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VIMA’s eclectic scene ready to roll

The Vancouver Island Music Awards (VIMA) is gearing up for the 9th Annual Awards show on April 28th. Some of this year’s nominees include the Tequila Mockingbird Orchestra, Steph MacPherson, Woodsmen, Man Made Lake, and Carli and Julie Kennedy.  Andrea Routley recently talked with James Kasper, the founder and producer of VIMA, about what to expect.

So, 9th Annual Vancouver Island Music Awards, and you’ve been there from the beginning. You must have heard hundreds of submissions by now, and across such diverse categories like rock/metal, jazz, pop, spoken word . . . Have you noticed any musical trends over the years, or recurring themes? Is there a way to describe “Vancouver Island Music”?

There is definitely an eclectic scene here on the Island, with everything from blues to metal. But probably what I hear most is a kind of vocal-based organic roots-rock sound. I think it’s been like that here for years, from what I’ve observed.

Is there a particular artist or group that stands out over the years? Why?

Any artist who works hard and doesn’t give up despite the challenges and adversity . . .  Any artist who treats other artists and fans with respect and kindness no matter what level of success they achieve . . . Those are the artists who stand out to me.

The Awards show is a huge production. You’ve got 1,000 tickets for sale, up to dozens of performers, advertisers, media–camera crew, artist collaborations . . . So quick:  Best VIMA show moment ever?

Oh wow, where to begin . . . I like the moments where the audience is so excited to hear the winner’s name that people begin screaming even before the presenter is finished reading the card . . . This happened in 2011 when Aegis Fang won for Male Vocalist, and in 2012 when Lindsay Bryan won for Song of the Year. And really, the whole event is just a rush. I spend 8 months of my year preparing for the main event, and it’s pretty exciting to see it all crystallize into a 3-hour show.

Now, Worst VIMA show moment ever:

Hm, well, the cue cards have presented some interesting challenges over the years, including the first awards presentation in 2011 when the cue cards weren’t ready, and the presenters were left to improvise until I sent the hosts out to do damage control, which they they did just fine. It was stressful at the time, but some people told me later they thought it was all part of the act. Ha. Also, several years back, when David Gogo and David Lennam were hosting, they were asked to give out a door prize and they somehow procured an actual honest-to-goodness door in the rubble backstage and brought it out as a “door prize.” At that point, I shook my head and thought to myself, “I have completely lost control of this show.”

James, you are also a prolific musician, both as a touring musician and a recording artist. What can awards do for a music career?

I always advise independent musicians to just take advantage of any opportunity they can to expose their work and build their network of contacts. A music awards show is one such opportunity. And the Island Music Awards have always been much less about competition and much more about community, celebrating the Island’s music scene, and a way for a diverse array of musicians and music industry representatives to come together on one night and network with each other.

Last summer, VIMA’s put out a call for community support, seeking donations from businesses in order to continue into 2013. The goal was $100 from 50 island businesses. What happened with that?

To be honest, it wasn’t the result we were hoping for. There were some donations from a couple of businesses and a couple of musicians, which we were very grateful to receive, but the event is still in dire need of financial sponsors in order to stay afloat. Any Island business wanting to support this event can reach me at info@jameskasper.com . . . because if we can stay afloat, it would be nice to have a 10th anniversary next year!

The 9th annual Vancouver Island Music Awards show takes place Sunday, April 28th at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church, downtown Victoria. Tickets are available now. Contact info@jameskasper.com.

For the full list of 2013 nominees, visit islandmusicawards.wordpress.com.

 

Monk’s personal commentary not the journey promised

A Year at River Mountain
by Michael Kenyon
Thistledown Press, 271 pages, $19.95.

Reviewed by Judy LeBlanc

The diary form in fiction invites us into the deepest chambers of the human psyche, a terrain to which I am drawn. However, it is not a form preferred by writers for good reason; it takes a compelling narrator to hold you that up close and personal for the length of a book. Cloister that narrator in a spiritual context in a faraway country and before I turn the first page, I am excited about the premise and what most certainly will be a serious grapple with metaphysical questions, insight into the human condition, a sprinkling of ah-ha moments.

