Vetta Chamber Music keeps community connected with its virtual season-opener
The concert was recorded live in a grand space, but artistic director Joan Blackman says the group’s intimate performance style hasn’t changed
Joan Blackman says the times seemed to call for a program consisting of the three Bs—Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms—for Vetta Chamber Music’s 2020-21 season-opening concert. Photo by Vetta Chamber Music
At Home With Vetta, a free virtual concert, will be available for viewing anytime between October 8 at 2 p.m. until midnight October 12. Online registration is required; visit Vetta Chamber Music.
AS ARTISTIC DIRECTOR of Vetta Chamber Music, Joan Blackman is accustomed to playing in intimate, modest spaces, venues like the Point Grey United Church. So when the pandemic presented the organization with the challenge of reformatting its entire 2020-21 season to take a virtual approach and the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts became available for a video shoot of its fall premiere, taking centre stage in such a grand venue in the era of COVID-19 proved to be a completely new experience for the seasoned musician.
It’s not that the acclaimed violinist hasn’t performed in magnificent concert halls; she has, with a decades-long career that includes roles as a soloist with and associate concertmaster of the Vancouver Symphony.
But this most recent performance, with pianist Jane Hayes, was different. With physical-distancing and other safety protocols in effect, there were just a few people on hand for technical support in the stunning centre.
“It was at once wonderful and strange,” Blackman tells Stir. “At the end of each piece, there was no clapping. Jane and I were further apart than usual. We were in our own sonic space, but we rehearsed enough that we didn’t feel that. We talked to each other about imagining the audience was there. I’m not sure I was thinking about that, as I was trying to be deeply into the music.
“I play my best when I am feeling the music all the way to the depths of my soul,” Blackman says. “It was important for this video that it wasn’t me just standing there playing. It’s our job to project the feeling of the music and the meaning of the music, but to me the feeling and the meaning are the same. If I’m not feeling it, I’m busy thinking, and thinking gets in my way. I do value the fact that we present intimate concerts, and part of being intimate is to show your vulnerability and be a human being.”
That video shoot was for At Home with Vetta, the organization’s first concert of the season, streaming October 8 to 12—for free.
With the Chan Centre’s sophisticated AV system (including various camera angles), combined with the beauty of both the theatre and the music, Blackman is optimistic that Vetta’s intimacy will translate to audiences through their screens.
Stir connected with Blackman via Zoom, the chamber musician speaking from her East Vancouver studio. It’s a converted garage with a 14-foot-high peaked ceiling and walls made of reclaimed barnwood. In it is her six-foot Grotrian-Steinweg baby grand piano (for her pianist friends to play when they come over to rehearse) and, of course, her beloved violin, which was made by Carlos Landolfi in Milan in 1761. “The only other person I know who plays on a Landolfi is Gwen Hoebig, originally a Vancouverite and concertmaster of the Winnipeg Symphony,” Blackman says. “One year she came and performed with me, and the violins sounded like sisters. It is my pride and joy, and I learn from it every day.”
Blackman says she and Hayes went back and forth to determine the program for Vetta’s inaugural 2020-21 season concert, though it didn’t take long to decide on the show’s three pieces: Johann Sebastian Bach’s Sonata for Violin and Keyboard No. 4 in C minor, BWV 1017; Ludwig van Beethoven’s Sonata for Piano and Violin in D major, Opus 12, No. 1; and Johannes Brahms’s Sonata for Violin & Piano in G major, Opus 78.
Each seems fitting for the times we’re living in, and they work together to form a program of comfort.
“We got together and thought, ‘what would people want to hear right now?” Blackman says. “We thought they’d want to hear the three Bs, the classics. It’s not a time for playing something by [controversial German composer Karlheinz] Stockhausen. Bach seemed to me like something that was saying ‘Here we are in this strange time….There’s this sadness, yes, but there’s also a connection.
“Beethoven is full of passion and fierceness about what’s not right,” she says. “In a way, he was quite the revolutionary. It starts out proud and triumphant; it’s got a beautiful, very intimate slow movement, and the last movement is just a romp—it’s kind of peasant-y, ‘let’s just have fun anyway.’”
The Brahms piece is also known as the Rain Sonata. “It talks about memories of his childhood sitting by the rain,” Blackman says. “It’s a little bit like being closed in but remembering the good stuff. It’s just got so much heart. It’s so human. So it all makes for a really cozy performance.”
Pianist Jane Hayes, left, joins violinist Joan Blackman in Vetta Chamber Music’s At Home With Vetta virtual concert.
Adding to the human element of the online concert is a live chat with the artists on October 9 at 8:30 p.m.
Vetta has four other concerts scheduled this season, all of which will be recorded live at the Chan Centre. Blackman is hopeful that live performances will resume before too long.
Although this new way of performing is uncharted territory for the group, there’s a silver lining to the streaming approach: the society will be reaching people who would not have otherwise made it to an in-person concert this fall. Some seniors’ homes, for instance, are planning on playing the concert on big-screen TVs. And with the first event being free, people who may have never considered going to a chamber music concert in the first place might be more willing to at least give it a go.
“We knew if we didn’t perform and weren’t able to program any season, we would lose people,” Blackman says. “We are a community and here’s an opportunity for us not to lose each other and to invite others to this community.
“We all love music, we want to share with you, and if you want to be a member of our community, this is what we do,” she says. “We can still have an intimate conversation with music.”
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