Volume 24 Issue 5 - February 2019

REAR VIEW
MIRROR
Remembering
Neil Crory
ROBERT HARRIS
Genius,
if the word has any
meaning at all, comes in
many forms. There’s the
exuberant, demonstrative,
egomaniacal, smoking-hot
pistol of genius –
think Glenn Gould.
But there’s also a quieter form of whatever
genius is – and if it’s anything, it is originality
combined with integrity, uncompromisability,
single-mindedness, assurance.
And by that definition, Neil Crory had genius.
Neil, friend to so many, longtime CBC Music producer, writer,
mentor, proselytizer, imp, beauty, died on January 10, after he and
the Parkinson’s disease which had invaded him a decade earlier had
finally had enough of each other and decided to part ways in mutual
disgust. Neil, to the disease’s fury, had bent to its destructive evil, but
had never broken.
Working at CBC Radio Music, as I had done for decades, meant that
I knew of Neil Crory. He was the ultimate music producer, famous for
his discoveries and crusades, picky, prickly, notoriously indulgent with
other people’s money, hard-nosed to a fault, a bit of an elitist, slow in
his projects and obsessions, not everyone’s favourite colleague. In fact,
far from everyone’s favourite colleague. It always used to make me
laugh that a radio department devoted to musical artists never really
knew what to do when it actually stumbled across one.
I knew of Neil Crory, but never really knew him until 2007, when
I was handed an unenviable assignment – to produce a single,
four-hour long, weekend classical music program, hosted by Bill
Richardson (another artist people were confused by) called Sunday
Afternoon in Concert. Today, the program is simply called In Concert,
is still four hours, and is produced by Denise Ball in Vancouver and
very ably hosted by Paolo Pietropaolo. Denise and Paolo approach
their monstrous broadcast time like any sensible production team –
they divide their program into sections and segments and weave a
tapestry of music throughout their program. They do a fine job.
However, for reasons I now forget, I decided not to follow this
approach with Sunday Afternoon in Concert. I wanted instead to do
the impossible – weave a single theme through a four-hour long broadcast,
create a program that was not a kaleidoscope of various parts,
but a unified whole unfolding over four hours, a Wagnerian opera of a
radio program, different every week. It was insane, counter-intuitive (no
one listens for a four-hour long period of time), impossible. Everyone
thought I was crazy. Everyone, that is, except Neil Crory.
I’m not sure whether the mischievous imp in Neil was simply
attracted to the sheer perversity of what I was trying to do. I’d like to
think he shared my enthusiasm for trying something different. For
whatever reason, he became my chief partner in crime, with his aweinspiring
ability to come up with novel programming and repertoire
selections. He didn’t contribute to every program, but the ones he did
contribute to were very special. Our mutual boss, Mark Steinmetz,
told me once that Neil had come up to him after one of my shows –
the four-hour Bach show where we played, among other things, two
versions of Brandenburg 5 by two different Canadian orchestras, back
to back – and told Mark he thought SAIC should be taken off the air.
“Why?” Mark asked. “Because it’s too good,” was Neil’s reply.
86 | February 2019 thewholenote.com