In A Year at River Mountain seasoned author, Michael Kenyon (five novels, three books of poetry) takes the reader into the world of an aging actor turned monk from Vancouver who has spent the past twelve years sequestered in a monastery in China. A visit from an actress the year before and her anticipated return forms the skeletal backdrop of the narrative. The beguiling actress named Imogen–of Shakespearean allusion–serves as a ghostly representation of the life from which he has fled and drives the narrator into musings on desire, his childhood and failed marriage, an estranged son. Kenyon strikes a tone of melancholy and timelessness as he describes the changing seasons and the monastic routines: sweeping leaves from the path to the temple, laying out nests, meditation. Nature is imbued with the narrator’s emotions: “Like the weather with its succession of storms, each ripping then drenching the forest, stirring the river into a brown, hissing snake wider every day, I am unsettled.” A sense of disturbance to the old order is heightened by the eruption of images, stark and vividly drawn: a vulture perched on the body of a drowned child as he drifts down the river, a bear nosing the old master’s corpse, a rape scene. A threat of violence lurks just beyond the monastery where unrest in the village culminates in war.

Though the seasons provide a gauge for the passage of time, the plot is more kaleidoscopic than linear. Brief and often disparate episodes drive the story forward and contribute to the character’s increasing feeling of dislocation. It is unfortunate that Kenyon didn’t allow his talent for evocative imagery to carry the weight of the story. An excess of sentence fragments evince poetic pretension. Rhetorical questions are left to hang like so many hollow pieces of laundry. Too many cryptic assertions trip me out of what might otherwise be an absorbing panorama of this man’s psychic struggle. The narrator describes his own commentary: “The massive abstractions and universalities and anonymous figures arrive anyway . . .” It is as if the author, himself, is aware of his inclination to strain toward profundity, and in the end, to fail to deliver.

This book promised a journey through a challenging terrain with the reward of a wider view. Instead, I am left with the feeling that I have scrambled through underbrush and arrived not far enough from my point of departure.

 

Judy LeBlanc is a fiction writer and a recent grad of UVIC’s MFA program.

Cheryl Strayed finds her way in Wild

Wild: from Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail
by Cheryl Strayed
Knopf, 336 pages, $29

By Lorne Daniel

“The experience of being a writer is a lot like a long walk in the wild,” Cheryl Strayed said early in her keynote address to an audience of 600 at the San Miguel Writers Conference in Mexico on February 13. The Oregon-based writer spoke of parallels between her search for new direction in her life and her literary pursuits.

Strayed’s memoir Wild: from Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail, was an Oprah book club selection, spent weeks on top of the New York Times bestsellers list and is soon to be made into a movie starring Reese Witherspoon.

The book came about only after she hit  “that bottom place in my life.” After her mother died, Strayed lost herself in promiscuous sex and heroin, destroying her marriage. Strayed, who grew up in rural Minnesota, says it was natural to go “looking for home in the wild” on the Pacific Crest Trail.

“I was just flinging myself in the direction of what is good.” In the process, “I got to feel part of the world again,” she says. “On the trail, I experienced all the consequences of my own actions.”

Even so, “experience doesn’t make a book,” she emphasizes. “Consciousness does. I didn’t have a story to tell until I started to write it.” The book was written years after the hike was completed.

“The next journey, after the hike, was becoming a writer,” she says. “I had to really, truly apprentice myself to the masters of the craft. And I did that.” She learned, in part, by “just typing out the work” of writers like Alice Munro, or writing paragraphs that tried to emulate the style of works she admired.

Strayed started writing Wild as an essay “but by page 75 of the draft we had come nowhere close to the [Pacific Crest] trail.” She realized she had to expand it into a book with a broader focus. “Structure is the toughest nut to crack,” she says of decisions about how to build the narrative and integrate events that occurred well before her trail trek.

Working from journals and her memory, Strayed also checked back in with some of the people she had met on the trail to verify her recollections. In many cases, though, Strayed was on her own in both the literal and literary sense.

