Stir Cheat Sheet: Five performances to catch at Music on Main's Listening. Together. festival

Featuring instruments from the cello to the santour, intimate filmed concerts to inspire and mesmerize

By Janet Smith

Jonathan Lo

THINK OF IT as a sort of musical spring awakening after a long winter.

Music on Main is getting ready to expand your sonic horizons, presenting five inspiring days of filmed concerts from May 14 to 18 as part of Listening. Together.

Here’s an introduction to just five of artistic director David Pay’s astutely curated acts, which hop between centuries and styles, and explore the expressive limits of the instruments. As Pay recently told Stir, “It’s just the music that they love. With this festival, that’s kind of at the core of it.” (For more on the percussion innovators Infamy Too!, see our story here.) Note that artists’ talks follow each performance.

#1

Jonathon Lo

(Sunday at 7:30 pm)

Lo is founding cellist of the Rolston String Quartet, and he’s performed everywhere from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City to our own back yard, as a soloist with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. The pieces he performs here show not just his expressive power but his versatility. He puts his bow to two works that riff on the chaconne, centuries apart: Benjamin Britten‘s 20th-century Ciaccona: Allegro from Cello Suite No. 2 and Giuseppe Colombi‘s Baroque-period Chiaccona a Basso solo. A chaconne, also spelled ciaconne, was a fiery and suggestive dance that emerged in Spain in the 17th century and later became popular in France.

#2

Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa

May 14 at 7:30 pm

Two Vancouver heavy hittiers with a long and deep relationship join forces, as piano maven Iwaasa takes on several works by composer Rodney Sharman. In fact, Sharman wrote the three pieces on this program expressly for her: Wounded (in memoriam Claude Vivier) (Sharman’s meditation on conversations he had with the Montreal composer), and two of Sharman’s ongoing “Opera Transcriptions”: L’Incoronazione di Poppea – Mercurio dal ciel in terra and Tristan und Isolde.

#3

Dálava

Sunday at 7:30 pm

If you haven’t been swept into the haunting, ancient-yet-cutting-edge sound world of Vancouver duo Julia Ulehla and Aram Bajakian, now’s your chance: on the last night of the fest they perform a Moravian folk song. The life and art partners put their own intense and improvisational spin on traditional melodies, dug up by ethnomusicologist (and magnetic singer) Ulehla from a book compiled by her great-grandfather. Guitarist Bajakian, meanwhile, has played with top avant-garde musicians like John Zorn, and has toured with the likes of Lou Reed and Diana Krall. (Catch him solo at Saturday night’s concert playing his own compositions, as well as an arrangement of the Beatles’ beloved “Michelle”.)

#4

Chloe Kim

May 14, 7:30 pm

Perhaps nothing on the program is going to lift your spirits more than this fast-rising violinist’s performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D Minor. The Vancouver-born, Victoria-based star and recent Juilliard School grad specializes in the Baroque composer’s elegantly intricate and rhythmically complex work. Note that the final movement is another “chaconne” (see above), a set of more than 60 punishing but transcendant variations on a theme.

#5

Saina Khaledi

May 15 at 7:30 pm

Flash back to Music on Main’s celebrated Where Dreams Are Made series, pandemic-era concerts that were performed one-on-one last year. Filmed during that unforgettable intimate event, Khaledi mesmerizes on the santour, a Persian hammered dulcimer that dates back as far as 669 BC. Watch her hands float and dart with stunning speed and precision, as the Vancouver-based musician plays the mesmerizing “Mystery of Love”.

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