ArtSpring Island Arts Centre Society

MET Opera Broadcast Stars Diva Renée Fleming

When writing about the Metropolitan Opera’s new production of The Merry Widow starring the great Renée Fleming, the Huffington Post says:

“It is hard to imagine a merrier widow than Renée Fleming, and she swirls through the Metropolitan Opera's sumptuous new production of Franz Lehar's popular operetta…” If last week’s opera broadcast at ArtSpring, The Barber of Seville, was a good place to start for opera debutants then The Merry Widow by Franz Lehár is even more so for anyone interested in venturing into the opera world. The production, which is in English and broadcast live at ArtSpring on Saturday, January 17th at 10:00 a.m., stars opera superstar Renée Fleming and Kelli O’Hara, the Broadway star in her MET debut. This operetta is presented in English and comes complete with can-can dancing (ever so slightly risqué), elaborate costumes, gorgeous singing and romantic characters. The story centers on the poverty-stricken Grand Duchy of Pontevedro.…

Composer Iman Habibi Gets Creative at ArtSpring

Composer and pianist Iman Habibi is at ArtSpring all this week with the Emily Carr String Quartet for a creative residency. Iman Habibi is working on a new piece for the Emily Carr String Quartet. His music is contemplative, melodic and very beautiful. Habibi is an award-winning composer whose work has been programmed by prestigious concert organizations such as The Marilyn Horne Foundation (New York), The Canadian Opera Company (Toronto), Tapestry New Opera (Toronto), Vox Novus (New York), Atlantic Music Festival (Maine), the BCScene Festival (Ottawa), and the Powell Street Festival (Vancouver). On Friday August 15th at 6 p.m. the public is invited to experience sections of this new work, hear about Iman’s creative process and participate in a question and answer session with the composer and the Emily Carr String Quartet. This is a unique opportunity to see behind the scenes of an artists creative process. Informal performance: when: Fri Aug 15th at 6 pm cost: free…

7th ArtSpring Chamber Music Festival this Week!

Since 2008, the Salt Spring Chamber Music Festival has had its home at ArtSpring. Again this July 21-26, the distinguished faculty David Visentin (Artistic Director), Hiroko Kagawa, Paula Kiffner, Kai Gleusteen, Catherine Ordronneau and Guest Artist-in-Residence Guillaume Tardif bring their vast talents to spread the music of Bach, Haydn, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Ysaye, Ravel and Faure through ArtSpring. This year the Festival will bring the music to the community with impromptu mini-concerts outside Salt Spring Books, in Centennial Park and at busker corner on McPhillips Ave. The SSCMF faculty is remarkable in its vast artistic and pedagogical experience. It includes musicians and concertmasters with major Canadian and International orchestras, founders of ensembles such as the Boreas String Quartet, and winners of international music competitions. There are members of the SSCMF faculty who are also faculty with some of the most well-respected Canadian and international mus…

New ArtSpring Director Gears Up for Summer

Just two weeks after traveling west across the country with her dog, Mia, ArtSpring’s new Executive/Artistic Director, Cicela Månsson, has rolled up her sleeves and is busy at work. “I’m thrilled to be in such a wonderful place and to have the chance to do work that makes a real difference in the community,” says the former artistic director and general manager of the Bobcaygeon Music Council. “The variety of ArtSpring’s summer programming, our Chamber Music festival and the four arts residencies we’re hosting are a veritable smörgåsbord of musical delicacies. It’s going to be great.” With a wide enthusiastic smile it is clear that Cicela is pretty impressed with the programming choices made by her predecessor. On July 14th, Italian jazz-folk musicians Riccardo Tesi & Banditaliana kick-off the summer series with the first of two outdoor patio shows, after which they head to the Vancouver Folk Festival. On July 17th, Tannis Slimmon, one of Canada’s best singer/so…

Play Celebrates Life of Tommy Douglas

What is remembered of even the most famous of us a few decades after our death? Often lamentably little beyond a few salient facts. Think of Tommy Douglas, whom Canadians in at 2004 CBC poll voted "The Greatest Canadian" of all time. What comes to mind at the mention of his name but a few of the most obvious facts? He was from Saskatchewan. He invented Medicare. He was leader of the CCF (whatever exactly that was) and then first leader of the Federal NDP. OK, what else? Wasn't he a preacher of some sort, a Baptist maybe? But what about the man? Who was he and what were his principles and his passions? What personal vision for our country and for the human societies of ordinary people that make up its parts drove him and gave him whatever place he has in our history? One of the roles of the arts is to recover memory. Actor John Nolan has spent the last few decades of his life keeping the legacy and the specific story of Tommy Douglas alive through theatre. For five yea…

