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Volume 23 Issue 1 - September 2017

  • Text
  • September
  • Toronto
  • Jazz
  • Orchestra
  • Musical
  • October
  • Recording
  • Composer
  • Symphony
  • Theatre
In this issue: a look at why musicians experience stage fright, and how to combat it; an inside look at the second Kensington Market Jazz Festival, which zeros in on one of Toronto’s true ‘music villages’; an in-depth interview with Elisa Citterio, new music director of Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra; and The WholeNote’s guide to TIFF, with suggestions for the 20 most musical films at this year’s festival. These and other stories, in our September 2017 issue of the magazine!

SMALL SCREEN Gustavo

SMALL SCREEN Gustavo Dudamel (left) and Gael García Bernal CUT-THROAT CLASSIC: MOZART IN THE JUNGLE LYDIA PEROVIĆ These days, stories about classical music are almost completely absent from television programming – which is why it’s all the more astonishing that an American series with protagonists who are musicians, and plots revolving around their work as musicians, has been, since its modest debut in 2014, gaining prominence. By Season 3, Amazon.com’s online-only TV series Mozart in the Jungle has accumulated several awards, a growing following – and critical acclaim nearing consensus. New charismatic music director takes over the reins at a large New York City orchestra. Board of directors gears up for a rebranding but the mandate is at stake. Young musician joins a music section full of veterans set in their ways. The old music director is not quite ready to disappear into the background. He is, in fact, about to get into a messy affair with the orchestra’s CEO. Meanwhile, opening nights. Fundraising events. Tour. Lock-out. Drugs, prescription and other. Sex. Rivalry and comradeship. Big chances and hard blows. And music: a lot of it, in almost every scene. I am of course talking about an Amazon Original series Mozart in the Jungle, a Golden Globe-winning show which shines the light on the lives of professional musicians as no other TV show has. Classical music and television – still the most powerful of all media – have completely parted ways in Canada and the US over the last decade. For Ontarians, the only chance of coming across any opera and classical music on TV is the public francophone TFO channel, which occasionally interviews artists and transmits recorded performances. The effects of the total withdrawal of the national public broadcaster CBC TV from covering art music, literature, visual arts and dance is for the sociologists of the future to measure and for us to bear. (Papers are not doing much better: our largest dailies’ coverage of classical music is occasional at best.) Classical musicians are permanently absent from TV fiction as well. Could the Looney Tunes cartoons have been the last time that classical music was present in broad TV mainstream? Which is why it’s all the more astonishing that an American series with protagonists who are musicians and plots revolving around their work as musicians has been, since its modest debut in 2014, gaining prominence, awards, a growing following, and, by Season 3, critical acclaim nearing consensus. Real-life musicians who’ve appeared in cameos include Joshua Bell, Emanuel Ax, Gustavo Dudamel, Lang Lang and Alan Gilbert. With season 4 in the works, the list is likely to grow. It’s hard to believe that the series has not come out of the traditional TV: it’s an Amazon.com production (the online retailer is also a TV production company) and, like shows on Netflix, can be watched online only – by episode, or entire seasons. It’s a new and fast-growing model of TV financing and consumption; and yet the old – classical music – seems to have found a place in it. The show’s creators – Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman, Will Graham and Paul Weitz – originally based it on oboist Blaire Tindall’s 2005 memoir, Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music, but the show, centred on a charismatic young conductor, an established older conductor, an administrator of a large NYC orchestra and a handful of musicians, quickly acquired a life – and wacky plots – of its own. After a bumpy first season that was no stranger to stereotypes, 16 | September 2017 thewholenote.com

implausible plotting, iffy gender politics (men are the creators, women are administrators or young artists in need of mentoring), a sitcomlike take on the working life and even a ghost of Mozart speaking in a posh British accent, the show proceeded to improve at a steady pace. Season 3 has persuaded its most obdurate critics. The principals are now complex individuals, stories are well-researched, careers take more than one miraculous performance, women too are creators. So, if you still don’t have the habit of looking for TV online and have missed the first three seasons entirely, now is a good time to catch up before Season 4 is released early this December. Season 3, its best so far, is also when the only Canadian in the show’s permanent writer-producer pool joined in. Multi-talented screenwriter and actor Susan Coyne is probably best known across North America as the co-creator of the 2003-06 Canadian TV series Slings and Arrows, a dramedy about theatre artists working at a Shakespearean festival much like Stratford and, should you poll the local TV critics, one of the best things ever to appear on TV. Slings accomplished what few TV creations dare try: it took a piece of highbrow culture – Shakespeare’s plays – and turned it into compelling television without dumbing any of it down. A corner of high culture, often accessible only to those who’d studied it and who tended to belong to the leisured classes, became the setting for a TV story about personal and professional intrigues of the working OPERA HOUSES OF SOUTH AMERICA PART 1 OF 2: PACIFIC SEABOARD APRIL 13 - 23, 2018 QUITO • LIMA • SANTIAGO DE CHILE ACCOMPANIED BY MAESTRO KERRY STRATTON Conductor and Music Director, Toronto Concert Orchestra www.torontoconcertorchestra.com PERFORMANCES BY ROMULO DELGADO Tenor and Multi-Instrumentalist www.romulodelgado.com Lola Kirke men and women who happen to be artists. Sounds familiar? Mozart in the Jungle is aiming exactly in that direction. The producers called Coyne before the work on the third season had begun, “out of the blue, but the next thing I knew I was flying to LA,” she explains when we meet to talk about her work on the show. Slings and Arrows is well known in TV and performing arts circles, and somebody must have connected the dots between it and MITJ. She had never been to LA before. “I found a very creative, slightly chaotic but wonderfully free-flowing kind of situation that I liked a lot; it’s not what I expected of LA television industry; it was more like working in the theatre.” She started as a writer but became a producer on the season – which is also a writing job. “Producers write all the time, work on all episodes, shaping stories, rewriting, tweaking scenes, and we’re to some extent involved in conversations about creative problems: you’re sometimes consulted about casting, for example,” she says. This isn’t Coyne’s first time writing about an orchestra: some years ago, she was asked to develop a Canadian show about a fledgling orchestra, but it didn’t make the production stage. “What we came up with was really good, but times being what they were, we couldn’t take it forward in Canada, and then both of us writers got busy with other projects. So, I have done some research into orchestras and I know how difficult it is to tell the story of an entire ensemble, plus the people backstage running the show. I think that telling a story through a small family of musicians, all of whom have their own issues, is the way to go about it. MITJ really honoured what’s unique about musicians, the physicality of the job, the fact that it’s like being an athlete.” And just like Slings, MITJ doesn’t make fun of people for doing what they do – they see being an oboist or a conductor or a composer as an absolutely worthwhile thing to do. “The show makes fun of them for their egos, and their neuroses. But they take it for granted that what they do matters.” Over 18 tours and musical events! Opera performances, instrument workshop, city tours, private string quartet concert, conductor’s comments, opera house tours, a winery visit and more... all included! BOOK BY SEPTEMBER 30 TH AND SAVE 0 PER PERSON. CALL 1.866.919.2111 TODAY! WWW.TOURINGWITHTHEMAESTRO.CA 1739 Lakeshore Road West, Mississauga, Ontario, L5J 1J4 905.855.1700 866.919.2111 | info@clarksontravel.ca TICO 50015708 thewholenote.com September 2017 | 17

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