On my way to Regina, I stopped for a day in Thunder Bay, where I stayed with a friend from the orchestra. Hoping to get some exercise on my one day not spent sitting in a car, I went to the local climbing gym., Boulder Bear.
Climbing gyms are great because the eccentric demographic of people who enjoy climbing mountains (and, although this wasn’t the case in any of the climbing gyms I’ve been to in Southern Ontario, indoor climbing in Thunder Bay really is regarded mostly as a training regimen at best, or at worst a pale imitation of outdoor climbing) also tend to be game for pretty much any type of physical activity that presents itself. Thus, climbing gyms tend to have weight rooms as well as odds and ends of any other pieces of athletic equipment they can get their hands on. (In this case, they had just installed a trampoline, although the lack of safety net meant nobody was allowed to use it sans harness and extra fee.)
I did a quick leg workout and some bouldering, and then the owner of the gym mistook me for someone else and greeted me enthusiastically. Once we had sorted out that we didn’t in fact know each other, he invited me on an outdoor climb that some of the gym members were going on that evening anyway. I’d never been outdoor climbing before, and had actually previousy assumed that you had to be able to lead climb to do it, which I can’t, but he assured me that they would be setting up toprope courses.
We went to Silver Harbour, about 20 minutes outside of Thunder Bay. I’m looking back on the pictures fondly since the enjoying-the-outdoors season is quickly drawing to a close here, and there are no indoor (or, obviously, outdoor) climbing walls in Regina (other than a crossfit gym that costs $170 a month, has a seasonal bouldering wall, and advertises with a big picture of a banana-back handstand on its outside wall… no thanks!!) IIRC, I managed all four of the courses that the more experienced climbers set up for the topropers in the group.
I arrived in Regina, Saskatchewan about two weeks ago, taking 5 days to get here from Kitchener. The first day, I drove to Sault Ste. Marie (stopping at the beach in Parry Sound along the way) and tried Couchsurfing for the first time! The second day is hands-down the best day of driving– between Sault Ste.-Marie and Thunder Bay, along the shore of Lake Superior, through house of provincial park where you can go for quite a while without seeing a single other car. About 40 km outside of Wawa, Ontario (home of the Wawa giant goose; or rather, the lineage of Wawa giant geese) I started thinking about Terry Fox. Terry Fox looms large in the collective consciousness of all Canadians, but particularly those in provinces he actually made it through; and it’s hard to watch the pavement whizzing by underneath your car without imagining what it would have looked like from the perspective of a lopsided jog. Just as I was contemplating this, I saw a man by the side of the road in athletic clothing. And crutches. With one leg. Running. Did I hallucinate him? Where was he going? Who was he? I didn’t see any other vehicles around him, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything– I was in the middle of a park, but there were campsites fairly nearby, and a few small on either side of the large parkland. I considered turning around to go talk to hum, but by the time the thought appeared in my mind, it would have been impractical. He certainly didn’t seem to be in distress, so I figured it would remain forever a mystery, and filed the anecdote away to relate to the friends I was staying with in Thunder Bay that evening. Well, just as I was typing this up, I hopped over to read the news from Northwestern Ontario. And lo and behold, an answer: Guy Amalfitano, a French cancer survivor who watched the Marathon of Hope on TV from his hospital bed as a teenager, arrived in Thunder Bay last week. According to the itinerary on his website, he is planning to arrive in Regina on the 24th of September, and to finish his journey on the 6th of November.
- I was waitlisted for Rice. Considering I started the process resigned to the idea of not even getting past the prescreening, I feel A-OK about that!
- I participated in my very first concerto competition! A few weeks ago I flew to Toronto for a day to play in the finals of the Orchestra Toronto concerto competition. The winner ended up being a flutist that I went to McGill with (3/4 of the finalists were McGill people, interestingly…) but I was still very happy with how I played. Because of the competition, I ended up pulling out of the opera audition I was going to do around the same time after realizing that the job sounded good in theory but would actually be extremely inconvenient in practice. Plus, I could do the competition without missing out on any services in Thunder Bay, whereas for the audition I would have lost a few days worth of pay for an audition that didn’t serve my interests anyway.
- I went to a barn dance at a farm in Neebing the other night with some symphony friends! Merrie, our principal trumpet, is also a Ceilidh dance caller, and her husband is a celtic fiddler who was playing with a guitar player visiting from Quebec. It was awwweeesome.
- The symphony season ends on the 3rd of May, but I am staying an extra week to play a show with my wind quintet! It will be at 3 PM on May 9th at the Foundry. The title of the show is “Music of the Americas,” despite my mostly-joking suggestion of “Nothing European.” Entrance is by donation.
- I guess I technically have two symphony seasons to play the ends of– I haven’t been in St. Catharine’s very much this year, but I’ll be with the Niagara Symphony for the last concert of the season on May 17, in which, bizarrely, we are playing one of the same pieces that we played in my first concert in Thunder Bay– Christos Hatzis’ Lamento, sung by Sarah Slean. This will be our last concert in Sean O’Sullivan theatre at Brock– next season, we will be moving into the FirstOntario Performing Arts Centre, the new PAC in downtown St. Catherine’s. (FirstOntario is apparently a credit union that made a major donation, but it’s kind of a snazzy name for it, isn’t it?)