In her keynote, Strayed read a scene from the book in which she is at the start of the trail but can’t budge, let alone lift and carry, her monstrous backpack. She plays the scene for considerable laughs but acknowledges a writer’s dual purposes of entertainment and engagement. “The deeper meaning of that scene is: how is it that we bear the unbearable?” As a writer, “you start to see yourself in terms of those larger questions.”

“I was wildly ambitious” in pouring herself into the book, Strayed says, but she also “embraced the fact that my book is probably going to fall short” of her literary ambitions. “I had absolutely no idea that one day my cell phone would ring and it would be Oprah Winfrey.” And for writers who might wonder, no, she says, she had no previous network of VIP connections. The book simply found–and continues to find–readers who identify with a lost person searching for her self.

 

Lorne Daniel is a Victoria-based writer of poetry and non-fiction. You can find him at www.lornedaniel.com, on Facebook and Twitter.

Retro pop inspires nostalgia . . . or confusion

Heartthrob
Tegan and Sara (2012)
Produced by Greg Kurstin, Justin Meldal-Johnsen and Rob Cavallo

Reviewed by Chris Ho

Reaching for new heights, the Canadian indie duo Tegan and Sara released their seventh studio album at the end of January and recently announced their 2013 Summer Tour with the indie-pop sensation, Fun.

It’s tempting to consider Heartthrob as a huge departure from the sisters’ signature guitar-driven indie rock that earned them their fame, although it’s been a somewhat natural progression. With the success and attention they received from their collaboration with dance-pop icons Tiesto and David Guetta, it’s no surprise that Heartthrob expresses the poppy, synth-driven side of Tegan and Sara.

However, if you were expecting the same sort of fresh and innovative pop sensibility found in previous tracks like “Feel It In My Bones,” or ‘”Alligator,” you may be slightly disappointed. With a few exceptions, nearly all of the songs from the new album are produced and written in a style that is extremely reminiscent of 80’s and 90’s pop, (which could very well brainwash the listener into either working out to “Body Break” Youtube videos or feeling a sudden urge to attend an 80’s-themed party). Or if you’re me, you put on Olivia Newton John’s “Let’s Get Physical,” after hearing the first song and hit single, “Closer.”  Be warned.

Nonetheless, with over-exaggerations aside, Heartthrob is a very honest album underneath all of the candy-coated dance beats and synth-bass lines. While the lyrics are simpler than what a Tegan and Sara fan would have come to expect, they are still ones we can relate to and are sung with a sense of conviction and honesty. Needless to say, the confessional style of Tegan and Sara’s songwriting remains throughout, even as it becomes saturated with a somewhat overwhelming amount of 80’s and 90’s pop influences. This is apparent in songs such as, “I Was A Fool and “Goodbye, Goodbye,” where everything from the vocal melodies to the synth lines and ambient elements seem to transport to listener into an episode of Dawson’s Creek or Saved By The Bell.

So as the album winds down and almost ends on a note that reminds you of a more serious side of  The Spice Girls, (as might be argued for the chorus of  “Now I’m All Messed Up”), one will either be overjoyed with nostalgia, or confused as to where this creation might fit in with modern-day pop.

 

Chris Ho is a UVic graduate and Victoria-based singer-songwriter.

Poet riffs on intersections of humans, animals and machines

The Flicker Tree: Okanagan Poems
By Nancy Holmes
Ronsdale Press, $15.95, 108 pages

Reviewed by Yvonne Blomer

The Flicker Tree’s poems praise the Okanagan’s living creatures, whether they be plants, birds, animals or humans. These poems note the see-er in the ecology of the poem and of the bird, the prickly pear, and the butterfly.

In the book’s opening poem, “Earth Star,” readers are placed in the wilderness where the human hand is ever-present, “Logged two or three times, the woods are grazed and thin,/ wrecked with beautiful litter: lichen-crusted/ branches, broken trees.” As I read, I couldn’t help but think of the poetic form the idyll and its overarching sense of paradise, its desire to praise the rural life. Nancy Holmes’s poems offer one caveat as part of that praise: they cannot ignore the human element, the spoiler in that idyll/ideal. This idyll-like stance holds in other poems, such as “Morning Dove,” “Swans in January” and in “Saskatoons,” where the natural world is imbued with the comparisons to the human–where “fat-ass fruit” is “piling up in the bank account” or in “Finch Feeder,” where the narrator is the dealer and the birds the drug users, “The junkies sit all day/ at the dangling syringe, shooting up black seed.”

