Blueridge Chamber Music Festival. North Shore series at Mount Seymour United Church, Vancouver series at St. Mark’s Anglican Church. Until Aug. 21. For more information visit blueridgechamber.org.
Dorothea Hayley had one chance to be cool – only one.
It was a fleeting moment – like when you’re not sure which train is leaving and which is staying; or when you see a beautiful woman clutching a parasol floating away on the New Jersey ferry – and you don’t say a word.
It was 1985. Everyone in Hayley’s Grade 1 class was naming their favourite bands. All she had to do was name a band – any band – and she could be cool, too.
Only she didn’t know any. (Duran Duran sounded redundant, REO Speedwagon must’ve been that new car company and Dire Straits were certainly nothing to joke about).
“When it got around to me – I had never heard of any band in my life – so I said: Peter, Paul and Mary. That was kind of the end of my hopes for popularity at school for the rest of time,” Hayley says, laughing.
Thirty years later, Hayley is a renowned soprano singer with a repertoire that extends from Bach’s Joy to Schonberg’s Les Miserables.
Her interview with the North Shore News comes during a brief break from her role overseeing temperaments, temperatures, high art and highballs as artistic director of the Blueridge Chamber Music Festival.
“It’s this magical place where you go and you stay with other musicians and everybody drinks and parties all the time,” she says. “In three weeks or four weeks there you get more done than in an entire year of studies.”
A veteran of the Vancouver Bach Children’s Choir, Hayley attended her first summer music festival at 17. The bands have been jumping and the living’s been easy ever since.
Unlike the disaster of her first piano lessons (unhappy with her mother’s tutelage, a six-year-old Hayley threatened to move out) the festival was a revelation.
“There’s this heightened energy of creativity that affects everybody. It affects the students, it affects the professors and it affects the audiences. There’s this sense that everybody is united in this suspended, magical moment where the outside world doesn’t really exist.”
Much like a summertime cousin, Hayley kept showing up at the July and August festivals, and each summer made its mark on her.
“I certainly would not have ended up being a professional musician without those experiences.”
Being a professional is largely about a “willingness not to do anything else,” Hayley explains.
“I think that being a professional, in some way, has to do with embracing the lifestyle of being an artist, which is this life that’s a little bit difficult. Your ego is subjected to so many ups and downs. You are at the mercy of your health … and of course you don’t make any money,” she says. “You become still more committed to creating art and to creating beautiful moments.”
That’s why she founded the festival and why she chose the North Shore, Hayley says.
Concerts are scheduled for the evening, when fading summer sunlight should be peering through the windows of Mount Seymour United Church.
“There’s that smell, that beautiful smell of the North Shore in the summer, of the pine trees kind of cooking,” Hayley says. “That’s kind of what I’m after with the festival. I want to create this atmosphere that doesn’t exactly exist anywhere else.”
To help create that atmosphere Hayley plans to perform works by Schubert and Ravel, as well as a “crazy piece” by German composer Helmut Lachenmann.
The music requires screaming, snoring and tongue clicks; an assortment of sounds “that are not what people usually expect from a soprano.”
Likewise, the festival aims to create an atmosphere that’s not what people usually expect from a chamber music festival.
“I want (the audience) to see that chamber music is not this old-fashioned thing where you have to put on a tie and go and be miserable and be bored for an hour,” she says. “You don’t have to come in and be an expert on classical music … you just come and take it in.”
Hayley’s North Shore concert is set for Saturday at Mount Seymour United Church. She’s tentatively scheduled to be the coolest person in the room.
