Volume 25 Issue 2 - October 2019

FOR OPENERS | DAVID PERLMAN
Anniversaries
In Blue & Velvet
Back in 1999, the feeling of collective millennial fervour and/or
impending doom, as the thousand-year clock ticked toward
midnight, is something that any of our readers old enough to
remember Y2K will be able to relate to. And literature and everyday
discourse are rife with examples of phrases like “100th birthday”
and “turn of the century” being used in ways which take for granted
that the reader or listener will understand, without any need for any
further explanation, why the odometer clicking from 99 to 100 always
has special significance.
I am, however, starting to think that any time the calendar
threatens to click over from nine to ten, people are suddenly galvanized
into getting something important done “before it’s too late.”
How else do we explain the rash of earth-shakingly important
events in years, like this one, when the moving finger of fate is
pointing to a nine? And this in turn leads to subsequent rashes of
anniversary celebrations, every ten years after that. Like this year’s
50th anniversary of the first moon landing in 1969; or the 30th anniversary
of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989; or … drum roll please!
... the 20th anniversary of the establishment of the WholeNote Blue
Pages directory!
That last example is of course entirely flippant; the other two are
not, although I must confess that while I listened in 1969, with half
the world, over a crackling transistor radio, to Neil Armstrong flub his
big line, and forgave him, I couldn’t care less at this point what Buzz
Aldrin thinks about Armstrong, 50 years later. More than anything
else I find it depressing that, 50 years later, the same old loony
theories about the moon landing being a hoax still refuse to go away.
As for the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, however, I
still think that one is worth celebrating (as, I notice, Orchestra Toronto
will do in their upcoming October 27 concert).
There’s another 30th anniversary concert in our listings this month
also worth celebrating, and since it hasn’t been picked up by any of
our writers, I am going to do a shout-out for it here, for three reasons.
Titled “Freedom Reborn,” it takes place at 5pm on Sunday,
October 27 at St. Andrew’s Church at King and Simcoe, across the
road from Roy Thomson Hall. As the organizers explain, the freedom
it celebrates is “the 30th anniversary of the return of democracy and
freedom to Central Europe” – namely the rollback of Soviet political
domination, throughout 1989, in Hungary, Poland, and what was
then Czechoslovakia. I won’t pretend to have either a deep historical
understanding of the ebb and flow of that year, or the visceral
memory of what it meant for citizens of the countries in question,
many of whom experienced it from places like Canada where they had
taken refuge, or sought firm ground on which to take a stand.
I do remember, though, the phrase “The Velvet Revolution” to
describe the astonishing, largely nonviolent series of events in
Czechoslovakia between the middle of November and the last days of
December 1989, culminating in the swearing in of Vaclav Havel – an
artist for crying out loud! – as president on December 29, just before
the clock ticked over. I also understand a little bit better now than I did
then, the extent to which, in the absence of the momentum building
through all the other Warsaw Pact countries over the course of that year,
that astonishing outcome would have been entirely impossible.
One of the things I like most about this particular concert is that it
is a joint venture among the Consulates General of the Czech Republic,
Hungary and Poland in Toronto along with the Embassy of the Slovak
Republic in Canada – the four member nations in the so-named
Visegrad Group of Central European countries. Cooperation to make
happy noise is almost invariably a good thing.
The second thing I like about it is that the artists involved reflect
all the countries concerned: Alicja Wysocka, soprano; John Holland,
baritone; Jan Vaculik, baritone; Sophia Szokolay, violin; Daniel
Wnukowski, piano; Imre Olah, organ; Novi Singers Toronto; the
St. Elizabeth of Hungary Scola Cantorum; the Dvořák Piano Quartet;
and Toronto Sinfonietta, under Matthew Jaskiewicz, music director.
And the third thing I like is that the repertoire chosen (again representative
of the four countries involved) is for the most part beautiful
– joyful and familiar, stirring and celebratory, so that the people
attending (and it’s free, so expect a crowd!) have a good chance of
coming away without the kind of ambivalence that dogs us all every
day, in the fishbowl of awareness of the negative consequences of our
own actions and inactions, intended or not.
Moments of hard-won escapism. Maybe that’s the message. Let’s
hope the organizers don’t feel like they have to wait another ten years
to wade in our town’s musical waters. Our Blue Pages directory is
full of examples of people working collectively on an ongoing basis
for art’s sake. In the mean times we live in, beauty needs all the help
it can get.
publisher@thewholenote.com
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Publication Date
Tuesday October 29 (online)
Thursday October 31 (print edition)
Volume 25 No 3 “NOVEMBER”
will list events
November 1 to December 7, 2019
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