Holmes’s use of simile from the human world, a kind of reversal from how poems usually find the wild in the human, continues in other poems.  In “Sagebrush Buttercup” for example, the buttercups are likened to buttons on a machine: “Let’s push these yellow buttons/ and start the spring.”

In the title poem “The Flicker Tree,” Holmes writes, “wracked by their own autumnal cries/ so piercing and sorrowful/ that when I hear them/ I too am candled/ by freshened embers of grief.” Holmes carries an awareness of the natural world as a place of worship in these lines where “candled” and “embers” recall the prayers and incense of other sanctuaries.

These poems reflect Wordsworth’s notions of “emotion recollected in tranquility,” but also convey  grief in what is offered by the window pane, the human observer, the machine. Hers not a poetry of the romantic because reflection reveals emotion centered on the loss inherent in environmental change. Holmes cannot observe the natural world and capture it in poems without also observing other impacts on that world, something Wordsworth did not face.

The first section of the book culminates in a long poem titled “Behr’s Hairstreak: Capture and Release.” This long poem focuses on the notions of “capture” and “release” so that these two things become riffs through the poem. Here, Holmes allows the poem to take leaps and trusts that the reader follows, such as, “bulrushes  brown and velvety/ like newborn foals.” A few lines later, “stiff upholstery/ like your grandmother’s chair/ let’s just stay here, stop moving,” followed by a calendar of things “I line up each day in neat rows (it starts like graph paper)/ inside me the moon waxes and/ withers like a growth (quadratic equation).” Science and poetry, scientist and poet also riff or merge in lines and images.

The other two sections in the book, on Okanagan’s places and people and on Woodhaven, “A Crisis of Place” include strong poems that did not capture me as powerfully. Some teeter too close to the political, leaning toward “message” which tends to bury magic or playfulness. That said, there are gorgeous lines: for instance, “the magpies write notes all over the mountain,” from “Giant’s Head Mountain Ghazal.”

Nancy Holmes is a spirited and wise guide to the Okanangan, its creatures and people, as well as the intersections thereof.

 

Yvonne Blomer is the Artistic Director of Planet Earth Poetry in Victoria, BC.  Her most recent book of poems is The Book of Places (Black Moss Press, 2012). Forcefield: 77 BC Women Poets (Mother Tongue Press, 2013) is forthcoming.

 

Life Underwater needs a little air

Life Underwater
Laurelle & Alexander (2012)
Boom Ting Recordings

Reviewed by Andrea Routley

Laurelle & Alexander’s debut-EP lives up to its name, with wet sounds of electric guitar and piano, and a synthesized wash to flood the remaining space, from gurgling, and in utero-like heart beats, to gulping bass details. Self-described as “Hippies with Computers,” they are clearly the west-coast variety; their saturated sound reflects the biodensity of coastal rainforest, and the submerged feeling of life under a canopy of grey cloud.

Life Underwater offers listeners five songs, two remixes, and an instrumental interlude called “Dream Wave,” a full-on hippy number, complete with the sound of the ocean waves lapping on the shore. And all of this is free to listeners. Every track contains an array of instrument sounds, yet they never feel cluttered. But the tracks that stand out for me are the ones that parse these sounds the most. They give me a chance to surface from the blur—after all, life may be underwater, but that doesn’t mean I don’t need to breathe. Laurelle’s dry, breathy vocal tone and soprano range has a subtle forcefulness to it that could have cut through the damp and saved many of these tracks from drowning, but it is submerged in vocal effects: reverberating and far away, it’s lost in the wash.

Still, there are some stellar tunes on here, and any fan of ambient electronic will love this EP. “Moon Kids” has the catchiest melody, with a little retro 80s mellow-rock guitar that’ll make you feel like pretending you were actually cool in the 80s (or even alive). (How I wish this great melodic hook didn’t disappear after the first 45 seconds!).  And my personal favourite, “Lost Stardust,” because who doesn’t love a snare drum? And why do I love that snare so much? Because the presence of that one sound does so much to balance out this slippery sonic slope, giving my ear a little traction.

