Vivaldi Chamber Choir: Classical Cabaret, Saturday, June 4 at 8 p.m. at St. Helen’s Anglican Church, 4405 West Eighth Ave., Vancouver. Pre-concert chat with Edette Gagné at 7:30 p.m. Tickets: $22/$18, visit classicalcabaret.brownpapertickets.com.
Conductor Edette Gagné is a strong believer in the transformative power of performances.
“The arts change people’s lives. They change people’s lives who are on the stage, they change people’s lives who are in the audience and they need our support in order to continue that incredible journey that they’re on,” she says.
The West End resident, who mans the podium for a number of different local ensembles, therefore strongly encourages community members to attend as many concerts as possible as well as make donations to groups in need of financial support to assure their continued music making.
“You never know how music is going to touch lives. You never know in a show how one particular piece might speak to somebody in the audience and just completely transform their day, or their moment, or their week, or their mood. We just don’t know,” she says.
With such potential power at her fingertips, or baton so to speak, Gagné remains committed to helping facilitate a certain type of experience for people – performers and audience members alike - each time she commands a performance.
“We are on a journey together and if we can take you on this journey and take ourselves on this journey, that’s something special,” she says.
The busy maestro has many opportunities to do just that in the coming weeks as she’s involved in a number of upcoming concerts with her various ensembles.
One is with the British Columbia Boys Choir, which is gearing up to leave June 26 on a three-week tour of Croatia, Slovenia, Venice and Scotland. Gagné has been with the organization for the last nine years and currently serves as associate conductor.
Prior to heading abroad, the choir will present a Bon Voyage Concert, June 12 at 4 p.m. at Vancouver’s Ryerson United Church.
“It’s not just a Bon Voyage Concert for the boys who are going on tour, which gives everybody at home a chance to see the show, it’s also our farewell concert for (artistic director) Tony Araujo. After 16 years, he’s retiring … from the Boys Choir so that he can pursue some of the other opportunities that have become open to him. It’s going to be a very emotional, of course, show on June 12 because of the fact that not only are the boys getting ready for this big tour, but also the fact that it’s our chance to honour Tony and say our farewell to him,” says Gagné, who will be taking over Araujo’s role.
Another major performance on the horizon that Gagné is involved with is the Vivaldi Chamber Choir’s season finale, Classical Cabaret, set for June 4 at Vancouver’s St. Helen’s Anglican Church.
Gagné joined the group at the beginning of the current season as artistic director and conductor.
“I was ecstatic to come out and audition because it had been a very, very long time since I had conducted an adult-voiced choir and that just opened up a whole world of repertoire to my musical brain and programming and everything else that I hadn’t really tapped into because it doesn’t work with young voices, it doesn’t work with boys. … It gives me a chance to explore a whole world of music that I haven’t touched since I was singing. It really appealed to me in terms of the possibilities,” she says.
Classical Cabaret’s format and flow will be different than a typical choral concert, aiming to offer a wide variety of music in a relaxed and inviting atmosphere complete with food and beverages.
“I like to do things a little outside of the box,” says Gagné, going on to explain the show has been designed to be “more like a party that we’re entertaining you at.”
“It’s not a come to a church or a theatre and sit in a chair and watch the concert go by and maybe get a stretch in intermission and then a glass of whatever. We’re presenting it in a cabaret format,” she adds.
The evening’s program will be divided into three sets with refreshment breaks in between.
The first set will feature songs sung almost entirely in French about beauty, nature and love. The second set, while also focused on nature, moves in a different direction, featuring songs about yearning and unrequited love sung in English, German, Japanese and Chinese.
“The final set of music is praise, so beauty in praise of God, in praise of art, in praise of music and with a very, very fun piece, a Canadian piece called ‘Feller From Fortune’ arranged by Harry Somers,” says Gagné.
The following evening, June 5, the Vivaldi Chamber Choir will present a reworked version of the show, entitled Beautiful and Bright, adhering to a more traditional concert format, in Sechelt.
Gagné has enjoyed working with the talented choir members over the last year.
“They come from all different levels of experience. We have everything from basically professional level singers to incredibly strong amateur singers who clearly love to be singing. The work ethic is so high and the pride in performance is so high. ... I think that I’ve pushed some of them out of their comfort zones with some of the challenge of the music and also what I’m asking from them musically but they’re just eating it up and they’re just really rising to the occasion,” she says.
With her first season nearly under her belt, Gagné is already looking toward the next and is beginning to brainstorm ideas.
“The choir has been around for 27 years so I’m carrying on a really rich tradition with this group. I don’t want to lose the thing that they started with, which was early music, but they’re happily branching out into all time periods, including brand new compositions,” she says.
For example, at the upcoming season closer, they’re going to be performing high school student Joshua Yang’s “Song of Nature,” which was a first-place winner in Vancouver Chamber Choir’s 2015 Composition Competition. “We’re only the second choir to perform ‘Song of Nature,’ which is really cool. That’s exciting,” says Gagné.
Gagné is also at the helm of the North Shore Light Opera Society’s current production of The Merry Widow, on now through Sunday, May 29 at Presentation House Theatre. This will be her fourth show with the society though her first in the role of stage director. She’s also serving as co-music director.
“It’s got something for everybody. The humour operates on multiple levels, the music is exquisite, the leads are unbelievable,” she says.
Other conducting roles Gagné holds include conductor of the Coast Symphony Orchestra, which is one of the four ensembles of the Sunshine Coast Community Orchestra Association, an organization she’s been with for eight years, as well as choir director with the Kids Sing Chorus. “It’s a wonderful organization. They provide a high quality choral program at no charge to the singers for young children in East Vancouver … when else can you do the hokey pokey when you’re at work?” she says.
Gagné also serves as vice-president of the Vancouver Women’s Musical Society, which is celebrating its 110th anniversary this season and works to support young, emerging professional musicians from B.C. with scholarships and bursaries to help them further their education and careers.
“I feel incredibly blessed that I do what I love and what I’m passionate about and I get to call it work. Granted I do have five jobs because that’s how you make a living as a freelance musician, however, the reason why the energy level is there is because it’s what I’m passionate about. I think if everybody was as lucky as me, wow, what a happy place the world would be. I tell people even a bad day is a good day because I get to make music,” she says.
