If it ain’t baroque: vocal group reimagines itself

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This article was published 07/10/2021 (1755 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’ll be the Dead of Winter when Camerata Nova takes the stage again.

The Winnipeg vocal ensemble announced Monday it has changed its name to Dead of Winter and will perform under that moniker Nov. 27 at its Celebrating the Carol concert at Crescent Fort Rouge United Church.

Andrew Balfour, Dead of Winter’s artistic director, says arts organizations and musicians around the world have been using the COVID-19 pandemic to find ways to break down barriers between performers and artists and potential audiences. Those brainstorming sessions led to the name change.

“There was so much downtime, so I think a lot of organizations and musicians started to think about the future and how to make choral music more accessible and less elitist and with much more diversity,” Balfour says. “Camerata Nova, now Dead of Winter, started talking about, maybe this is the time we can get away from the Euro-centric, classical-oriented, Latin even, ways to describe a choral ensemble like we are, and we decided to take the plunge.

“We felt that the name, after 25 years, had served us well, but maybe it was time for a change.”

Dead of Winter also offers a hint at where the group originates, in referencing the city’s unofficial nickname, Winterpeg, and the season with which the city is most often associated.

“We feel comfortable about this name. We feel it describes where we’re from, of course, from Winnipeg, and we feel it adds a little bit of an edge,” he says.

Balfour, who founded the group in 1996 and is of Cree descent, says the name change amounts to a rebirth for the organization, which began performing Renaissance and Baroque period works but in the past five years has increased its focus on new compositions as well as choral music with Indigenous themes.

Some of those works are by Balfour himself, including Captive, the third instalment of his Truth and Reconciliation concert series, which Dead of Winter will perform in May 2022.

Camerata Nova was to present Captive in May 2020, but it wound up being one of countless Winnipeg concerts that were postponed, owing to the pandemic.

There was plenty of discussion about the new name within the vocal group’s board of directors, members of the group and with Balfour about a name change; he admits it took him a while to come around to the new moniker.

He gave the group its original name, after all.

“So when this first became discussed I was adamantly against it,” he says. “I guess in some ways, as an artist, (Camerata Nova) was my baby.”

Under any name, Dead of Winter’s singers can’t wait to return to the stage Nov. 27 and 28 for the Christmas concerts, which will have free admission (reserve tickets at deadofwinter.ca).

It is also scheduled to team up with two other local choirs, Polycoro and Canzona, at the Winnipeg Baroque Festival next April.

Choral groups have been hard-hit by the pandemic, after reports last spring from the United States found choral practices and concerts had become deadly superspreader events.

This perception remains a problem, Balfour says, and it’s a big reason why the group hasn’t performed since February 2020.

“All over the world it affected choral singing and we’re still trying to recuperate from it,” he says. “I know many professional orchestras, their music unions do not want large-scale choirs behind them. They’re still frightened of that.”

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Not only is October the first busy concert period in Winnipeg in 18 months, a trove of Manitoba artists from different genres are releasing singles, videos, EPs and albums this month. Here are a few:

• Sierra Noble returned from a five-year hiatus to perform with Doc Walker at the Unite 150 concert on Aug. 28 at Shaw Park. The Winnipeg-based singer-songwriter and fiddler followed that up with a new single, Let Me Get Out of Here, which came out Oct. 1.

• Touching, the artistic alias of former Jazz Winnipeg artistic director Michael Falk, released a set of stylish videos and indie-rock songs last May that showed Winnipeg and parts of rural Manitoba in an artistic light. Those songs have become the backbone of a new album, littleworlds, which comes out Oct. 29. To see a new video of the song Tony Called the Muscle, set in a boxing ring, you can check it out here: wfp.to/touchingtony.

• A video that should earn a few chuckles is Boy Golden’s latest single, KD and Lunch Meat (wfp.to/boygoldenkd).

Boy Golden, the nom de plume for city singer-songwriter Liam Duncan, released the album Church of Better Daze in July and the video has Boy Golden band members throwing pasta against a paint canvas while visiting an art gallery.

The upbeat rocker, and the video idea, appears to have stuck as KD and Lunch Meat has been called the “song of the summer” by CBC Radio 3 DJ Grant Lawrence.

alan.small@winnipegfreepress.com

Twitter:@AlanDSmall