Passing the baton

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This article was published 06/09/2023 (975 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Sean McManus is in the middle of a Manitoba arts cabinet shuffle.

He had been the executive director of Manitoba Music since 2015, but resigned this summer to take over the same job with the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, which begins its 51st season tonight at the Crescent Arts Centre with American pianist Awadagin Pratt.

“It’s all pretty fresh. I had a couple days of easing in, but this first concert came up pretty quick. We’re in the thick of it now,” McManus says.

“It’s a similar size and a similar style of team, where everybody is doing a little bit of everything, from strategic thinking to the execution. I’m pretty comfortable in that kind of environment and that’s part of what attracted me to the organization.”

The game of executive directors’ musical chairs began last November when Vicki Young announced she would end a 20-year run as the MCO’s managing director at the end of the organization’s 50th anniversary season in June.

The MCO hired McManus June 20, only 12 days after Manitoba Film and Music announced Lynne Skromeda, the head of the Winnipeg Folk Festival, would be its executive director and the province’s film commissioner starting Aug. 8.

Vanessa Kuzina, an executive with Toronto record label Six Shooter Records who has ties to Winnipeg, takes over McManus’s old Manitoba Music job Sept. 11. The search for Skromeda’s replacement at the folk festival continues.

While every arts organization is unique, McManus’s leadership skills gained during almost nine years as head of Manitoba Music will work at his new post.

“The biggest difference for me now, is at Manitoba Music, as a service organization, we were supporting artists, supporting festivals and presenting organizations. In this role, I get to work more directly with a group of incredibly talented musicians and work directly with audiences and watch those two come together,” McManus says.

“That’ll be the new side that I’m excited about.”

He has a musical background — he studied the saxophone while earning a music degree from Brandon University in 2000 and earned a masters in ethnomusicology from York University in Toronto in 2005.

He also helped support the province’s classical artists at Manitoba Music as well as rock, pop, hip-hop and performers.

While saxophone is an instrument rarely featured in classical music, McManus’s experience playing with jazz and folk groups years ago should help him relate to the soul of the organization — the musicians and conductor Anne Manson.

“I do think it can be a valuable aspect of this work, to have that connection and to have some sense of what it’s like to be on their side of it,” he says. “There’s something special about having been behind the music stand.”

The MCO grew substantially during Young’s two decades at the helm, but McManus takes over in an unsettled arts climate still trying to rebound after the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown.

Arts groups around the world are encouraging audiences to attend live performances as they did in 2019 and before.

“There’s changes coming for all organizations and ensembles in the art sector. We’re still figuring out what a post-COVID world looks like,” he says. “I hate to use that terminology, but the truth is that it’s had a pretty big impact on people’s habits to going out, not just concerts, but the theatre and the movies.

“We’re excited to keep programming. It’s something the MCO has always been good at, finding young talented soloists, young, new composers.”

MCO will continue its outreach into Manitoba communities to create experiences across the province, as well as focusing on young guest soloists and composers for its programs, he says.

“That’s not a change in the way that we operate, necessarily, but it provides us continually with new blood, so to speak, and exciting new opportunities to work with young artists.”

McManus, 47, attended many MCO concerts in the past when he was able — his former job kept him on the road a lot, travelling to music events in other cities — and he’s keen to hear Pratt perform Bach’s Harpsichord Concerto in A Major, BWV 1055, often called Bach’s keyboard concerto, tonight.

Manson and the orchestra will also perform Henry Purcell’s Suite from The Fairy Queen, Allaqu by Marcus Goddard, Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and Rounds by American composer Jessie Montgomery.

“I’m the kind of concert-goer who likes to listen to the repertoire before I go,” he says. “I found the Glenn Gould recording of (the Bach), which was exciting and fun, and then I realized Awadagin has recorded it too. I’m super-excited to see it live.”

Alan.Small@winnipegfreepress.com

Twitter: @AlanDSmall