Laurelle & Alexander are currently working on a full-length album, Across Oceans, to be released later this year. I’m excited about what this talented pair will deliver, but hoping they’ll remember to breathe.

Fun Game: How many water puns can you count?

 

Andrea Routley is a writer and musician based in Victoria, BC. Reviewing other people’s music makes her nervous about what people will say about her upcoming album, “After We’re Here.”

Love is blind, s***head.

Reasons to be Pretty
@ The Phoenix
Written by Neil Labute
Directed by Christine Willes
Feb 14-23 

Reviewed by Leah Callen

Reasons to be Pretty presents a world where people change relationships as easily as they shed overalls. Here, men and women take swings at each other while searching for their ideal other. Reasons to be Pretty blames women for the superficial desire to look good and men for desiring good-looking women. These characters are caught in a vicious cycle.

The women and men are flip sides of one another, barely skirting the clichés of beauty versus brains. Reese Nielsen as insecure Steph is exactly what she accuses her boyfriend of being: an overbearing know-it-all (who may kill your fish if you push her). Yet, I felt great sorrow for her as she spends the rest of the play taking his casual insult to heart and reinventing herself. In her humble monologue, she tells us she doesn’t have much but she likes what she has and she’s got to protect it. I saw her as a diamond in the rough, her off-the-charts cursing a defense mechanism.

Alberta Holden as the bouncy Carly, the security guard who’s always on the beat, almost becomes the butt of well-read Greg’s jokes. But she confesses a dark vulnerability by flashlight while doing her rounds at the warehouse: beauty comes with perks and pain. Her face is a creep magnet. With team spirit, Alex Frankson plays childish, Just-do-it Kent who skips through life and compares his lover’s eyes to crayon colours.  Robin Gadsby shines as Greg, so thoughtful in his reading list and thoughtless about his girlfriend’s feelings. His thematic T-shirts broadcast the mood of each scene brilliantly. I enjoyed the shocking fistfight between jock and bookworm. Like two oversized children, they duke it out on the playground, but the bully has it coming.

It’s ironic that a play about the superficiality of looks is so visually exciting. We, the audience, become a character in the actors’ mirrors, and we’re told to mind our own business (check out the Phoenix bathrooms at halftime, hint, hint). Moving sets, film projections, and songs like “Bad Romance” set the atmosphere beautifully. The mall scene is full of visual metaphors: the red roses match the bloodstains on Greg’s In Cold Blood T-shirt; the male and female bathroom signs point in opposite directions–all illustrate the relationship war.

The play sometimes stretches things too far. Steph’s unedited rage needs a rewrite. As a woman, I related to both female characters: I’ve had people put down my looks and also been stalked by strangers. Perhaps that’s the female condition in our society–hated and desired. Overall, the play made me happy I’m single.

Why are we so critical when looking in the mirror? As Greg would say, it’s all just packaging. One man’s Venus is another’s regular girl. But, I also believe love should cast a glow on your partner’s face. I agree with Steph: “love is blind, s***head.”

 

Leah Callen is a budding poet-playwright-screenwriter studying at the University of Victoria.

Polley’s Stories We Tell moves audiences with simple honesty

Stories We Tell
Sarah Polley, Director
Viewed at  the Available Light Film Fest
February 4-10, 2013, Whitehorse, Yukon

Reviewed by Nadine Sander-Green

Stories We Tell is an experiment that went incredibly well.

In her first documentary, Sarah Polley searches for the truth about her mother, an actress who died of cancer when Polley was eleven years old. She does so in the most direct way she can think of: by interviewing everybody and anybody who knew the exuberant Diane Polley. We meet Diane through her handful of children, her husband Michael, her friends, an actor who worked on stage with her for only a few months. She is remembered as a fearless character who had a terrible voice but sang all the time. Diane was the life of the party, a woman always trying to fix the mess she had created, a loving wife, a mistress.

