The Blueridge Chamber Music Festival, a series of four concerts played in Vancouver (The Orpheum Annex and St. Mark’s Anglican Church) and repeated on the North Shore (Mount Seymour United Church). Tickets are available online at Brown Paper Tickets (brownpapertickets.com/profile/1126156). More information: blueridgechamber.org.
Blueridge will always be home for Dorothea Hayley, who grew up in the wooded community east of the Seymour River.
Hayley roamed to Montreal to pursue her love of classical music at McGill University, but the accomplished vocalist always makes her way back to Blueridge. It’s where her and fellow McGill alum Alejandro Ochoa have laid down roots for an annual festival which celebrates their love of chamber music.
Originally from Colombia, Ochoa was surprised the first night he arrived in Blueridge seven years ago and encountered a black bear.
“It was quite a welcome,” recalls Ochoa with a laugh.
The annual Blueridge Chamber Music Festival has grown over the years from its humble beginnings.
“It was really just an excuse for us to get together with some friends who are amazing musicians and just play some concerts,” says Hayley.
This year there are nine concerts and 19 musicians as part of the festival, with performances at Mount Seymour United Church and in Vancouver.
It might be a two-week event, but it takes the whole year to prepare for it, explains Ochoa of all the emails that go back and forth to line up the musicians.
“It’s a big undertaking,” he says.
So how do Ochoa and Hayley curate their chamber music lineup?
“We invite people whose playing we admire,” says Hayley, in short.
“Yes, that’s the first thing on the list,” agrees Ochoa.
Case in point, this year they invited their McGill musician friend Chris Paul Harman to be Blueridge’s 2017 Composer in Residence.
“He’s really interesting because he was self-taught as a composer. As a kid he started playing the cello and he took some composition lessons but he never went to university,” explains Hayley of Harman, who is now head of music composition at McGill.
Getting that job at McGill without a formal education, says Hayley, is unusual and speaks to Harman’s extradionary talent and ability. If fact, Harman now holds a PhD in composition.
“His music is really exciting. It’s very adventurous and contemporary but he likes to use sourced material,” says Hayley.
One of the pieces Harman will be performing is by Bach. Another one is from the 1930s and was used in the movie The Shining. But there’s a twist. Harman turns these classics on their ear and makes them his own through improvisation.
“Basically chamber music is the original party music,” explains Hayley, for the unacquainted. “Music that is designed to be played in intimate settings among friends.”
The festival’s home venue, Mount Seymour United Church, has a familiar comfort for Hayley, who would give piano concerts there as a child.
“I grew up with this feeling about Mount Seymour (United Church) that it was the right place to make music. It just feels right,” she says.
Ochoa couldn’t agree more.
“The acoustics are fantastic, actually,” he says. “We have particularly always enjoyed playing there.”
Concerts are intentionally scheduled for mid-summer evenings, when the smell of roasted pine needles permeates the air and fading summer sunlight peers through the windows of Mount Seymour United Church.
“That’s kind of what I’m after with the festival. I want to create this atmosphere that doesn’t exactly exist anywhere else,” says Hayley.
This year the Blueridge festival is inspired by the theme of Red Wedding.
“We wanted to have, at the centre of the season, this kind of catastrophic event, this disastrous relationship,” explains Hayley.
The series of four concerts are a melodic metaphor for a relationship that starts off really well and then goes badly. The first concert is the meeting. The second is romance. Another concert, only performed in Vancouver, is decidedly passionate. The third concert at Mount Seymour church evokes feelings of betrayal and abandonment. And the final concert is about dread.
“It’s not very literal at all, it’s a poetic interpretation,” says Hayley, with a laugh.
Audience favourites such as Mozart’s exquisite “String Quintet in C Major,” Dvorák’s “Piano Quintet in A Major,” and Shostakovich’s “Piano Quintet in G Minor,” as well as rarer works like Zemlinsky’s “Clarinet Trio” will be performed.
“We had to go the deep web to get this music,” says Hayley, of the clarinet concerto.
New this year for the festival’s organizers is their first staged work: Peter Maxwell Davies’ eccentric and stirring solo opera, Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot.
Alongside the Blueridge concert series is a one-of-a-kind academy for gifted young musicians to hone their classical music skills. Passing on their passion for music is rewarding for Hayley and Ochoa, who teach voice and piano at Vancouver Community College and Kwantlen Polytechnic University respectively.
Hayley has even taught in Afghanistan, at the National Institute of Music, which provides scholarships to children who were formally living on the streets and getting by selling bubble gum and shining shoes.
“And so these kids are incredibly hungry for learning,” says Hayley, adding her Afghanistan experience was very intense and extremely fulfilling all at the same time.
She would arrive at the school in the morning and give a voice lesson to one student. Five minutes into the lesson a little head would appear at the door. And by the end the group had swelled to 20 kids hungry to raise their voices in song. That experience changed her perspective as a musician, in a saturated field which sometimes leaves her feeling unappreciated.
It also opened Hayley’s eyes to the freedoms we sometimes take for granted in Canada.
“It’s unbelievably intense to be living under guard the whole time,” she says.
Hayley was in Afghanistan on New Year’s Eve and went to a restaurant to celebrate. While she had to be patted down three different times by guards with machine guns to enter the restaurant, which she described as a stone fortress, overall it was a wonderful dinner.
Two weeks later there was a suicide bombing and 21 people were killed in that same restaurant.
“I guess I just feel lucky to be here,” says Hayley.
