Embracing the space

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This article was published 24/06/2021 (1949 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The only thing missing during the recording sessions for Leanne Zacharias’s debut album was the Big Bad Wolf.

The Brandon cellist set up microphones in a straw-bale observatory in Saskatchewan, two historic country churches near Manitou, one made of wood and another of stone, and a log cabin in northwestern Ontario while recording Music for Spaces, which comes out Friday.

And while the record includes the odd bird singing and cricket chirping along with Zacharias’s cello, nowhere is there any huffing and puffing, nor are there three little pigs scrambling for their lives.

The wide range of tones Zacharias creates with just four strings might not blow your house down, but it could knock your socks off.

Zacharias, who also is an associate professor with Brandon University’s School of Music, grew up in Morden, where she learned of the two tiny churches that are located about 40 kilometres west of the small Pembina Valley city.

St. Luke’s Pembina Crossing Anglican Church is the wooden church, built in 1922, while St. Mary St. Alban Anglican Church, near tiny Kaleida, is a stone church built in 1892 using rocks collected by farmers in the surrounding area. Both are recognized as historic sites by the Manitoba Historical Society.

“I think of these sites that I found like music boxes, a perfect, small environment for a solo instrument.” Zacharias says. “These are both buildings I was aware of from growing up in this area, and just being aware of beautiful historic sites around the Prairie.”

She has performed the five pieces in Music for Spaces several times in Winnipeg and in concerts around the world, but the inspiration to put them on an album together came from an event that was part performance art, part concert that took place during the 2017 edition of the Agassiz Chamber Music Festival in Winnipeg.

Titled The Listening Booth, it saw Zacharias perform in a small gallery space; just one audience member at a time would enter and listen to her play. Music for Spaces is Zacharias’s way to recreate those person-to-person experiences.

“The project has been about finding a unique space that allows for an intimate moment for the listener between the cello itself, getting really close to it, and getting a close encounter with the pieces,” Zacharias says. “I knew it was possible to do that for a recording but I didn’t want to use a conventional recording studio for that.”

The observatory — made from straw bales with a wooden floor — is near Lumsden, Sask., north of Regina. Zacharias says she wanted to embrace the sounds of the outdoors with her performance, whether they came from curious animals or gusts of wind.

“It’s a very small cube,” Zacharias says. “Each wall has an open window, as well as the ceiling, so you can see out in every direction. It’s an incredible way of framing the Prairie landscape. It has a very specific acoustic and it is quite resonant inside.”

A log cabin near Sioux Narrows, Ont., which Zacharias remembers visiting as a youngster, was the final recording studio for Music for Spaces, and it added a small bit of risk. She and her bulky cello had to travel on bumpy logging roads and then take a 20-minute motorboat ride, after carefully gauging the weather conditions to ensure a safe passage.

It wasn’t Zacharias’s first experience with taking her cello on the water, though. Her Brandon University bio says she approaches her musical life like an extreme sport, and one night several years ago in Austin, Texas — she earned her doctorate in musical arts at the University of Texas — she combined her love of boating with her cello virtuosity.

“My job as the performer in that concert was to row myself to the site with my cello in the case in the rowboat, set down the anchor and get the cello out and play from the rowboat,” she says. “I had a lot of trepidation in that performance and I certainly did many dry-run rehearsals in which the cello case was empty before actually going through with the real thing.”

Zacharias has broken the classical-music mould by releasing two music videos for the album. The first one, Studio, uses animation by Winnipeg filmmaker and singer-songwriter Christine Fellows that is inspired by the piece by Canadian composer Michael Oesterle (wfp.to/zachariasstudio).

In the second video, for Shadow Play (wfp.to/shadowplay), choreographer Lesandra Dodson, a University of Winnipeg grad who teaches at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, N.B., interprets Zacharias’s lightning-quick finger-picking, known as pizzicato, via modern dance.

“I was giddy, giddy, both times,” Zacharias says, describing her reaction to Fellows’ and Dodson’s interpretations of her playing. “That’s what I always seek in performance or in video or in music in any realm, that sense of wonder and surprise… Each of them created a very specific world through their piece that I think I can only understand part of.”

Zacharias had been scheduled to perform in January as part of Groundswell’s 2021 concert series, but she says the Winnipeg show will go on either in the late summer or early fall, when audiences are allowed to attend indoor concerts once again.

alan.small@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter:@AlanDSmall