Orchestras Canada

The Saskatoon Symphony has announced its 2012-13 season, designed by music director Victor Sawa to show off the orchestra’s artistic capacities and show-case some of the relationships the organization has developed with its new neighbours in the 20th Street district. The line-up includes a six concert Masters Series, four POPS concerts, a chamber series, special events, and a new contemporary music program called ‘The Core’, a two-concert series presented in partnership with PAVED Arts, an artist-run centre in the 20th Street neighbourhood.

The Thunder Bay Symphony Orchestra, under music director Arthur Post, has announced its 2012-13 season – and it’s a busy one, consisting of 28 separate events over 5 different series (and some special events, as well.) Highlighted soloists include Yi-Jia Suzanne Hou (violin), R. Carlos Nakai (native American flute), André Laplante (piano), blues artist Matt Andersen, tenor Michael Burgess, and a special performance by Ben Heppner.

The Orchestre symphonique de Montréal has announced its summer season, an imaginatively laid-out program that includes a pair of free outdoor concerts, and appearances at festivals in Orford, Lanaudière and at home in Montréal. The big news in the announcement is A Cool Classical Journey, a brand-new festival at the Maison symphonique and other venues at Place des Arts, featuring 20 different 45-minute long concerts performed by international artists—all taking place on Saturday, August 11! Featured artists include the OSM (which is featured four times throughout the day), Canadian Brass, the Tetzlaff Trio, pianists Lars Vogt and Marc-André Hamelin, and many, many others.

The Ottawa Symphony Orchestra has announced the appointment of Peter Feldman as its new General Manager, succeeding Bryan Croft. Peter was the founding executive director of CAPACOA, the Canadian arts presenting association.

The Thunder Bay Symphony Orchestra has announced the appointment of Kelly Rooney as its new Development Manager. A Thunder Bay native, Kelly is a graduate of Confederation College’s Arts Administration program. Since graduating, she has spent the last 20 year’s travelling the world, working and volunteering with a variety of arts, health promotion and social service organizations. “I’m happy to be back in my hometown, surrounded by family, and working in the arts again”, says Ms. Rooney.

Bill Skolnik, CEO of the Canadian Federation of Musicians and the Vice President from Canada for the American Federation of Musicians, has announced that he’ll be leaving his position with the CFM/AFM to serve as CEO of the Directors Guild of Canada.

The Centre in the Square, long-time performance home of the Kitchener Waterloo Symphony, has hired Sandra Bender to be its next CEO. She succeeds Jamie Grant, who is now running the Long Center for the Arts in Austin TX.

It was a sad week for Canadian music, as we recognize and mourn the passing of two pivotal figures in the development of a cosmopolitan Canadian musical culture: Helmut Kallmann and Istvan Anhalt. Both came to Canada as a result of World War II, and both made an indelible impact on our country.

Dr. Kallman was widely recognized as Canadian music’s foremost historian, and is perhaps best-known for his pivotal role in editing both editions of the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada. From 1950-1970, he worked at (and ultimately supervised) the CBC’s music library; from 1970 to 1987 he headed the Music Division of the National Library of Canada.

Dr. Anhalt was a long-time resident of Kingston ON, where he moved in 1971 to take up the position of Head of the Music Department at Queen’s University. As his obituary noted, “many of his major compositions – four operas, seven symphonies and numerous other works were written during the Kingston years, notably the four symphonic works inspired by commissions from Glen Fast, the conductor of the KSO, whose confidence in him brought about the creation of some of his most beautiful works.”

AUDITIONS

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.