Incredible Dance Show with Taiko Drumming on Salt Spring

Karoshi, the next show in ArtSpring’s dance series, blows off some serious workplace steam on Monday, April 7th with Shay Kuebler’s Dance troupe from Vancouver. Merging dance, multimedia and live Taiko drumming, Shay Kuebler's Karoshi (which is a Japanese term that translates literally to "death from overwork") physically and visually depicts the clash between extreme societal pressure to conform and personal fulfillment. The five male dancers propel each other to feats thought impossible of the human body. Kuebler, who has performed before at ArtSpring with Vancouver’s 605 Collective, brings this unique vocabulary of contemporary and hip hop dance combined with martial arts to turn out a high kicking, karate chopping, back flipping sensational performance that Salt Springers will not want to miss. Exploring the idea of extreme working conditions, Kuebler takes anger-management to the next level in this explosive and darkly funny program set to the tone of suffocating …

Ballet this Sunday. Minus the Riot.

On May 29, 1913 Paris witnessed history’s most famous theatrical riot. The audience for the first performance of The Rite of Spring was shocked, so the story goes, by Stravinsky’s unprecedented music and Diaghilev’s daring choreography. Fights broke out and the police had to be called to quell the brouhaha. But as with many good stories in history, nothing is quite as it seems. By the second performance the following night everything was calm and the audience applauded heartily. It seems that the opening night crowd came ready to make trouble even before the first note sounded. The art world in Paris had its factions and loyalties, and animosities ran deep. As innovative as Stravinsky’s music certainly was, and as profoundly as it and the ballet probed the visceral impulses of human experience, the work was recognized almost from the beginning as one of the most interesting and influential creations of the 20th Century. Now, 101 years later, we get to revisit this e…

Portland's Star Dance Company on Salt Spring

Portland’s Northwest Dance Project, one of the most widely praised contemporary dance companies on the American West Coast, has been called by the American press “one of the hottest dance troupes in the country” and they perform at ArtSpring on Monday, March 10. The company was started and continues to be directed by Sarah Slipper. She was born and raised in Vancouver and received her dance training at Britain’s Royal Ballet School and at the Royal Winnipeg Ballet School. She made her professional debut with the Royal Winnipeg in 1980 and went on to dance principal roles in many classical and contemporary ballets. After leaving the stage as a dancer, she studied theatre in Winnipeg and at Oxford and became first an independent choreographer, mainly in the US, and then founding Artistic Director of Northwest Dance Project. In the last two decades she has created over 40 works which have been performed across the world from the Bolshoi to the Washington Ballet, Alberta Ball…

New Music: Crossing the Bridge into the Unknown

Contemporary composers, no less than Mozart or Beethoven or Brahms, work to craft sound into compositions to help us understand the world we live in and the inner workings of our lives. Though New Music is sometimes seen as frightening and unfamiliar by audiences, it is by crossing the bridge into the unknown that we often discover the most. Last summer at ArtSpring we had a rare opportunity to witness one of Canada’s most important living composers, Linda Catlin Smith, in the process of working on a new solo piano work for one of Canada’s best pianists, Eve Egoyan. They were at ArtSpring for a week-long creative residency exploring, developing and refining the new work. Now, Nocturnes and Chorales, which is what the new work came to be called, will be premiered in a concert on Friday, February 21 as the centrepiece in Eve Egoyan’s presentation of new music from four contemporary composers – American James Tenney, Britain’s Micheal Finnissy, Piers Hellawell from Northern …

One-Woman Play Explores Drug-Facilitated Sexual Assault

To entertain. To explore. To inform. These have always been the pillars on which live theatre is built. On Wednesday, February 18 ArtSpring brings a highly praised one-woman play to Salt Spring in which actress Emmilia Gordon presents a powerful drama about drink spiking and drug facilitated sexual assault. If that sounds heavy duty, well, it is and it isn’t. The subject is serious and sobering, but the dramatic realization is dynamic, engaging, and, if it doesn’t sound too odd to say it, irresistibly entertaining. Come see the show to become informed, but come to see it also for the sheer vigour and brilliance of its acting. Dissolve, written by Vancouver playwright Meghan Gardiner and directed by Renee Iaci (whom you may remember playing one of the two leads in Summer of My Amazing Luck presented at ArtSpring two years ago), will be performed twice on February 18 – in the morning for students from GISS, and at 7:30 at ArtSpring for the general public (with parents…

