Chloe Kim helps create beautiful sounds, without the jingle bells, at Music for the Winter Solstice
The violinist takes on Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel as part of Music on Main’s non-treacly tradition
Music on Main presents Music for the Winter Solstice at Heritage Hall on December 15 and 16 ay 7:30 pm
IS THERE A more divisive phenomenon than Christmas music? Some people can’t get enough. Others, once the jingling bells and little drumming boys hit the street come mid-November, just want to crawl into a deep dark hole and not emerge until it’s time for New Year’s dumplings and longevity noodles. (That would be February 1, in case you haven’t already marked it on your calendar.)
Fortunately, we here in Vancouver have a happy alternative to the annual onslaught of roasting chestnuts and red-nosed reindeer, in the form of Music on Main’s Music for the Winter Solstice concerts, which reliably mix secular warmth with the sacredness of really beautiful sounds. Returning to Heritage Hall after last year’s online-only event, the shows will feature an intriguingly eclectic array of performers, with singer-pianist Veda Hille returning—albeit in a new format, with singers Lucien Durey, Patsy Klein, and Nicholas Krgovich—and two brilliant young classical musicians, violinist Chloe Kim and percussionist Julia Chien. And while the program is still being finalized, we do know that the latter two will team up to play the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel, one of a handful of late-20th-century compositions to have become a beloved part of the pop-classical canon.
And rightly so. While the devout Pärt has composed brilliant liturgical music, much of it derived from his interest in Gregorian chant and other medieval forms, Spiegel im Spiegel has no explicitly religious content. It’s simply a gorgeous, arcing melody sustained over a sequence of simple arpeggiated triads, but its plainspoken beauty has a wonderfully calming effect that’s a perfect antidote to the pre-Xmas bustle. And there are those who think that the piece is more than merely beautiful. Some, it seems, consider it positively miraculous.
It’s been used in commercial “healing sleep” soundtracks, and to score the funeral of a victim of a terrorist bombing. Clinicians have used it to inspire children with cerebral palsy to make music—in one case through a virtual instrument controlled by brain waves. And a host of online testimonials celebrate its use in countering various forms of travail and loss: Spiegel im Spiegel has been credited with helping new babies pull through life-threatening ailments, with easing an elderly parent’s long passage into death, and with being more effective than pharmaceuticals in treating anxiety and panic attacks.
Kim—who’s already familiar to Music on Main audiences through her extraordinary performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D minor as part of last spring’s Listening Together series—doesn’t have that kind of relationship with Spiegel im Spiegel. Although her engagement is deep, it’s more intellectual, based on her inclination as a Baroque specialist to exhaustively research anything she plans to put in front of the public.
“Anything that wasn’t composed today is early music, in a sense,” she argues in a telephone interview from Victoria, where she’s visiting family before heading to San Francisco to play Bach’s Christmas Oratorio with Philharmonia Baroque. “You owe it to the composers and to your audience to have done the research, if that makes sense. Performers are not just performers; we’re really scholars as well, so we should know something about the composer’s background; where they were in relation to the rest of society; what informed them when they were composing their music; who would have performed their music on which kind of instrument. This doesn’t relate just to Bach and his contemporaries, but also to Arvo Pärt—and anything, again, that wasn’t composed today.”
In performing Spiegel im Spiegel with Chien, she’ll be meditating on what she calls Pärt’s “retrospective” side. “He really looked back to early music,” she notes. And while Kim has yet to rehearse with her duo partner, she has already recorded a version of Pärt’s piece with percussionist Bryn Lutek, which will air on the CBC in 2022 as part of the national broadcaster’s 30 Under 30 initiative.
At the time of our interview, Kim, Chien, and Music on Main were still discussing the rest of their Music for the Winter Solstice program, but the violinist makes no secret that she’s overjoyed to be working, once again, with MoM artistic director Dave Pay and his associates.
“The whole organization operates on a basis of equity—valuing performers not only for what they offer as performers, but also as people with thoughts and feelings,” she points out. “That’s something I really respect about Dave Pay and everybody who works at Music on Main. There’s really no top-down process in that organization; it’s always a conversation, and it’s a happy environment to work in.
“He programs from a place of ‘What is excellent?’” she adds. “And the last text that I got from Dave was that he’s thinking of the program as being ‘eclectic and beautiful and secular and moving’.”
For many of us, that’s just about the best seasonal gift imaginable.
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