In several interviews Polley has admitted she had no idea if the film (which took over five years to make) was going to amount to anything. She even said she was embarrassed to be making it. She couldn’t figure out why she needed to tell the world her family’s story.

What comes out of this experiment is a surprise. Polley’s biological father is not Michael Polley, the father who helped shape her into the woman she is today. Her biological father is Harry Gulkin, a film producer who had met Diane when she was acting in a play. Although Polley’s family joked she might not be Michael’s real daughter (her blonde hair says it all), it seems as if that’s all it ever was: a joke.

For those who have followed Polley’s career, from child-actress in CBC’s Road to Avonlea to director of the critically acclaimed Away from Her, learning about  her “real” father is a juicy piece of information. But scandal is not what the documentary is about.

Stories We Tell questions why we need to expose our personal stories. It’s not a new question, especially in this age of the memoir and general lack of privacy. The answer doesn’t come quite to the surface in the film, but it’s there. It’s in the audience’s trust as the film meanders along in no clear direction except for Polley’s steely determination. It’s in the way the film is paced; the slow unravelling of little truths that make the film whole.

At first glance, Polley’s story is not exceptional in any way. Many people uncover truths about their parent’s infidelities. Some discover more devastating truths. Many have suffered more. The success in this film is simple: Polley makes her story matter. It’s her honesty, her vulnerability, but mostly it’s her constant prodding for some version of truth.

Members of the audience are sure to leave with more questions about truth and memoir and the need to tell stories than they arrived with. Polley has brought to light what many have ignored when crafting their stories; it’s easier to believe there is only one truth, rather than incorporate many.

But the audience will also leave with the weight of a full story, and a darn good one at that.

 

Nadine Sander-Green is a writer and photographer based in Whitehorse, Yukon.

 

 

 

An ode to bodies electric

In the Next Room (The Vibrator Play)
@ Theatre Inconnu until March 2/13
Directed by Naomi Simpson
Written by Sarah Ruhl

Reviewed by Leah Callen

Sparks fly in the 1880s when Dr. Givings electrifies women with his revolutionary therapy for hysteria–a vibrator. His wife, Mrs. Givings, is a live wire desperate to plug in to her husband’s secret practice in the next room. But the good Dr. turns her off and turns on the sensitive Mrs. Daldry instead, with a prescription of casual pleasure to put the roses back in her cheeks. Tension builds when Leo, a passionate painter, a robust Mr. Daldry, and a black woman named Elizabeth are drawn into the undercurrent. The play warns: be careful not to over-pet a cat or it might burst into flames.

Watching In the Next Room causes fits of laughter. The actors’ paroxysms were so refreshingly real and unabashed when struck by erotic lightning. Emma Conde hit the high note perfectly as the delicate Mrs. Daldry undressing dutifully. Elizabeth Marsh delivered an emotional climax as the wet nurse, as natural as rain. I was torn by her character being more comfortable in her own skin than the two uptight, white ladies–both touching and stereotypical. James Roney was one hundred percent Bohemian as Leo who wants to immortalize the down-to-earth Elizabeth with a painted halo. Celine Richmond gave a magnetic performance as the midwife, Annie, while Jason Stevens was a forceful whirlwind as Mr. Daldry, who just wants his appetite satisfied. Odile Nelson was a bit of a caricature as the intense Mrs. Givings, but she drove the plot forward with a firm reign and growing pathos. All the while, Julian Cervello basks in the electric halo of his table lamp as Dr. Givings. In a clever lighting maneuver, each time a patient finds sexual enlightenment, they too achieve a golden halo.

I enjoyed the sense of humour in the simultaneous staging. Mrs. Givings pours cups of tea for guests in her rosy living room while her husband strips them down to their basic anatomy in his clinic. When the power goes out, both husband and wife must resort to old-fashioned methods to get by. While Dr. Givings examines an uncomfortable patient in his office, people finger a piano in the living room.

