David Visentin, the director of the Toronto El Sistema project to which Mr. Cohen donated his $15,000 protégé award, is also Artistic Director of our summer Salt Spring Chamber Music Festival. He will be here again this July with the accustomed faculty plus the Alcan String Quartet as special guests.

So congratulations David for starting the Toronto version of El Sistema. We’ll see if we can organize a talk this summer at ArtSpring so David can explain how this amazing music training programme for kids at risk works and describe his experiences with it.

Meanwhile, thanks from us also to Leonard Cohen for his generosity toward a most worthwhile arts project.

“What I have learned in my years of making dances – and making narrative dances in particular – is that, like the pragmatist, you have to know what you are trying to accomplish; but like the idealist, you have to be open to many ways of getting there. … You have to look like you know what you are doing but you have to make sure that you don’t. … And believe me, it takes years to perfect this. But that is where the inspiration lies, somewhere between knowing and not knowing.”

http://www.cda-acd.ca/en/programs-services/national-dance-week

Here on Salt Spring, our dance outreach co-ordinator, Anna Haltrecht, has created a special website calendar that lists all dance-related activities on Salt Spring, including ArtSpring’s planned dance performances in our 2012-13 season. Check it out at:

http://www.bonesforever.com/index.php/dance-on-salt-spring

Feel free to contact Anna via her website for any questions or ideas you may have about getting involved in dance in our community. She’s really approachable and eager to promote dance in whatever ways she can.

by Paula Kiffner

So many people have said to me that the cello is their favorite instrument. Certainly it is my favorite instrument. But what draws people to the sound of the cello? I think it is the human quality of its range. The cello covers almost the entire range of the human voice, and possesses a warm singing quality.

This wide range from bass to soprano lends itself to the creation of works for multiple cellos – something that cellists (a naturally gregarious lot) greatly appreciate. You may be familiar with recordings by the world-famous Berlin Philharmonic cello section, or the performances by 100 cellists of Pablo Casals’ “Song of The Birds”.

On Sunday, May 6th, at 2:30 PM at Artspring, Pamela Highbaugh-Aloni, cellist of the Lafayette String Quartet, and I, along with pianist Jamie Syer, the former Dean of the Victoria Conservatory, will present a program of works for two cellos and piano. Some of the works to be performed are transcriptions and some were written originally for this combination. I’ve even included two arrangements I made of well-known opera arias.

Pamela, Jamie and I have known and worked with each other for several years, and this program has given us the opportunity to learn some unusual and very interesting repertoire spanning the Baroque to Modern eras, from Handel to Bartok, including ultra-romantic duets by the Russian composer Reinhold Glière.

Please join us at 2:30 PM at Artspring on Sunday, May 6th. The concert is preceded by a winetasting at 1:30 PM featuring wines of the Garry Oaks Vineyard.

Salt Spring audiences may remember Bouge de là as the company that brought us the charming dance/theatre production Old Thomas and the Little Fairy last season.

The award distinguishes an arts company for successful audience development and promotional activities throughout the tour of one of its shows. L’atelier/The Studio combines dance with visual art, and has been acclaimed by more than 105 audiences across Québec and Toronto.

I am pleased to announce that ArtSpring has booked L’atelier/The Studio for March 5, 2013. This truly wonderful show, which will appeal to both adult audiences and to children, will be included in our Dance subscription series. Tickets will go on sale in August.

The Collegium is the enrichment programme of the Conservatory where the very best string players, pianists and, in some years, guitarists hone their solo and ensemble skills. Just how good these students are is attested to by the fact that many familiar faces who performed here a few years ago have now gone on to study in the music faculties of some of the best Canadian and American universities.

This year’s concert starts at 1:30pm, a somewhat unusual time needed to allow the group to return to Victoria for an evening orchestra rehearsal. You can expect a variety of fine classical music for solo piano, string quartet, piano trio, string trio, etc.

Tickets at just $15 for adults and $5 for all youth are available now from our Ticket Centre (250-537-2102) or online at tickets.artspring.ca

Dr Schofield describes the shortcomings of electronic tablets over traditional books as follows:

“The materiality of the book is what’s missing. An ornamental letter on a page, or side notes and symbols, for instance – what do they do for the reading process? It turns out they may help with memory retention, and with continuous thinking.”