For the TBSO’s Music in the Classroom program, today I was in schools with a wind quintet. Among many other things we played the Adagio from Hetu’s wind quintet, and the kids were asked to think during the movement about what kind of scene would belong to that music in a movie. One tiny kid confidently raised his hand and said, “D-Day.” Hear for yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CspMEPqJro
The Walleye, Thunder Bay’s arts and culture newspaper, wrote a review of our Nutcracker here! Fun for me to see a picture of it, since I couldn’t see anything from the back of the pit…
Right now I am in the middle of getting familiar with some music that comes in chunks larger than I’ve ever played before. The first one is the Nutcracker, which the TBSO is performing with the Minnesota Ballet soon; 34 pages, all of it… well, written by Tchaikovsky. I went back and read Barry Stees’ post on the subject, where he says:
This juggernaut of a piece for the orchestra confronts many musicians at this time of year. If it were played just occasionally it would be universally hailed by musicians as one of the greatest pieces of ballet music. Instead, many musicians look upon it as a chore.
This strikes me as incredibly true. This performance will be my first time paying the piece, so I don’t feel any of the “ugh, this again” that lots of people seem to feel. That response seems to be pretty much the standard from musicians to the Nutcracker, which objectively doesn’t make a lot of sense. This is a piece that demands to be taken seriously; it’s difficult, long, written by a famous and well-loved composer, and performed every single year– what other piece of music gets to be performed on that kind of a schedule? But familiarity breeds contempt, of course, and for people with permanent positions in ballet orchestras… well, I would imagine they get pretty darn familiar with it. I’m also working slowly but steadily on an entirely new set of repertoire: my first opera audition! Opera, and opera auditions, seem to occupy a somewhat unusual space in the lives of orchestral musicians, especially younger ones. For some reason, the orchestral excerpts one is expected to learn at music school rarely include opera excerpts. Thus, whereas at this point in my life I generally expect one or two new-to-me excerpts on a list for a major orchestra, this, my first opera audition, features a whopping nine new excerpts to learn (and a few more that I’m only vaguely familiar with.) Then, of course, there’s the issue of listening to recordings of the excerpts. Thus far, the only way I’ve found to reliably locate an excerpt in the middle of a recording is to listen to the whole opera with a score. So, I figured that as long as I’m doing that, I might as well be organized about it. For each opera, I am going to choose a video reference and an online score (oh god, I hope I can find scores online for all of them) and take notes on the recording; where various landmarks in the score happen, and so on, so that I can easily come back to the excerpts later, and also locate other parts in the opera more easily, if I ever need to play an excerpt from the same opera, but in a different place. Ideally, I will end up with a collection of easily navigable video references for operas with common bassoon excerpts, that will also be useful to me if I have to actually learn the whole opera. So far, I am almost done with Cavalleria Rusticana. As well as timing notes, my document on it also contains a lot of notes about cuts the recording takes (which takes an extreeeemely long time to figure out, when you’re going along merrily and all of a sudden the recording is somewhere else…) and also errors in the score, such as pages being omitted or uploaded twice. So, a large part of the difficulty is dealing with the pedagogical shortcomings of the available materials. But, since The Orchestral Bassoon website doesn’t have most of these opera excerpts yet, someone’s gotta do it! Of course, it will also pay off in that I’ll be better prepared for an opera audition the more thoroughly I know the repertoire. And, of course, better prepared should I get an actual opera job! Basically, it seems like opera auditions have a higher barrier to entry than symphony auditions, because not all of the people who are familiar with symphony lists are familiar with opera lists. So I want to use this audition as an opportunity to break into the “people who can comfortably do opera auditions” club, and after having done the huge amount of initial work on this one, every opera list after this will have fewer and fewer new excerpts to learn from scratch. Perhaps after this I should get familiar with some ballet excerpts too… although, it seems like I’m doing that now– the only list turned up through a google search for “ballet bassoon audition” is all standard symphony stuff, plus generous helpings of the Nutcracker!
