Our 30th annual "turning of the year" December/January issue, Janus-like looking back and ahead at a world on edge: think of every listing in this magazine as a potential crumb of consolation – the opportunity to congregate for any and all reasons from the sacred to the just plain silly. Find some peace however you can. And thanks for reading. Viva la musica.
ELIZABETH MCPHAILAlyssa
ELIZABETH MCPHAILAlyssa DVM release, and something Ialways felt in my bonesthat I needed to do. I alwayswaved off playing the guitarin recording sessions or atshows because I alwayshad someone better thereto do it. I had to determinewhich songs I knew best, soI wouldn’t focus on messingup the guitar parts. But Ialso needed to build a setthat told my story.”Sometimes it’s the spaceitself that provides the answer.“It was important to mefor my first solo performance,that I was comfortableand so was everyone else inthe room. I often describethe songs I write as “spillingmy guts”, so I needed a safespace to be able to do that,and for people to receive it as well. I remember setting up the seatingat Rise, where I had mentioned that I only played guitar sitting crosslegged on my bed or my couch. This sprung the idea of the loveseatbeing the main stage seat, instead of standing or sitting on a tallerstool. It was like playing my living room, only it was 1,140 km frommy home. And this was crucial to my first solo show being a success,both sonically and personally.”Alyssa describes the experience once she felt settled in.“I could feel every part of me connected to the songs, the stories,and the beautiful people around me. I’m not sure I could ever put thisfeeling into words, but the best way I can put it is this: when the sunshines into a body of water and the waves reflect the light back intothe world. My solo excursion to Hornepayne along with playing myvery first solo show was extremely healing, and helped me realizethat I am good enough to play shows on my own. It’s about believingin yourself and the story you have to tell.”Sophia Perlman grew up bouncing around the jazz, opera,theatre and community arts scene in Toronto, joined the creativeexodus to Hamilton in 2014, and is now centred in Hornepayne,Ontario,where she eagerly awaits the arrival of her regularWholeNote in order to armchair travel and inform her Internetvideo consumption.ART OF SONGStill pushing boundariesWest End MicroMusic FestivalLYDIA PEROVIĆAlot has happened since 2018, the year I describedthe Happenstancers in these pages as part of thefuture of chamber music and song recital. A yearlater, two of the ensemble’s three founding musicians(mezzo-soprano Adanya Dunn and pianist Nahre Sol)departed Canada, which left Brad Cherwin in Torontowith room to invent from scratch and experiment – andexperiment he did!FORGET THE NORDIC SPA.GIFT THEM A TRUECULTURAL EXPERIENCEWITH WORLD CLASS ARTISTS LIKE VOX CLAMANTIS.Brad CherwinThe Happenstancers are now a large informal band of musicianswith Cherwin as the artistic director, with several busy performanceseasons under their belt each more ambitious than the last, an annualfestival, a visiting guest conductor, a concert space in a Lutheranchurch out on Bloor West, a part-time production manager, a videoartist, and a solid record of success with granting bodies. And mostimportantly, an audience which – the Holy Grail of classical music –skews under 40 years old.Next step would be to have repeat performances and to take themoutside Toronto, Cherwin tells me when we meet in a coffee shop totalk about yet another iteration of Happenstancers’ all-choral WestEnd Micro Music Festival (WEMMF), Revelations, a contemporarymusic shindig pushing boundaries and rethinking the concert form,happening November 22-23 and Nov 29-30 at Redeemer LutheranChurch,1691 Bloor St. W.“We would love to tour, but it’s hard to make the finances work,”Cherwin says. They performed one year in New York (where14 | December 2024 & January 2025 thewholenote.com
JAKE KOVNATDanika Loren in Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire Op. 21 (ThreeTimes Seven Poems from Albert Giraud’s “Pierrot Lunaire”) performedby The Happenstancers with Simon Rivard, conductor (June 2022).pianist-composer and recurring Happenstancer Nahre Sol lives) and ata festival in PEI, but the logistics around performing even in places asclose as Hamilton remain daunting.Unless there’s a co-presenter on the ground? “That’s the way to doit: you have to have a local partner. We’re open to that, absolutely. I’vereached out to a lot of festivals, and will keep doing that.”Is it that people find contemporary classical music a tough proposition?“We’d like to avoid those labels. We don’t stick to boundariesbetween musical genres or periods. But who knows, maybe marketingwould be easier if we did.”Geo ChobanovBass-baritoneKristian AlexanderConductorKINDRED SPIRITS ORCHESTRAAlexa FrankianSopranoSALUTE TO 2025!Shunning the timely: There’s another thing that theHappenstancers would rather not do, he says, even though a lot oforganizations have taken that route.“Shows that have some sort of connection to current events. Climatechange. A political narrative. A dramatic through-line. All that stuff isfine, but I don’t want to attach our shows to something timely. That’ssticking us here. I’m more interested in attempting something timeless.Besides, my opinion on this or that current issue is not that interesting.It’s not about me and my opinions. It’s about finding thisshared space between the performers, the composer and the audience.And letting them make up their own minds.”The current mood in the sector is to issue political statements, Iput to him. Every couple of months there’s a new cause to champion.“I salute people who make that part of their mission. But I want,Overtures, arias and duets from beloved operas by Mozart, VerdiPuccini, Rossini, Donizetti, Gounod, Tchaikovsky, and morePresented bythewholenote.com December 2024 & January 2025 | 15