What catches my attention here is the phrase “continuous thinking.” This expression touches on the essence of what reading is about – not just the retrieval of useful information, but the unfolding and pursuit of continuous trains of thought. Google, god bless it, gives us easy answers to questions, but only reading teaches us to think.

And so it is similarly with live performance. Substitute the word “attention” for “thinking” and we have a close analogy. What a live performance, whether of music or dance or theatre, offers that electronic media do not is opportunities for “continuous attention” not only to the substance of the performance, but also to ourselves and to our relationship to what we see on the stage.

When a pianist plays Liszt in our theatre, or dancers move their bodies in the presence of our own bodies, or when actors speak in the same physical space we inhabit with them, we become not just consumers of information but active participants in the unfolding of specific narratives of what it means to be human.

This is why it is so crucial to present live performance in the arts: to offer opportunities for thought, attention and feeling in real, human time, and thus to hold out alternative ways of understanding the world to the ubiquitousness of mere information.

First there will be Paul Destrooper’s new work The Four Seasons which combines Vivaldi’s music with West Coast native legends as we follow two ravens through the seasons of a mystical relationship. The dance is accompanied by art from four first nations artists and haikus written by Victoria poet Linda Rogers and read by the Nonourable Steven Point, Lieutenant Governor of BC. Both music and spoken word for this work are recorded.

Then pianist Sarah Hagen performs several Chopin Preludes live on our Steinway to accompany Sandrine Cassini’s choreographed exploration of Chopin’s life and artistic achievement.

As Ballet BC puts it, this is “a unique show celebrating the West Coast and its multi-cultural, multi artistic community showcasing local international stars.”

The performance starts at 2:30pm on Sunday, March 25. Tickets are available from our Box Office (250-537-2102) or online.

Karl may have been born on a farm near Gwynne, AB and brought up on fairly predictable musical fare, but the moment he finished high school he hit the road as a jazz drummer and never looked back.

That road lead him from the Banff Centre, where he was the youngest participant ever in their long-term career residency programme, to two Western Canada Music Awards for Jazz Recording of the Year, to performances at Carnegie Hall and the John F Kennedy Centre. He has received the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta’s Emerging Artist Award and sits on the Board of Directors of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.

“One of Canada’s most brilliant musicians,” is how Dr Jeremy Brown of the University of Calgary Department of Music describes him.

Not so bad for someone who is still in his twenties and is legally blind to boot.

As if the musical accomplishments of Karl Schwonik’s jazz ensemble weren’t enough, the evening will also feature the participation of Rémi Bolduc, widely recognized as the greatest alto sax player in Canada.

Hailing from Ste-Hyacinthe, Quebec, Bolduc started playing in the jazz clubs of Montreal at age 15. A few years later, big band leader and composer Vic Vogel took notice of then 19-year-old musician and immediately praised his new protégé by saying that “he plays like the devil”! Since then he has played clubs across the country and in New York, Paris, Geneva, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Peking.

“For lovers of jazz this will be an evening to remember,” says ArtSpring Executive Director George Sipos. “Brilliant young musicians from Western Canada and a renowned veteran from Quebec. Our theatre will swing for sure.”

Tickets for the 8:00pm performance are available from the ArtSpring Ticket Centre – 537-2102 or online.

Quebec pianist André Laplante has been honoured in almost every major competition over the years, from the International Tchaikovsky Competition to the Sydney and Long-Thibaud Compeitions. He has won several Juno awards for his recordings and has performed around the world from Carnegie Hall to China. In 2005 he was awarded the Order of Canada in recognition of his contributions to classical music.

He is known widely as a specialist in the music of Franz Liszt and Maurice Ravel. At his ArtSpring concert M. Laplante will play Liszt’s monumental Les Annees de Pelerinage, as well as works by Bach, Mozart and Ravel.

“In recent times,” says ArtSpring Executive Director George Sipos, “we have presented some amazing young pianists near the beginning of their careers – Joyce Yang, Di Wu, Mariangella Vacatello. This time we get to hear from one of the world’s seasoned virtuosos, someone whose talent has been compared to Ashkenazy, Horowitz and Rudolph Serkin.”

The 7:00pm start, unlike the more customary 8:00, is to allow for a reception with the artist after the concert in the ArtSpring galleries. Country Grocer will host the food and drink at the reception to allow Salt Springers get to meet M. Laplante informally.

Tickets for the recital are available from the ArtSpring Ticket Centre 537-2012 or online.