Orchestras Canada

We’ve recently posted reader reviews of 2 recent book of potential interest to administrators and board members of Canadian orchestras on the OC blog – Jim Collins’s Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos and Luck – Why Some Thrive Despite Them All and Michael M. Kaiser’s Leading Roles – 50 Questions Every Arts Board Should Ask. Our hearty thanks to reviewers Thérèse Boutin of the Orchestre symphonique de Trois-Rivières (Collins); Natalie Williams Calhoun of the PEI Symphony Orchestra (Collins); Paul Inksetter of the Thunder Bay Symphony Orchestra (Kaiser); and Catherine Molina of the Guelph Symphony Orchestra (Kaiser) for their work! You can check out their reviews here.

On November 9, friends and supporters of the Thunder Bay Symphony Orchestra learned that the orchestra had recorded its fifth consecutive balanced budget in 2010-11 – a season that also marked the orchestra’s 50th anniversary, its first-ever sold-out classics performance since moving to the Thunder Bay Community Auditorium 25 years earlier, and the winning of the Vida Peene Award.

Commenting on the good news, TBSO Board President Paul Inksetter said, “Our 50th anniversary season was a good one for us. While we still face a number of challenges, we are more confident of our future now than we have been for a very long time. We have a wonderful new Music Director in Arthur Post. Our audiences love the new energy he has brought to our programming.”

For more information about the TBSO, please visit tbso.ca.

Later this month, the Thunder Bay Symphony Orchestra is holding auditions for a rather non-traditional orchestral instrument: the electric guitar. In order to perform Canadian composer Tim Brady’s Amplify, Multiply, Re-mix and Re-define: in memory of Les Paul on its January Masterworks concert, the TBSO needs to recruit no fewer than twenty electric guitarists from the community.

Interested guitarists are asked to apply to audition; those selected will be granted a 10-minute time-slot and asked to play a solo piece of their choice along with an imposed piece selected by the TBSO.

For more information, please visit tbso.ca.

Last week, the Ontario Arts Council announced that it had awarded the Vida Peene Award for 2011 to the Thunder Bay Symphony Orchestra. The $10,000 award is presented every second year to an outstanding Ontario orchestra, and this year the TBSO was cited by the peer jury as a “vital organization in this northern city, embraced by its community with a remarkable audience base. It regularly plays to capacity houses and shows excellent commitment to Canadian composers and soloists.”

For more information, please visit arts.on.ca.

We’ve got a pair of recommendations this week.

The first item is a report on the education programs of eight Canadian orchestras – the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra, National Arts Centre Orchestra, Orchestra London, Ottawa Symphony Orchestra, Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, Thunder Bay Symphony Orchestra, Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. The evaluation was undertaken by Measured Outcome, an organization that undertakes collaborative, web-based research on the impact of charitable programs, and the process gave voice to the experiences of students, teachers and orchestral musicians involved in the programs.

Key learnings?
99% of participating adults and students found the programs valuable;
96% plan to return in a subsequent year;
61% of young people get their first (and only!) exposure to symphonic performance through a school visit, compared with 24% who attend with family and 15% who attend with friends;
Only 62% of the participating teachers make use of the Study Guide material provided, and of those, only 17% (or 10.5% of the total number of participating teachers) make use of the podcasts provided;
Teachers, students and performers consistently report that rowdy behavior by certain attendees detracts from the overall experience;
There are a number of opportunities to strengthen these already-valued programs.

The report was the subject of Orchestras Canada’s first webinar for the 2011-12 season, an event that brought together over 20 representatives from member orchestras from Victoria to Halifax. We are committed to continuing the discussion with our member orchestras, with the goal of strengthening their programming and their opportunities for collaboration.

You can view the report here.

Our second recommendation? A major new research report on arts engagement, commissioned by the Ontario Arts Council, and undertaken by Alan S. Brown of Wolf Brown and Ipsos-Reid. The report builds on Brown’s existing body of work on arts engagement, and traces the connection between an individual’s “personal artistic practice” (be it listening to music on the radio, selecting CDs to purchase or tracks to download, taking music lessons, interpreting the work of others while performing as a soloist or in an ensemble, or creating new works of music) and their attendance at live performances. There are some particularly compelling findings about the levels of cultural participation of Ontarians from diverse cultural groups.

And we can’t resist leaving you with this inspiring statement:

“Overall, 95% of all respondents are interested in doing more arts activities than they presently do.”

You can find the report here.

ADMINISTRATIVE / ADMINISTRATIF

Thunder Bay Symphony Orchestra
Development Manager
Application deadline/Date limite : N/A

Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal
Adjoint(e) administratif(tive) au directeur musical / Administrative Assistant to the Music Director
Application deadline/Date limite : October 28 octobre 2011

ADMINISTRATIVE / ADMINISTRATIF
Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra and Chamber Choir
Stage Managers and Assistant Stage Managers
Application Deadline / Date Limite : August 31 août 2011

AUDITIONS
Thunder Bay Symphony Orchestra
Assistant Concertmaster (one-year, possibly permanent) / Assistant violon solo (contrat d’un an, avec possibilité de permanence
Principal Second Violin / Deuxième violon solo
Section Violin / Violon section
Second Oboe / English horn / Hautbois section / Cor anglais
Application Deadline / Date Limite : October 3 octobre 2011

We’ve got a pair of presentations of Beethoven’s Symphony #9 to celebrate this week – and they’re each special in their own way.

On Thursday, 31 March, the Thunder Bay Symphony Orchestra led by Music Director Arthur Post caps a season-long 50th anniversary celebration by performing the iconic work with a stellar cast of soloists and the Thunder Bay Symphony Chorus. Happy Birthday, TBSO!

And April 7-10, Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, the Tafelmusik Chamber Choir and frequent guest conductor Bruno Weill complete their tour of Beethoven’s symphonies by performing the work at Toronto’s Koerner Hall. The program opens with a cappella choral works by Mendelssohn, Brahms and Arvo Pärt, directed by Tafelmusik Chamber Choir Director Ivars Taurins. In the words of Bruno Weil, “we approach these Beethoven concerts as if they were the very first performance, as though the music had been composed yesterday. This is the real thing — there’s no sense of routine with Tafelmusik musicians and everybody’s giving their all for this music, playing with a full heart and a full soul and spirit. That is the secret to a great performance.”

In 2004, the Thunder Bay Symphony Orchestra, under then-Music Director Geoffrey Moull, released a critically acclaimed CD of Canadian orchestral music, Variations on a Memory. The CD – containing works by John Estacio, Jeff Ryan, Régent Levasseur, Aris Carastathis and Alexina Louie – quickly sold out, and has not been available since. However, the TBSO has recently announced that the CD is being re-released in time to play a part in the orchestra’s 50th anniversary season. For more information, please visit tbso.ca.