Driving Miss Daisy on Stage at ArtSpring

Regardless of the play, theatre is always an act of courage: How to convince an audience that what they see on stage matters, not just as entertainment, but as an exploration of intense moments of human experience. You’d think the courage to attempt this is especially necessary for new and experimental theatre, for works that seek to transport audiences to previously unknown territories of form or content or style. But often the greatest courage needed is in revisiting stories that are already familiar to audiences. How do you present on stage something like Driving Miss Daisy, a show that almost everyone has seen in the memorable Oscar-winning movie with Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman, and manage to make it fresh and meaningful. This is the challenge faced by Vancouver’s Arts Club Theatre in the production it is currently touring through BC which will be presented by ArtSpring on February 10 and 11. The story of course concerns a proper and somewhat ornery Sou…

Les Voix Humaines in Concert February 7

That history repeats itself is a truism so widely known that we tend to ignore it. The Taliban we read about endlessly in the newspaper is a case in point. Here are a bunch of irrational Islamists determined to overthrow secular government in the name of a radically fundamentalist religion. They seem animated by a hatred of art, culture, normal civility and all the good things we value in civilization. Except that we’ve seen it all before. In mid-17th century England, puritan fundamentalists high-jacked Parliament, murdered the king, and instituted a dictatorship called the Protectorate under Oliver Cromwell. They suppressed the theatre, banned most music as a sinful distraction from the constant duty to serve God, and generally sought to make life miserable for everyone. Interestingly, the one area of musical life they left alone was music performed among friends for private enjoyment, so it is not surprising that the era encouraged chamber music and saw a great fl…

World-Famous Cellist Performs December 3rd

Raphael Wallfisch, one of the greatest living cellists in the world, visits ArtSpring on Tuesday, December 3 for a concert of music by Bach, Brahms, Debussy and Stravinsky. So what, you say. What makes him so special? For starters, he has played with all the major orchestras in the world, and has recorded every known work for solo cello, with the exception of the Elgar Cello Concerto which he has so far avoided out of respect for the great Jacqueline du Pré, whose recording he considers unsurpassable. Wallfisch was born in post-War Britain from parents who were both musicians, his mother Anita Lasker-Wallfisch having survived Auschwitz because she was a cellist, an experience she subsequently narrated in her book Inherit the Truth. His parents kept this background from the young Raphael for quite a while so that he could approach music on its own terms, unaffected by the horrors that might otherwise cling to it in a child’s mind. He tells a charming story of one of …

African American Roots Music Group Performs November 14th

Digging for roots is rewarding not just for gardeners. Much of what we value in music too has its roots in a past that is often obscure, but whose recovery can enrich both our ears and minds. In the case of African-American music, we think we know the terrain: the Blues, Gospel, Jazz. But behind all that was the earlier, more original tradition of the slave era, only a step or two removed from the musical heritage of West Africa and the Caribbean. This is the cultural soil that California’s Linda Tillery has been exploringing for over 40 years. Her work has been partly scholarly – reviewing documents, researching archival recordings, working as a historian. More importantly, however, she has succeeded in bringing the music back into live performance. Her Cultural Heritage Choir presents a live concert at ArtSpring on Thursday, November 14 at 7:30pm. The word “choir” is a little unusual in this context. The ensemble actually consists of four a cappella singers and…

Sackbut and Vocal Ensemble Peforms Sunday

After all the fog we’ve been having the last few weeks, Salt Springers know a thing or two about the meaning of the word “obscure.” We know that the harbour, the hills, the contours of this place are as lovely as ever, only hidden from view. The same thing can be true about music. Time can obscure real gems that remain gems nevertheless, however unfamiliar: Consider for example Adam Jarzebski, Mikolaj Zielenski and Jacek Hyancithus Rozycki. They were Baroque composers living in the late 17th century, and are no doubt as obscure as you can get, certainly in comparison to Vivaldi, Corelli or Scarlatti. Even worse, they were composers at the Polish court at a time when all eyes were on Italy, Germany and England, and we all know how distant Eastern Europe was and is from anywhere. On top of that, think of the sackbut and admit that it is about as obscure a musical instrument as you are likely to hear on Salt Spring, or anywhere. Blessed with its funny name, the sackbut wa…

Iconic Dancer Margie Gillis Performs Oct. 19th

Margie Gillis is unquestionably one of the greatest artists Canada has ever produced. Her appearance at ArtSpring in a new dance work on Saturday, October 19 marks fourty years of remarkable achievement as a dancer, choreographer and inspiration to several generations of young artists intent on exploring how movement can reveal and express the inner life of the self. Margie is best known as a solo dancer, but her hundreds of works include duets, small and large group pieces for the stage, as well as work in film and television. The new work she brings to ArtSpring, called Bulletins from Immortality, explores the world and mind of poet Emily Dickinson. The work presents distinguished American actress Elizabeth Parrish playing the role of Dickinson, and Margie dancing the emotive and spiritual story of the poet’s life. “It is a huge honour for us to welcome Margie Gillis to Salt Spring,” says ArtSpring Artistic Director George Sipos. “Few artists in our country have h…

