Sarah Slean performs alongside Johannes Debus and the BIGLAKE Orchestra in Prince Edward County, in August, 2023.Deb Walters/Supplied
The classical music festival scene in Canada is growing in leaps and bounds, but event organizers are still battling classical clichés: that it’s snobbish, it requires formal wear, it’s serious, unsmiling, un-fun. Three Canadian festivals demonstrate the opposite and show classical music for what it is: approachable, fun, joyous. Anything goes when it comes to fashion, too – especially when the venue is a farm, a barn, or an amphitheatre.
Festival de Lanaudière
Festival de Lanaudière, based in Joliette, presents big events at Amphithéâtre Fernand-Lindsay and at smaller venues around the Quebec town. Founded in 1978, the festival specializes in presenting big classical names. This year’s edition (running July 6 to Aug. 4) includes appearances by Orchestre symphonique de Montréal music director Rafael Payare and Metropolitan Opera music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who leads a closing-night performance of Verdi’s Aida. The in-concert presentation focuses on the singers and the score, a change for the opera in which theatrical accoutrements are often considered first.
Swedish mezzo soprano Anne Sofie von Otter is making her Lanaudière debut with two concerts: an evening of French songs and another with Swedish folk songs and popular melodies including works by ABBA’s Benny Andersson and folk duo Simon and Garfunkel. Festival artistic director Renaud Loranger doesn’t see the pop showcase as a contradiction to the core focus on classical music. “Maybe it’s a bit of an enlargement,” he says.
A space-themed concert features the music of Claude Vivier’s orchestral suite Orion and Gustav Holst’s The Planets, with NASA scientist Farah Alibay, who grew up in Joliette, acting as emcee. “I talk all the time about the community of values and the community of spirit, and I think those are absolutely crucial today,” says Loranger. “The world is so brutal and difficult in so many ways. But one channel of emancipation is to stay close to the people who share your values, and that means, in our case, musicians and artists, but artists in the broader sense, and Farah is a great example of that.”
Westben Festival
Community values are very much at the core of the Westben Festival. Based in Campbellford, Ont., Westben (opening on June 30 and running to Aug. 4) is marking its 25-year anniversary with a wide array of sounds, including pop (Sarah Slean, Steven Page), folk (the Barra MacNeils), jazz and gospel (Jackie Richardson and Joe Sealy), classical (bass baritone Gerald Finley), and an evening with Wolastoqiyik neoclassical-jazz-pop artist Jeremy Dutcher. It also features a night of music and storytelling with artists from nearby Alderville First Nation. Concerts are presented at a range of local venues, including a 400-seat barn.
Festival co-founder, artistic and managing director Brian Finley says the diversity of Westben’s lineup has broadened its audience. “You just have to do something well for it to work,” he says. Nature is central to Westben, Finley adds. “It is amazing how it impacts your acceptance and experience of welcoming other cultures into your midst,” he explains.
The co-founder will be providing piano accompaniment to Gerald Finley (who is also his cousin) in a recital at Westben’s barn at the end of July. “What I find from his past performances here is this feeling of accessibility, of removing barriers,” Brian Finley says.
BIGLAKE
Cultivating a sense of connection between music and audiences is central to BIGLAKE, a music festival based in Wellington, Ont. Founded in 2021 by Canadian Opera Company music director Johannes Debus and Juno Award-winning violinist Elissa Lee, the annual festival (running from Aug. 23 to 31) includes chamber concerts, recitals, opera, and jazz and folk. Debus says curiosity is a crucial element to the festival and its pairing of programs and performance spaces is intended to encourage that quality in audiences. Venues include an art gallery, Wellington Music Hall and the historic Cunningham House 1804, built by a Quaker family who fled the United States following the War of Independence.
The settings are markedly different from the COC’s usual house, the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, Debus notes. “You’re at a location that maybe helps you to forget about your daily life issues. The musicians are really next to you, almost sitting on your lap,” he says.
This year’s festival includes a Beethoven Marathon, which will feature all 10 of the composer’s violin and piano sonatas performed over one day, an opera gala featuring the COC Ensemble Studio, and a Musical and Edible Promenade. “We say, ‘OK, here’s the music, how can we enhance the experience and show how the county, and its related flavours, can contribute and maybe, shall we say, heighten the experience,’ ” Debus says.