Classical music: Blueridge festival still thriving after a decade
Credit to Author: dgdsun| Date: Wed, 07 Aug 2019 18:14:18 +0000
When: August 4-25
Where: Various venues
Tickets and info: From $15, blueridgechamber.org
It’s early August, and perish the thought that the end of summer draws ever closer. However, it is time for the last of our summertime classical festivals.
The Blueridge Chamber Festival takes its name from the leafy North Vancouver neighbourhood that was its first home. It remains a festival with several differences: It features voice as part of the mix, as befits festival co-founder soprano Dory Hayley; it’s also a potent mix of favourite chamber music repertoire and some very edgy endeavours.
This is festival No. 10, which definitively demonstrates Vancouver’s appetite for summer concerts. It all grew from a fairly simple concept: Hayley and co-founder Alejandro Ochoa wanted to perform together with friends in a breezy, fun context. A decade later, the festival runs to some 10 concerts, 38 artists, and four venues, plus an educational component for youthful performers.
Traditional and contemporary repertoire is featured at Blueridge Festival.
Has success come at too high a price?
“I certainly didn’t foresee that it would be so much work,” admits Hayley. “We started it for fun, and it has grown into a bit more of an institution. I hope that the event still has that feeling of listening to friends and sharing very directly with them. It’s great that we have more concerts. It’s just that the administration is exhausting.”
Surely the words of festival organizers everywhere. But, of course, it’s entirely worth it.
Summer programs for younger musicians were an important part of Hayley’s background (“I did Mount Orford seven times!”), and she knew that intensive involvement for a cadre of students was a way of accelerating musical growth.
“Alejandro and I started when we were both finishing our doctorates, and found that immersion in summer festivals advanced our playing more than the rest of the year put together.”
Many residential programs, like Quebec’s Mount Orford, have the additional appeal of a summer getaway. But who needs to get away from Vancouver in the summer?
“Blueridge is a very packed two weeks for the students, even though they get to go home every night,” Hayley notes. “The faculty all stay together in a large house on the North Shore.”
The festival’s venue in the early years was Mount Seymour United Church. Then runout concerts to Vancouver were added, together with one-off special events. This year the North Shore venue is Presentation House Theatre, with Vancouver concerts at the Orpheum Annex.
Since its inception, Blueridge has made a practice of exploring some of the more exotic byways of classical music.
This year the festival kicked off with an August 4 performance of Schoenberg’s shocker Pierrot Lunaire, staged in Mountain View Cemetery. When I spoke with Hayley last week, she was still elated from an early rehearsal of the iconic but very dark masterwork.
“It’s a piece I’ve wanted to do for a very long time, and we have the most amazing band. We played it through and no one made any mistakes — except me.” Too bad there was just the one performance.
Edzi’u.
Another innovative event will take place in North Van’s spanking new Polygon Gallery, “held in conversation with the Polygon’s exhibition of Christian Marclay’s groundbreaking video installation The Clock,” to wind down the festival August 25.
There is an unprecedented performance of modernist maven Morton Feldman’s For Philip Guston, a four-hour plus composition. Also on the docket is a remarkable new work, Kime Ani, by Edzi’u, a young composer of Tahltan/Tlinglit heritage.
“Although she is a composer, she also studied classical voice with me for several years,” notes Hayley. Edzi’u uses archival recordings of three generations of her family layered with her own material.
Not to imply that Blueridge is exclusively about the new.
“There is something for everyone,” says Hayley. “Our main stage programs place much more emphasis on traditional repertoire.” That even includes Choose Your Own Chamber Party, a program programmed by festival fans.
CLICK HERE to report a typo.
Is there more to this story? We’d like to hear from you about this or any other stories you think we should know about. Email vantips@postmedia.com