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The Vancouver Symphony
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Music of Queen
Wed, October 5, 2022
8pm | Orpheum
MiG Ayesa
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For one night only, experience The Music of Queen like never before with the full power of the VSO. Including classic hits like Bohemian Rhapsody, Under Pressure, Somebody to Love, and We Will Rock You – don’t miss this high-energy rock symphony tribute to the legendary Freddie Mercury and one of Brit rock’s biggest bands. Featuring Brent Havens, Conductor MiG Ayesa, Vocals
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ARTS Harpsichordist Weimann likes orchestral company
by Charlie Smith
Organist and harpsichordist Alexander Weimann realizes that many people have misconceptions about baroque music. Because it thrived in the 17th and 18th centuries, he knows there’s a perception that it’s somehow dusty or old-fashioned.
In fact, the conductor of the Pacific Baroque Orchestra tells the Straight by phone that this early music is actually very exciting and, because it arose out of folk traditions, includes a great many dance songs.
“If people don’t know it, they really should take the opportunity to enjoy it, because I know that those terms—baroque and early—sometimes build a barrier where there shouldn’t be one,” Weimann tells the Straight by phone.
He describes the Pacific Baroque Orchestra as “pretty much” the only professional ensemble of its kind in Canada west of Toronto. On July 27, Weimann will lead the orchestra in the opening concert at this year’s Vancouver Bach Festival. It’s one of his four appearances at the festival.
Entitled Ebb and Flow, the concert will showcase the two Early Music Vancouver musicians-in-residence, violinist David Greenberg and keyboardist David McGuinness, along with Vancouver poet laureate Fiona Tinwei Lam. Ebb and Flow opens with the song cycle Silken Water, by Canadian composer Alasdair Maclean and based on Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry. In addition, the orchestra will perform German composer Georg Philipp Telemann’s Hamburger Ebb und Fluht, followed by George Frideric Handel’s Water Music, HWV 348.
“I think in this program with the poems that were chosen, it works particularly well to give us an idea of water as the force of nature but also as something that’s very musical in itself,” Weimann says.
He describes how the composers address the subject as “stunning”, with the Telemann dance pieces almost treating water as if it were an organism. “It’s very beautiful,” he declares.
Another highlight of this year’s festival will be the Pacific Baroque Orchestra’s interpretation of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Concerto for four harpsichords in A minor on August 5 at the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts. This will feature four harpsichordists—Weimann, McGuinness, Marco Vitale, and Christina Hutten—all playing instruments created by West Vancouver’s Craig Tomlinson based on a model built by Pascal Taskin in Paris in 1769.
The Munich-born Weimann explains that as a child, he learned the piano, and then in his early teenage years, a church organ became his instrument of choice.
“I was always fascinated by the harpsichord—which I would qualify as the closest sibling to the organ—but also a little deterred,” he admits.
That’s because he believes the harpsichord can sound a little mechanical if it’s in the wrong hands or if it’s not made properly.
He mustered up the courage to try the instrument in his early 20s and experienced a great deal of frustration for a long time. It wasn’t until he was in his late 20s that he could feel truly comfortable with it, that the harpsichord became an “expressive device and not just a machine”.
One of the advantages of the harpsichord is that it enables him to play with other musicians, whereas a church organ is a more solitary instrument.
“Orchestra music is so much fun, and the harpsichord was the vehicle for me to do that,” Weimann says. “That’s why I wanted to crack the nut, really.” g
Harpsichordist-organist Alexander Weimann. Photo by Alex Waterhouse-Hayward.
– Alexander Weimann
Early Music Vancouver presents the Vancouver Bach Festival from July 26 to August 6. Weimann and/or the Pacific Baroque Orchestra will perform in four concerts. For more information and tickets, visit earlymusic.bc.ca.
PRIDE Singer scrutinizes gender expectations for sopranos
by Charlie Smith
Over the past two years, singersongwriter Ellen Torrie thought a lot about gender assumptions placed on sopranos in opera and baroque music.
Torrie is a Montreal-based soprano, visual artist, and folk musician who prefers the pronouns they and them. According to Torrie, sopranos have traditionally been expected to ooze femininity while appearing conventionally attractive and desirable on-stage.
This is notwithstanding opera’s history of gender-bending over the centuries through so-called “trouser roles”, a.k.a. travesti, in which women wear pants while performing male roles.
“The feminine and masculine tropes are still so strict, regardless of the gender identity of the person playing them,” Torrie says. “So, I’m interested in projects that reframe narratives in opera and in early music— to smash heteronormative narratives in opera—which I think is the next step.
“The framework is there,” Torrie continues. “We already have been doing, essentially, drag in opera for centuries.”
Torrie and Montreal-based violist Marie Nadeau-Tremblay are the first members of Early Music Vancouver’s emerging-artists program. Torrie says that many younger baroque artists have a deep interest in gender representations in early music but adds that institutions presenting this art form have not been nearly so quick to adapt to reflect current society.
“The best part is that these emerging artists will be the industry in 20 years, so we will have that power to conceive the kind of stories we want to tell now,” Torrie says.
The musician views the pandemic as a period when many people stepped away from social conventions and confronted previously hidden aspects of themselves. For Torrie, isolation led to a “sort of reckoning” with gender identity.
“It felt very easy at the time and beautiful to discover these very different parts of me in that way,” Torrie continues. “But when I returned to the stage and when I returned to the industry of early music and of classical music, it just became that much more apparent, these gender expectations that are put, especially, on sopranos.”
The biggest one, the singer emphasizes, is to look a certain way on-stage.
“I think I’m looking forward with my colleagues to forging a new way forward in terms of what it means to be a soprano— and how FoC [feminine-of-centre] and identity are related but are also separate in a lot of ways,” Torrie says, “and how those gender associations can be harmful but can also be celebrated.”
Torrie will perform at two Vancouver Bach Festival concerts, including Armonico Tributo at Christ Church Cathedral on August 2. It will include EMV artist in residence and keyboardist David McGuinness and violinist Chloe Meyers in a program revealing how Scottish folk music seeped into the consciousness of 17th- and 18th-century European baroque composers.
“Folk singers are singing in what I would call democratized spaces—like public spaces—busking in cafés, in parks,” Torrie says. “Because of the context of our performance, we’re able to facilitate community music-making and community storytelling.”
Torrie likens this to the self-accompaniment that occurred in Renaissance salons. “So I’ve been learning baroque guitar to learn to self-accompany Renaissance and baroque music—and marry this aspect of folk music to Renaissance music.”
And that, Torrie adds, just might help bridge any class divides between devotees of folk and baroque music. g
Ellen Torrie wants to smash heteronormative narratives in opera. Photo by Petra Stauffer.
– Ellen Torrie
Early Music Vancouver’s Vancouver Bach Festival presents Armonico Tributo on August 2 at Christ Church Cathedral. On August 3, Ellen Torrie joins violist Marie Nadeau-Tremblay and theorbist Sylvain Bergeron in a Vancouver Bach Festival concert at Pyatt Hall in the VSO School of Music.
