Music on Main’s Music for the Winter Solstice celebrates stillness
With pianists Robyn Jacob and Rachel Iwaasa, and more, ninth edition of popular winter concert offers a chance to pause and reflect
Music for the Winter Solstice.
Music on Main presents Music for the Winter Solstice at Heritage Hall on December 13 and 14
NEXT YEAR, MUSIC on Main’s beloved Music for the Winter Solstice celebrates its 10th anniversary, so perhaps this question will be even more appropriate then: how do you keep a long-running favourite fresh?
For now, though, we have the answer: do nothing.
Well, that’s not quite true, even though MoM’s artistic director David Pay has retained last year’s creative team for this year’s event, and none of the participants are complaining.
“There was a nice energy with everybody,” singer and pianist Robyn Jacob reports in a Zoom chat from her Vancouver home. “It was a really cool, eclectic group of people who had never really been in a room all together before. And so I’m really excited just to get back together with these people again. It’s just a nice hang, you know? So I think this relationship-building has meant a lot for me: making new friends and getting to experience new things with these people who are just really good at what they do.”
Rejoining the Music for the Winter Solstice cast, in addition to Jacob, are pianist Rachel Iwaasa, cellist Jonathan Lo, and tenor Asitha Tennekoon. Also returning are some MoM staples: the Wyrd Sisters’ “Solstice Carol”; local composer Alfredo Santa Ana’s “A Short Song for the Longest Night of the Year”; and the traditional closing number, former Music on Main artist-in-residence (and 2013 Pulitzer Prize-winner) Caroline Shaw’s “Winter Carol”, which is just about the friendliest exercise in audience participation anyone could imagine.
Otherwise, the program is new—and not only new, but significantly different. It also reflects a growing trust and intimacy between the cast members, as Jacob points out. Whereas last year she contributed three songs first performed by her art-pop band Only A Visitor, for 2023 she and Iwaasa are working up something that will literally require them to collaborate side by side.
“I ran into Rachel at the grocery store a few months ago, and we both knew we were going to do this concert again, and she said ‘Well, why don’t we do some four-hands music for piano?’” Jacob explains. “And I was just like ‘That is such a good idea! It will be really fun.’ And so I did a little bit of hunting and digging around. And it’s funny: I feel like there is so much music for two pianos, but there’s almost no… Well, I wouldn’t say ‘almost no’. But there’s much less music for piano four hands, especially contemporary music. It just doesn’t seem to be as cool. Two pianos is, like, way cooler, or something—but of course having two pianos in a venue is quite hard to find.”
The two keyboardists eventually settled on a pair of pieces by New York City–based composer David Lang. And just as Jacob’s Only A Visitor songs dovetailed nicely with Rodney Sharman’s composition for Iwaasa, Known and Unknown. during last year’s event, Lang’s Gravity and After Gravity seem almost tailor-made for Music for the Winter Solstice’s signature feeling of seasonal calm.
“I think they really fit the theme: this sort of stillness in the middle of winter,” Jacob says. “There is a lot of stasis in these pieces, as well as movement. They’re really cool, and I really like his music in general. It’s a dream to play it—and it’s really fun to work with Rachel. We haven’t fully dug into it yet, but rehearsals start on Monday!”
Those of us who know Jacob as a singer-songwriter, a music-theatre composer, or a long-standing member of Vancouver’s gamelan community, might be surprised to learn that at one point she was seriously considering a career as a concert pianist.
“My original passion was contemporary music and piano, and I didn’t really start songwriting until later on in my university degree, when I was dealing with an injury,” she explains. “I was just sort of lost; I wasn’t sure what avenue I wanted to take in my performing. So it’s really cool to come back to that now, and I feel very privileged to be able to work with Rachel, who’s just plain amazing—as we all know!”
Jacob adds that while the prospect of performing alongside one of Canada’s greatest interpreters of contemporary music might be daunting, Iwaasa has been helping to settle her nerves with some practice tips, like setting her metronome to half the indicated speed when working on the two Lang compositions. That way, she notes, “you have to fill in every other note without the metronome’s help, but it’s still there as a guide.”
Appropriately enough, one of Music for the Winter Solstice’s principal charms is that, with its air of warmth and contemplation, it offers a chance for audience members to reset their own internal clocks to a pace that’s more seasonally appropriate than the usual December rush and bustle.
“In a non-21st-century context, the darkness of winter would mean a slowing down, because you just aren’t able to do as much,” Jacob contends. “You don’t have very much daylight and it’s just physically harder to do everything. And I think that’s what we really need, but everybody at this time of year is so busy!
“So this concert is like a hinge, where you’re on your way to a totally different time of year,” she continues. “You’re kind of coming around the bend, and it’s just like a moment of reflection, a moment to sit in that for a minute. But I also think, in some way, it’s this little light in the darkness. It’s really just about being together, having a nice glass of wine, and listening to some nice music.”
With world peace out of the question for now, that’s likely the best present any of us could hope for.
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