Music review: Music for a Winter Solstice explores time, change, and loss in moving ways
Rodney Sharman’s new piano piece finds metaphorical new ways to end notes, plus divine lieder, beautiful Bach, and more
Robyn Jacob
Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa
Music on Main presented Music for the Winter Solstice on December 14 and 15. Music on Main’s Online Winter Solstice Special is available for free from December 16 to January 6, 2023 at musiconmain.ca
MUSIC ON MAIN’s Music for the Winter Solstice has been a welcome antidote to the holly-jolliness of the season for eight years.
But more than ever, Thursday’s secular celebration acknowledged that the holidays can bring mixed emotions—particularly for those who are reminded of loss. Many of the songs performed in the intimate Heritage Hall by a strong quartet of artists—pianist Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa, vocalist and pianist Robyn Jacob, tenor Asitha Tennekoon, and cellist Jonathan Lo—meditated on the passage of time itself. As Jacob said at one point, the Winter Solstice exists on the edge between past and present, inviting the audience to “just sit in that crease”.
That feeling of suspended time and memory was particularly true of composer Rodney Sharman’s haunting and curious premiere “Known and Unknown”, commissioned especially for pianist Iwaasa—and devoted to the beloved mother she lost to Alzheimer’s in 2020. In playing Sharman’s piece, Iwaasa found a way to play phrases whose final notes never quite finished, but hung in the air. They lingered in a way that was movingly metaphorical, capturing how our lost mothers stay with us in our memories, and everything we do.
Iwaasa told the audience that when Sharman first came to her with the composition, he said he’d discovered a new sound—and it was truly unlike anything you’ve heard before. As the notes defied finishing, one was reminded of Nick Cave-via-Bob Dylan’s lyrics “Death is not the end.”
That piece was a meaningful compliment to the themes in Vancouver composer Alfredo Santa Ana’s equally haunting “A Short Song for the Longest Night of the Year”. One line referred to the way time eventually “pulls all the leaves to the earth”. Like so many of the contemplative works on the program, it ended in hushed quiet, then meditative stillness and silence before the applause.
Other highlights included the full-ensemble rendition of the Wyrd Sisters’ melancholic “Solstice Carol”, Iwaasa reaching into the top of the grand piano to create a rumbling winter wind with its strings.
The magnetic Jacob plumbed memory loss in thought-provoking ways in her “It’s Like Looking Down”, devoted to Linda Macdonald, a sufferer of postpartum depression who was subjected to inhumane experimental drug therapies and shock treatments at the Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal in the 1960s. Depressing subject matter? Yes, but Jacob sensitively explores, through her looping lyrics, what it’s like to live in a constant present, with no past—ideas disappearing and returning, a bit like the notes in “Known and Unknown”.
Asitha Tennekoon
Jonathan Long
Tennekoon, dressed in a Doctor Zhivago-esque grey coat with woolly trim, displayed his expressive star power—and related a story about missing his own late father. The tenor, appearing as a soloist in a few shows this Christmas season, here brought extreme emotional depth to lieder by Hugo Wolf and Franz Schubert, with Iwaasa at the keyboard. His sustained yet beautifully restrained note at the end of the latter composer’s “Nacht und Träume” was goosebump-inducing.
And Long’s expressively virtuosic feat performing five of Johann Sebastian Bach’s cello suites met silent awe in the audience. So different from the other music on the program, it touched on all the ideas of time, contemplation, and the journey to celebration. It is also just simply impressive to watch up-close and live, the cellist pausing between pieces for brief moments of reflection.
The show’s traditional finale, an audience-participation sing-along rendition of Caroline Shaw’s “Winter Carol”, found the work’s overlapping vocal rounds surrounding you from all the atmospheric corners of the hall. That left concertgoers with a fitting feeling of unfixed endings—and the lyric “let’s just be still awhile” was a perfect summation of this serene performance's solstice mood.
If you want to relive some of its magic, along with moments from Music on Main's previous Music for the Winter Solstice concerts, head to MusicOnMain.ca, where performance highlights are streaming for free from December 16 to January 6, 2023. Performers include Grammy winner Caroline Shaw, singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane, violinist Chloe Kim, singer-songwriter Veda Hille, theatre maker Corey Payette, and others.
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