40 Underhill Drive, Don Mills, 7:30 p.m.
    • November 21, “From the Calliope to The Mighty Wurlitzer,” Jubilee Lecture Series, 40 Underhill Drive, Don Mills, 1:00 p.m
Posted in Interviews | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Safe asset: Kaffe Fassett

Posted on October 3, 2012 by barczablog

Today I escaped from the urban rat race in the company of hundreds of fans of designer Kaffe Fassett.  We’d gone where the GPS won’t go, somewhere in the vicinity of Brantford Ontario.

Fassett is the Mick Jagger of the quilting world.  I suppose that’s a bit of  an oxymoron, considering how quiet that community is.  In other words, if anyone had thrown their underwear at the stage it would only happen because the owner wanted to show off a clever design.

Kaffe FassettBut our quilt and knit rockstar is an extraordinarily humble man, genuinely interested in reaching out to his audience.  It wasn’t just a book signing, not when the book is Fassett’s autobiography, My Life in Colour.  I had no idea he’d be such a flamboyant speaker, holding us spellbound with tales of his fascinating life & times, his creativity, and several funny stories.

And for what it’s worth, the title of this piece is his mnemonic to explain how to pronounce his name.

Although I’d wondered at one point before I heard the fluidity of his delivery whether there were any ghost writers in the picture (and apparently there was one for one of Fassett’s earlier books), once i saw Fassett take the stage, as charismatic as a talk-show host, there were no doubts in my mind. The artist is also a wonderful writer.

Fassett is already known for his work in several disciplines: painting, knitting, fabric design, quilting, patchwork…. And while I would suggest he add writer to the list of occupations, he’s been doing this for quite some time in several books.  The only thing different this time out is that we’re reading about Fassett’s life rather than his quilt patterns or his designs.

As the author himself puts it, My Life in Colour is a “narcissistic trip down memory lane”.  He said that with a straight face, as the entire place roared with laughter.

In the book and in his talk we hear how Fassett became Fassett.

  • early life as a visual artist, working in an academic context, and then his gradual retreat from that context
  • decision to go to England
  • discovery of the wonderful colours found in the wool in a Scottish yarn store
  • learning how to knit from a woman he accosted on a train

He spoke eloquently to some of his key philosophical preoccupations, procedural preferences representing his beliefs as surely as they are etched in his work.

Fassett feels very strongly that colour is instinctive, and was revolted by the systematic approach to colour in school.  As he put it, “when they brought out the colour wheel I said ‘get thee behind me’”.  Fassett is strongly anti-formulaic, against the use of systems, and preferring instinct to a scientific approach to colour.

This meant that his approach to painting began as very understated, with so little colour early on that Fassett became frustrated.   Or as he put it “beige clothes, beige skin, beige hair…”  And he pulled a face, accompanied by a roar of laughter.

By going into yarns and knitting, where he could happily employ bold colours, it was as though a restraint had been removed from the artist & his work.  Fassett would then take his bold designs to Vogue where they were quickly acclaimed as the most original approach to knitting that had been seen in a generation.

As Fassett acknowledges, his work was “wrong” in terms of following correct procedure.  In this sense he’s a genuine crossover artist, bringing a fresh philosophy to a moribund discipline screaming for something new.
Or as he put it, “’It would look like cat vomit in the wind all higgledy piggledy.”  Fassett showed us the gorgeous front, then the slightly messy back.  Only a total purist would object, as –naturally—Vogue were thrilled and chose to highlight his work.

My Life in Colour tells us a great deal about Kaffe Fassett the man & his process, illuminated with illustrations and glosses worthy of a poem by William Blake.  The book is as consistently beautiful as his work.

My Life in Colour is available in stores such as “Red Red Bobbin”.

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