I’ve been in Thunder Bay for two weeks now! So far we have played two concerts. The first was a show with Sarah Slean, who played her own songs the first half of the concert and sang Christos Hatzis’ Lamento and Parasol in the second. I realized after the concert that we are actually playing Lamento on the final Masterworks concert in Niagara this year as well! The second concert was John Estacio’s Bootlegger’s Tarantella, Afternoon of a Faun, Dawn and Siegfried’s Rhine Journey from Gotterdammerung, and Scheherazade. For that concert, there were quite a few extras who came in from Toronto as well as from Quebec and Manitoba, which was fun. Now we have one more week here– Schubert 5, pieces by Oskar Moraetz and Paul Haas, and an amazingly cool piano concerto by Poulenc that I had never heard of before– Aubade, Concerto Choregraphique pour Piano et 18 Instruments. Then, in a week, we are going on Tour! I’m actually not entirely sure where– the schedule only says “East.” So, I’m assuming various towns vaguely to the east of Thunder Bay. Last week I drove out to the township of Oliver Paipoonge, which is just 10 minutes along the trans-canada, to go to an archery practice! Unlike the archery team I was on in high school in Toronto, where we used recurve bows and trained for indoor competitions, the club I went to here uses exclusively compound bows and competes outdoors. Being in a more rural area, I guess it’s natural that the archery traditions come more from hunting practices than in Toronto where it was more of a nerdy/historically-focused pursuit. (A membership at the club here also automatically gets you a year-long membership to the Ontario Association of Anglers and Hunters.) The compound bow took some getting used to– it’s more difficult to draw initially, but about halfway back it suddenly becomes much easier as the pulleys help you draw the weight of it. So it can store more energy than the equivalent recurve bow, an obvious advantage if you were, um, shooting bears or something. I also bought a membership to the sports complex that’s right beside the hall where we play, which gets you access to the gym, pool, and an unlimited number of drop-in classes. So far I’ve gone to yoga, kettlebell, and a core class. Today I am going hiking with some friends from the orchestra to the Sleeping Giant, a mountain formation made of a spirit who was turned to stone when white people found out about his silver mine. Whoopsie.
So for the past little while I’ve pretty much been living the freelance life… by which I mean I haven’t slept in the same place for more than three or so nights in a row since finishing McGill. It’s actually been pretty awesome, and I’m almost done with all the work I have scheduled before the start of the National Academy Orchestra: next week I’m playing second on two pops shows with the Toronto Symphony, and then I’m going back to Montreal for Convocation, and then my lease starts on the house I just signed for with a few other NAO musicians. I don’t (at the moment…) have anything scheduled between when our lease starts on June 1st and when the orchestra starts on the 16th, so I guess I get two weeks’ vacation! NAO goes until mid-August, and then I’ll be up teaching at the Interprovincial Music Camp as per usual. And then I have the whole month of September to get settled in… Thunder Bay! I have been offered a one-year position playing second in the Thunder Bay Symphony for next season! Although I’ve been enjoying a taste of what life would be like as a freelancer in Southern Ontario, it’s amazing to have the stability of a full-time job– even if it is only for a year– right after graduating from my undergrad. Although I would like to go to grad school at some point (okay, there’s one grad school in particular I kind of have my heart set on) I didn’t feel prepared to do a big grad school audition tour while putting together my first-ever recital this year. But I admit I regretted it a little when the acceptances started coming in for everyone in my year who had done that: Juilliard, Colburn, Royal College of Music, and plenty of other exciting and prestigious places where my colleagues from McGill are about to go start the next stage of their musical lives. So for me the fact that I now have a job for next year is validation that I made the right choice for myself by putting off grad school auditions.
Three hours after my recital ended, I had my first post-school rehearsal :P That week I was playing fourth on the Verdi Requiem with the orchestra of the Société Philharmonique de Montréal. That concert was on Good Friday, and the bassoon section was Marty– my first teacher at McGill– playing principal and two other students from McGill besides me. The next day I took the Montreal-Toronto Megabus hopefully for the last time, and crammed in an Easter party before going to Kitchener to do some school shows with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony the first half of last week. The latter half of the week was Niagara, who had the Sultans of String in, and we performed both a childrens’ show with them and a full pops program. All of the music on those programs was written by the Sultans, and it was really good! Some in the orchestra even went up to the lobby to buy their CDs and get them signed (as band leader Chris McKhool said, “buying our CDs is definitely the safest way to take us home with you tonight!”) So, between travel Montreal-Toronto-Kitchener-Toronto-St. Catherine’s and all the rehearsals and concerts, this is actually the first day I’ve had off after my recital. On Thursday I’m flying to Thunder Bay for their audition, and then have another concert cycle with the NSO (Cosi Fan Tutte overture, Brahms Piano Concerto #1, and Beethoven 7!) while simultaneously chaperoning at the Ontario Student Classics Conference (http://www.classicsconference.org/), which I attended as a high school student and just happens to be 1) the exact same dates as NSO masterworks 5 2) at Brock University, 3) hosted this year by my former high school, and thus 4) provides me with a free room at the Brock residences for this concert cycle. Sweeeet. Then I have to get all my belongings from my soon-to-be-former place in Montreal, find a place in Hamilton and move into it, because I’m going to be playing in the National Academy Orchestra for the summer! I only auditioned for two summer festivals this year (oops!), NAO and the NAC’s Young Artist’s Program, and although I got into both and was hoping to be able to go to both, they ended up conflicting in such a way that I wasn’t able to get a sub for NAO as I was hoping. So, I reluctantly had to pass up the YAP for this year, since NAO is a 9-week orchestral program that pays a minimum of $430 a week to each apprentice. However I’m very happy to be able to participate in that, especially with both Rite of Spring and The Firebird on the program! Happy summer!