Volume 23 Issue 7 - April 2018

FEATURE
Elmer Iseler, Jessie Iseler and Lydia Adams before a performance
at Choral Kathaumixw, Powell River BC in July 1996.
TWENTY YEARS LATER
MAURA MCGROARTY
Celebrating Elmer Iseler
DAVID JAEGER
Known as the dean of Canadian choral conductors
and called a Canadian choral visionary, Elmer Iseler
(1927–1998) will be celebrated in a concert titled
“Joyful Sounds, a Tribute to Elmer Iseler, 1927–1998 –
Twenty Years Later” on April 14 at 7:30pm at Eglinton
St. George’s United Church. Lydia Adams will lead the
Elmer Iseler Singers in a program of Canadian choral
classics, plus the world premiere of a major new work,
commissioned to honour the 20th anniversary of his
passing. And I will be part of it too.
Iseler helped to found the Festival Singers of Toronto in 1954, and
conducted them until 1978. In 1968 they became the Festival Singers
of Canada, and also the professional core of the Toronto Mendelssohn
Choir, which Iseler had conducted since 1964. The high standard of
performance that Iseler achieved drew notice from no less a celebrity
than composer Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971), who recorded a number of
his works with the Festival Singers of Canada in the early 1960s.
Iseler was a champion of Canadian music, and throughout his
career he commissioned and performed numerous works by Canadian
composers. By the time he founded the Elmer Iseler Singers in 1979,
the commissioning of original Canadian works had become a cornerstone
of Iseler’s artistic mindset. The Elmer Iseler Singers Choral Series
of published choral works contained hundreds of works, 90 per cent
of them by Canadian composers. Iseler’s spirit of embracing Canadian
choral music inspired Lydia Adams, the current artistic director of
the choir, and Jessie Iseler, Elmer’s widow and the choir’s general
manager, to shape the April 14 tribute program with Canadian music
to celebrate Iseler’s legacy. For all those reasons, when they invited me
to host the event I did not hesitate to accept.
The premiere of a major new work by British Columbia composer
Imant Raminsh (b. 1943) headlines the tribute concert. Raminsh told
me that a number of years ago Lydia Adams had approached him to
discuss the creation of a major new work to celebrate both the legacy
of Elmer Iseler, as well as the occasion of Canada’s 150th year. Thanks
to a private donation from Elizabeth DeBoer and Ross Redfern, the
Elmer Iseler Singers were able to commission the large-scale work,
titled The Beauty of Dissonance, the Beauty of Strength, which
runs over 40 minutes, in eight movements. Raminsh took two years
to gather poetry from all the regions of Canada; he told me that he
and Iseler shared a love for the Canadian landscape, and this shared
passion informed the design of the new work. The two men had
met in the 1960s at the University of Toronto. Iseler saw the score to
Raminsh’s Ave verum corpus, liked it and took it into his repertoire,
the first of several Raminsh works he championed.
The title of the new work comes from its central movement, which
uses a poem by Montreal poet Arthur James Marshall Smith (1902–
1980) called The Lonely Land, a depiction of the Canadian Shield
inspired by a 1926 Group of Seven exhibition. Raminsh shared with
me that he grew up the son of a forester, whom he described as, “an
amateur painter of some accomplishment.” His father was fond of
the approach of the Group of Seven landscape painters, and Raminsh
recalls that the many paintings by his father adorning his family’s
home showed a strong affinity with this style.
Imant Raminsh in his studio at the Vernon Community Music School.
PARKER CROOK/VERNON MORNING STAR
14 | April 2018 thewholenote.com