Sarah Ruhl’s wordplay is often hilarious, but she also gets downright poetic. The play questions soulless, mechanical sex. Leo muses that a light without a flame is not divine, and Mrs. Givings prophesies that future fireflies will be electric. The lyrical dialogue of In The Next Room gave me playwright envy. The plot has a darkly comical edge. There’s a fine line between being electrified and electrocuted, between delight and discomfort. These characters marvel at the literal electricity passing between them. However, the true charge comes from within, or as Walt Whitman once dubbed it in his poem I Sing the Body Electric: “the charge of the Soul.” Science has yet to unlock that mystery.

Loosen your corset strings before you go to the theatre: I’m sure you’ll get a buzz out of this daring production.

In the Next Room runs until March 2 at Theatre Inconnu, 1923 Fernwood Road (across from The Belfry). Tickets available for purchase online or over the phone at 250.360.0234.

 

Reviewer Leah Callen is a budding poet-playwright-screenwriter studying at the University of Victoria.

 

Dubeau revisits cinema and gaming moments

Silence, on joue! (A Time for Us)
Angèle Dubeau & La Pieta (2012)
Game Music

Reviewed by Aaron Shepard

Angèle Dubeau, a stellar violinist, is one of Canada’s most accomplished and celebrated classical musicians. Along with La Pieta, the all-female ensemble that has accompanied her since 1997, she has recorded rich, exuberant interpretations of composers such as Philip Glass, Arvo Part and John Adams that are faithful to the spirit of the original, yet accessible to a broad audience. Her signature sound of virtuoso musicianship, lush orchestrations and warm production values invariably smooths the edges from the more experimental pieces. Not that you’ll find anything too edgy in Silence, on joue! This collection of soundtrack covers is about giving the people what they want. Featuring selections from films as varied as Memoirs of a Geisha, The English Patient, Modern Times, and Cinema Paradiso, Silence will tug at the heart and memory strings of cinephiles. Some tracks, like “Over the Rainbow” and “Concerning Hobbits,” are instantly recognizable, while songs from Hana-Bi and L’odyssee d’Alice Tremblay are a bit more obscure. Regardless, they all tend toward the romantic, the pensive and the uplifting, and are perhaps too similar, too polished, to truly excite.

I’m not saying these songs lack sophistication. Composers like Ennio Morricone, John Williams and Joe Hisaishi, while mainstream, are too brilliant to turn out mere sugary pap, while Dubeau and La Pieta’s thoughtful instrumentation lends subtle depth to even a sentimental piece like “My Heart Will Go On.” If there is nothing unexpected here, these near-flawless interpretations offer a pleasurable, nostalgic journey for the listener.

Game Music, stretching the boundaries of classical music through interpretations of video game theme songs, is the more interesting of the two collections. Here, Dubeau and La Pieta capture the sense of magic and fantasy inherent in epic games and offer a glimpse into the gamer’s experience of being in another world, similar to the way one can be transported by a very good film (or very good film music). The maturity of many tracks demonstrates the extent to which video games have evolved in terms of narrative complexity and even emotional depth.

Like Silence, Game Music is easy on the ears, but also far more diverse and challenging for both musician and audience. Several songs–like “Heavy Rain,” “Final Fantasy” and “Secret of Mana”–are surprisingly beautiful, balancing tense, ominous crescendos with quiet interludes. “Chrono Trigger & Chrono Cross” soars with Middle-Eastern violins and galloping hand drums reminiscent of Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road Project. “Tetris,” with its harpsichord and an exuberant, Tchaikovsky-esque string section, is a far cry from the clunky, electronic version I remember from my youth. Meanwhile, the upbeat “Angry Birds Theme”–from the immensely popular kids’ game–is one of Dubeau’s most purchased tracks on iTunes.

In both collections, one senses Dubeau’s respect for the music, her belief in the ability of each song – yes, even the tired Titanic love theme – to exist apart from the scenes and images for which it was originally created. Through that respect and sincerity, she’s succeeded in giving the songs of Game Music and Silence a life of their own, freeing them to become soundtracks for new memories and associations: perhaps a comfy chair by the fire on a rainy day, or the view from a seaside cottage, if the listener is lucky enough.

 

Aaron Shepard, a former musician, is shopping his first novel around publishers’ desks and writing his second.