Winnipeg artist’s ‘Ocean’ travels to Great Lakes

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This article was published 27/07/2019 (2645 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

PARRY SOUND, ONT. — There’s an adage that goes: “The road between friends is never long.” Well, in this case, it happens to be a big, bonny blue ocean spreading across the Great Lakes separating two sister festivals: Winnipeg’s Agassiz Chamber Music Festival (ACMF) and Parry Sound, Ont.’s Festival of the Sound (FOTS), now in full swing until Aug. 10.

The three-week festival in Parry Sound, helmed by world-renowned Canadian-American clarinettist/artistic director James Campbell, will be given a taste of the wheat-golden Prairies when a group representing Agassiz arrives next week in the lumber and mining town of 6,500 located 250 kilometres northwest of Toronto for Blue Ocean. The intimate chamber concert, being performed July 31st at the Charles W. Stockey Centre for the Performing Arts is named after Winnipeg composer Jim Hiscott’s work of the same name.

“I’m very excited and also very honoured that James has chosen this piece to include in his festival,” says Hiscott, a former CBC radio producer who will be performing on button accordion during his own FOTS debut.

“For so many years, I’ve been hearing all about the wonderful concerts there with always such a great lineup of artists. I’m also honoured that James is going to be playing with us,” he says, referring to the Juno Award-winning artist stepping in with his licorice stick for Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra principal clarinet Micah Heilbrunn, who joined Hiscott for the 16-minute work’s performance at Agassiz in June.

Joining the duo will be renowned British pianist Martin Roscoe, WSO associate concertmaster Karl Stobbe, and Ottawa-based cellist and ACMF artistic director Paul Marleyn, who are also travelling to the picturesque shores of Georgian Bay next week. The concert also includes Schubert’s Piano Trio No. 2 in E-flat Major, D. 929.

The theme of the FOTS’s ongoing 40th anniversary celebrations is Come to Party, so Campbell invited artists and ensembles representing chamber festivals from across Canada and internationally to do just that.

Marleyn, a former University of Manitoba music professor who now teaches at the University of Ottawa, sings praises for the festival featuring such luminaries this year as Manitoban-born baritone Russell Braun; cellist Cameron Crozman; trumpeter/pianist Guy Few; pianist Janina Fialkowska; and chamber groups the Gryphon Trio, New Zealand String Quartet, and the Penderecki String Quartet, to name only a few.

“The Festival of the Sound is very highly recognized, and one of the biggest and most strongly established festivals in Canada,” Marleyn, who has graced its stage five or six times over the years, says over the phone from Ottawa.

“This concert is a wonderful opportunity to spread the Winnipeg brand further afield. It’s really fantastic that Agassiz can go on tour for its first time, as we are geographically more isolated in Manitoba and haven’t participated in these types of artistic exchanges as the other festivals in larger centres do.”

Other Winnipeggers at the festival include Stobbe making his FOTS debut during Festival Baroque on July 31, fresh from a four-city Canadian tour with the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra.

The Prince George, B.C.-born violinist also performs Just Friends on Aug. 1st with mezzo-soprano and CBC Radio host/producer Julie Nesrallah, Campbell, Roscoe and others.

WSO associate principal horn Ken MacDonald treated FOTS music buffs to his buttery smooth artistry during the July 24 program Swiss Trio & Friends, appearing with Campbell, the Zurich-based Swiss Trio and Toronto violist Douglas McNabney.

Hiscott, who performed the work with Campbell at Brandon University’s 2017 Clarinet Festival, describes his audience-friendly piece infused with infectious Zairean and Cuban dance-like rhythms as “a continuous set of variations going between different folk styles.”

It was originally commissioned by the Vancouver New Music Society in 1990.

“During the 1990s, people began thinking there could be other approaches to contemporary music than the cerebral, modernist, avant-garde styles of Stockhausen and Schoenberg,” explains Hiscott, who first took up the piano accordion at the age of seven while growing up in St. Catharines, Ont.

“I had been listening to a lot of music from the Congo, Zaire, Latin America and Cuba, as well as Ireland and Newfoundland, and how all those traditions influenced each other. I wanted to write in a less abstract style that reflected these types of music, as I felt you can express things in a deeper sort of way because it becomes more about the emotional gesture itself, than all the mathematics and complexities.

“Blue Ocean is about the oceans joining all these different places with music travelling back and forth like waves, and just feeling joy and being positive about life.”

Campbell credits another former Winnipegger, legendary bass player Dave Young — who performs regularly at the FOTS and blazed a trail with the Lenny Breau Quartet and Oscar Peterson Trio, among others — as his “jazz adviser.”

The versatile Campbell nurtures a jazz career that includes gigging with his guitarist/composer son Graham Campbell and regularly programs jazz, pop and folk weekends in addition to the full slate of classical offerings to provide a choice for listeners.

He draws on jazz lingo when speaking about performing with Hiscott and his merry band of players next week, adding he’s looking forward to reprising the 16-minute work, originally performed in June at the Agassiz festival, for its FOTS première.

“The challenge in music is always finding ‘the pocket,’ as they say in jazz.

It’s about finding ‘the zone,’ and if you can do that, then the piece will basically drive itself because it creates its own energy and momentum,” the soft-spoken artist marking his 35th year at the festival helm says. “It’s what you’re always trying to do whenever you play any kind of music, whether classical or jazz, and when you’re there, you know it. It just feels good. It just feels right.”

holly.harris@shaw.ca