Volume 29 Issue 5 | April & May 2024

in 1713 – Bach’s

in 1713 – Bach’s life is all these little tiny tidbits of information, right? So you kind of hope you’re gonna connect the dots with some vague sense of accuracy. There is a document that says the prince brought home so much music they had to have new shelves constructed in the library, and Bach made these harpsichord transcriptions of three or four of them. The prince was writing music too, and I think that was their way of studying them. And [Dieterich] Buxtehude too, in the realm of organ influences was huge. There’s a video of a program Tom Allen did recently with and for Sweetwater Music Festival. He calls it Bach’s Long Walk In the Snow – walking to Lubeck to hear Buxtehude play. He went in November, and the people he worked for said “Okay, you can go, but be back in time for the Christmas season” and he said he’d be gone for four weeks, and he stayed for three months … so there’s a nice sub-theme leading from Saturday to Sunday. Aaron James plays Buxtehude’s Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern in his organ recital, one of my favourite pieces of his. And Bach loved that chorale too. David Perlman can be reached at publisher@thewholenote.com AND ELSEWHERE Toronto Symphony Orchestra: You can get your Bach on in a few places this spring. The Toronto Symphony presents “Brilliant Bach,” a crowd-pleasing program with some of the concerti for multiple violins, including the Concerto for Two Violins & String Orchestra BWV 1043 and Concerto for Three Violins & String Orchestra BWV 1064R, as well as Brandenburg Concerto No.2 BWV 1047 and more. Jonathan Crow leads and plays solo violin. Wednesday, Apr 24 to Saturday, Apr 27 at 8pm, Roy Thomson Hall; Sunday, Apr 28 at 3pm, George Weston Recital Hall Trinity Bach on the GO: Increasingly it’s worth the trip to Hamilton, and the GO train is at your service, so why not consider a program planned there by the Trinity Bach Project, intriguing for its contextualization of J.S. Bach’s music. The concert includes Bach’s beautiful Motet Jesu, meine Freunde, but also pieces by those who influenced him, and those whom he influenced: motets by his predecessor Heinrich Schütz, and Monteverdi’s Cantate Domino, but also Anton Bruckner’s sacred motet Locus iste. Felix Deák offers selected movements of Suites Nos.1 & 2 for unaccompanied cello. Nicholas Nicolaidis conducts the chamber choir, and Aaron James is at the organ. Saturday, Apr 20, at 3pm St. John the Evangelist Church (Hamilton). Stephanie Conn PROFILE Andrew Burashko The Art of Timing Out ANDREW SCOTT During a particularly compelling moment in The Art of Time Ensemble’s recent performance, Dance to the Abyss: Music From The Weimar Republic, the ensemble, now in its final season, performed Cab Calloway’s Minnie the Moocher five times in a row. Utilizing a set of detailed instructions from a document titled Nazi Germany’s Dance Band Rules and Regulations, the ensemble uses each rendition to iteratively strip away the lifeblood and very essence of what makes that great 1931 song so paradigmatically part of the jazz of swing-era Harlem. In the Art of Time’s skilled musical hands, the song metamorphoses (and I mean this in the most Kafkaesque of ways) into something more Joseph Goebbels-approved propaganda, than Lennox Avenue swing. Far from being repetitive, the successive iterations exemplify the adage death by 1,000 cuts; the ten rules gradually purge any vestige of Black, Jewish and American influence from a piece that the Nazis would have classified as “degenerate art.” In many ways, the piece epitomized the sort of work that only The Art of Time DAVID LEYES Andrew Burashko Ensemble could successfully pull off. Programmed immediately before the show’s intermission, the selection evoked a set of conflicting emotions – darkly funny, of course, but also horrifyingly revelatory of how easily a vibrant musical form could be, and was, co-opted for nefarious fascistic purposes. But conflicting emotions are the point. Dance to the Abyss is like so much of the work that Art of Time, under the able leadership of pianist and Artistic Director Andrew Burashko, has done with consistent aplomb over its 25-year history. It is a performance-based challenge to the audience, designed to make one both listen with intentionality, and think. “One of the things that I’ve been most interested in these last 25 years is to offer as mixed and eclectic a program as possible,” states Burashko, reflecting upon the expanse of work that the group has done since its inception in 1998: pairing the compositions of contemporary American jazz pianist Joey Calderazzo with the lieder of Richard Strauss; reimagining Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with a cast of musicians comprised of this country’s finest jazz, classical, and pop players; or finally, the ensemble’s upcoming May 2024 tribute to Joni Mitchell in 26 | April & May 2024 thewholenote.com