Singing Sideways: Adi Braun Brings Jazz to ArtSpring

What do you do if you’re born with a natural musical gift into a family of opera singers? What do you make of such a blessing, or, alternatively, curse? That was the question facing Adi Braun, the jazz/cabaret singer who performs at ArtSpring on Saturday, October 12. Her parents were both prominent stars of the Canadian opera world, and her brother, Russell Braun, has become one of the leading baritones of the modern generation. Adi’s first answer as a teenager was to turn to jazz and pop, recording her first album at age 19. But then the second answer after high school was to leave all that behind and follow in the family trade, studying classical music at the University of Toronto and then performing for several years as a singer with the Canadian Opera Company and Toronto’s Opera Atelier. But tug of the musical heart was too strong, and in 2000 she began moving “sideways”, as she puts it, into both jazz and cabaret singing. After that there was no looking back. From…

Jazz Legend Harold Mabern in Concert Monday

When classical musicians talk about the history of music they talk about form: polyphony, fugue, sonata form, twelve-tone serialism, and all the rest of it. Liken it to jazz musicians and you hear a list of names of legendary performers: Miles Davis, Art Tatum, Dizzy Gillespie, Oscar Peterson, and on and on. Why is that? Largely it’s in the nature of jazz itself, a music based on improvisation, individual temperament and above all style as a subjective rather than rigorous discipline. One of the names that features on the list of jazz legends, the great pianist Harold Mabern, visits ArtSpring on Monday September 30 for a 7:30 performance with Vancouver’s Cory Weeds Trio. Mabern, now 77, lived through the golden age of modern jazz. Born in Memphis Tennessee, he moved to New York in 1959 and landed in the middle of the important blossoming of post-war American jazz. Between 1968 and 2012 he has made twenty records as leader, and participated as sideman in an astonishi…

Piano Fortissimo: Beatrice Rana in Concert

This spring all eyes in the classical music world were on Fort Worth, Texas, as they are every four years for the Van Cliburn Piano Competition, one of the most prestigious competitions for the best and brightest pianists from around the world. The favourite this year for many who followed the performances was 20-year old Italian pianist Beatrice Rana. After all, she had swept the prizes two years earlier at the Montreal International Piano Competition when she was only 18. Here is what Nina Tichman, pianist and professor at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz in Cologne, had to say about her: “One doesn´t have to be a gifted prophet to predict that Beatrice Rana will be – in fact, already is – one of the most significant artists of her generation... Music lovers all over the world can look forward to many many years of wonderful performances from this exceptional person.” This month that world begins on Salt Spring when Ms Rana inaugurates a three performance Canadi…

Chamber Music Festival This Week at ArtSpring

The Salt Spring Chamber Music Festival springs to life at ArtSpring this week with three great concerts and a week of learning for the festival’s resident students and faculty. This year's concerts will feature many highly talented musicians who play diverse instruments that range from banjo to cello and from piano to oboe. The first performance on Tuesday, July 23rd features Jayme Stone, the amazing banjo player who wowed his Salt Spring audience last summer. He’ll be joined by Moira Smiley, a terrific singer he has been working with at the recent Vancouver Folk Music Festival. Moira is an avid collector of American folk music and Jayme, who loves collaborating with musicians from diverse traditions, is really excited to play with her at ArtSpring. They'll also be joined for a part of the concert by the classical musicians of the Visentin Ensemble, who are here for the week running the Salt Spring Chamber Music Festival. On Thursday, July 25th Canadian cellist Hannah Add…

African Music Concert This Sunday

Last year H’SAO, a higly gifted band of musicians of Chadian origin now living and making music in Montreal, hit the Vancouver Folk Festival and were absolutely amazing. This Sunday, July 7th at 2:30 p.m. at ArtSpring, Salt Springers will have a rare chance to hear this stunning group in concert. Including instrumentalists and singers, this young, talented band has made an important place for themselves on the World Music scene. They draw their inspiration from Gospel and from traditional African music, especially from its Chadian roots. To this they add a love of jazz, soul and R&B. The group has toured extensively through France, Australia, Haiti, Sweden, South Korea, South Africa and of course Canada. This summer they continue with a busy schedule performing in British Columbia along with five other provinces and various U.S. states. In 2009 H’SAO was nominated for an ADISQ award in Quebec for best World Music Album of the Year. Their third and most recent CD, …