John has had a love for the piano for more than 65 years. The 1920-built Heintzman upright he has today (pictured) was the same one he played on as a child in the dining room of his mother’s home in Vancouver (and positioned in exactly the same spot relative to a west-facing window). Along with the Heintzman logo, it actually bears the inscription on the inside of its cover: “Grand Piano in Upright Form”, and has a tone to match.
With help from a strict but
kindly teacher named Mr Laidlaw, young John managed to pass Grade II and Grade
III exams administered by Toronto’s Royal Conservatory, and progress part way
into the next level without actually sitting the exam. But this was followed by several years of a
musical drought, when the piano was hardly touched. And the Grade-IV-level studies turned out to
be the last piano lessons he had in his life.
He briefly studied organ, though, and has occasionally substituted on
the 3-manual Casavant pipe organ at the church he and his family attend in
Ottawa.
Secondary school (at the private
Shawnigan Lake School, 50 km north of Victoria on Vancouver Island) re-awakened
his interest, and John was given permission to make use of the school’s grand
piano in the auditorium (locally known as ‘the Big School’). He actually started learning a number of
classical pieces (e.g., Beethoven, Mozart, Händel) from collections of sonatas
and sonatinas, much to his mother’s surprise and delight. One day, while sitting in a Victoria theatre
audience waiting for a performance to begin, he was the only one to answer the
call for a volunteer to play the traditional introductory O Canada when the scheduled pianist was unexpectedly unavailable.
During his university years, John
even started composing, writing out two full-length sonatas and compiling a
third in his head which has still never been written down. But then another drought — he and his new
wife spent a good fifteen years moving around to different parts of Canada (plus
three years abroad); after his mother moved into a small flat, the piano spent the
rest of this time in storage.
John did have the opportunity to
study voice on occasion — first with a private teacher in Vancouver and later
at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto.
In 1981–82 he sang tenor in a Russian choir in Vancouver and briefly
played in their balalaika orchestra (he is very fond of Russian folk music, as
well as choral music in general, and was a regular (and ardent) viewer for the
last five years of Canada’s longest-running (1965–1995) TV music programme, CBC Hymn Sing.
In 1982 the family moved to
Ottawa and were reunited with John’s beloved Heintzman. While he spent some time re-learning pieces
he had studied earlier, he did a lot more playing by ear and discovered a new
love: improvisation — either on
existing melodies or just what flowed through his fingers at the time with no
antecedent melody. See more (with
samples) at: http://kanadacha.ca/poetry/improv.html. Later, when asked by Ottawa poet-artist Miroslava
Linda Sabbath to compose music to go with her poetry, he took the
opportunity of combining piano improvisation with the spoken word — see: http://kanadacha.ca/poetry/poetpiano.html. During the 1990s he managed to record about fifteen
hours’ worth of improvisations (mostly on the Heintzman) on cassette tape,
which he is still in the process of digitising to mp3 files. And last year he came up with a new
composition — A Chorus of Morning-glories
— now printed with the help of a friend in Athens (Greece), Coreen Morsink, who recently
completed her doctorate in music at Goldsmiths (University of London). In 1997 he actually had the opportunity of
briefly playing Glenn Gould’s piano, then at the National Library in Ottawa.
In 2011 he opened his own YouTube
channel under the nom-de-plume Ottaworth,
which currently (as of mid-January 2014) features sixteen videos — including
his own arrangements of hymns and classical pieces, along with a couple of
songs for Sunday School children which he wrote, and later had performed by
church soloist (and family friend) Nicole Bower from Toronto. You can find all this at: http://www.youtube.com/user/Ottaworth/videos.
At the end of 2012 John retired from his position with
the Slavic Research Group at the University of Ottawa. He still continues to work as a free-lance
literary translator (Russian-English). A
link to an outline of his professional career (in pdf format) may be found at: http://kanadacha.ca/#notebook. This is on the home page of his website at: http://kanadacha.ca.
Here for the record are
some of John’s favourite musical Internet links:
PIANO
Polish-Canadian virtuoso pianist Jan Lisiecki (in his
early teens) performing Franz Liszt’s étude Un
sospiro. See also other YouTube
videos of this amazing young pianist (now nearing his twenties).
Ottawa’s own Angela Hewitt playing Debussy’s Clair de lune at the Royal
Conservatory’s Koerner Hall in Toronto.
See more Angela Hewitt videos on YouTube.
American pianist Jacqueline Marie Weitz performing
Ravel’s Concerto in G Major with the San Francisco Conservatory Orchestra.
Glenn
Gould’s Goldberg Variations on YouTube.
Québec child pianist Daniel
Clarke Bouchard (12 years old) plays Schumann’s Opus Nº 1 at Montréal’s
Place des Arts.
Child prodigy (7 years old) Shuan Hern Lee’s interpretation of
Rakhmaninov/Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of
the bumble-bee on Australia’s Got
Talent in 2010.
A fascinating presentation of two acrobatic pianists
literally ‘dancing on the piano’ at FAO Schwarz in New York (as
did Tom Hanks in the movie Big). Don’t miss their performance of Bach’s Toccata & Fugue toward the end.
Canadian music comedienne Anna Russell gives her
hilarious voice-and-piano interpretation and description of Wagner’s Ring Cycle. (This link will take you to Part I. Follow the links to the rest of her ‘first
farewell concert’.)
ORGAN AND OTHER
INSTRUMENTS
Ottawa soprano Wallis
Giunta (who performs with the Metropolitan Opera in New York) performs a
popular Christmas carol accompanied by four Canadian organists in New York City
(two of these massive church organs are Canadian-built Casavants), sponsored a
year ago by the Canadian Consulate-General in New York.
Dutch organist Gert van Hoef
plays Bach’s Toccata & Fugue in D
Minor in the Stephanuskerk in Hasselt (Netherlands).
Dutch virtuoso violinist Janine Jansen leading the
BBC Concert Orchestra in a performance of Vaughan-Williams’ The Lark ascending — filmed at London’s
Albert Hall.
Swedish soprano Malena Ernman (the
‘Victor Borge’ of opera) doing a hilarious interpretation of Rimsky-Korsakov/ Rakhmaninov’s
Flight of the bumble-bee, together
with Martin Fröst on clarinet and Niklas Sivelöv on piano.
Norwegian diva Sissel Kyrkjebø
singing “Going home” from Dvořák’s New
World Symphony — recorded in Røros, a 17th-century German mining town in
Norway, at a concert inspired by the Northern Lights.
Sissel Kyrkjebø singing Auld Lang Syne (in English and Swedish), with fantastic scenes of
nature added by Dutch webmaster Ine Braat. A real audio-visual entertainment treat!