Dance to the Abyss: L-R: Andrew Burashko, Drew Jurecka, Andrew Downing, Lydia Munchinsky, Nathan Hiltz, Kelsley Grant, Kris Maddigan, Kevin Turcotte, Larry Larson. Text as displayed is from Czech/Canadian fiction writer Joseph Škvorecký’s story “Eine Kleine Jazzmusik”, published in 1966. Both Sides Now. Fusion, hybridity and a purposeful attempt to reside in the musical margins, defying classification, have been the raison d’etre for both Art of Time, and Burashko for a quarter century. JOHN LAUENER Minnie the Moocher written and performed by band leader, composer and singer Cabell "Cab" Calloway III, earned him the nickname "The Hi De Hi De Hi Man" based on his scatting in the song. traditional program notes. How does one convey the context and the story behind the music through the music itself? “How does one make it both rigorously historically accurate, and compelling enough to offer audiences an entry point into the incredible 400 years of history and music that we today call classical?” wonders Burashko. That question, coming from the Art of Time’s director in 2024, is, of course, rhetorical. Presenting challenging, disparate music to audiences in a cohesive manner that combines dramaturgy, spoken word, humour, historical narration and stylistic intersection is exactly the sort of thing that the pianist and his ensemble have long since figured out how to do. A big part of that, and of the Art of Time’s longevity and success more generally, is defying the strict performance practices that reigned supreme in classical music during the 20th century. “When the Art of Time started,” states Burashko, “the idea of someone talking and breaking through the fourth wall was almost never done. But I have always wanted to speak to, engage with, and entertain the audience; I have had no interest in the ‘this is our offering, take it or leave it’ approach to concert presentation.” The swamp of human desire: Burashko garnered an initial reputation at age 17, when he made his debut with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra as a classical pianist of note, immersed in the standard concertizing repertoire that the role demands. As he explained to me, however, he soon became interested in “exploring where high art, for lack of a better term, intersects with popular culture.” Many previous Art of Time presentations have mined this intersection – Burashko cites Igor Stravinsky’s Ebony Concerto, which the Russian composer wrote for Woody Herman’s First Herd, or Dmitri Shostakovich’s Jazz Orchestra Suites. But it is Berlin’s cabaret scene of the late 1920s in Dance to the Abyss that perhaps best exemplifies this fusion. “I was always fascinated with the richness of that scene” Burashko states. “I love Kurt Weill, Erwin Schulhoff and the composers of that era. Plus, the Dadaists like Kurt Schwitters, writers such as Franz Kafka and Thomas Mann, and the Berlin Cabaret which contributed to what at the time was a swamp of unfettered human desire.” The challenge here, as with any Art of Time show, is how to navigate the swamp rather than just describe it, especially when you eschew Dismantling: Whether Art of Time was a harbinger of change or the beneficiary of fortuitous timing, things in the classical music world “have changed considerably over the last 25 years,” Burashko says. As evidence, he points out that today, even the august and renowned pianist András Schiff concertizes with a clip-on Lavalier microphone, addressing his audience from the stage between works, something that would have been anathema even a few years earlier. What, discovered during Art of Time’s inaugural 1999 season (listed originally as Chamber Music Unlimited), was that the bringing together of disparate music (Cage, Gershwin, Crumb, and Lieberson) in combination with dance, evocative staging, and thoughtful on-stage commentary (modest initially, but expanded throughout the seasons), constituted a gradual dismantling of the restrictive traditions of the art form – an intoxicating elixir for an audience hungry for a welcoming entry point into a world of great music. “It still amazes me: I would meet people who said they don’t know how to listen to classical music or even what makes it good,” continues Burashko. “But music should elicit a visceral reaction. And ETERNAL CITIES BY MASMOUDI QUARTET Tickets available online at www.alliance-francaise.ca © Sandra Sunshine Photography thewholenote.com April & May 2024 | 27