March is the Cruelest Month

I always imagine that the adjudicators of the Manitoba Music Competition Festival hurry out to town as soon as the last class has taken place. They have certainly had ample opportunity during their two weeks of work to attract many hostile thoughts, and perhaps it is this atmosphere of hostility which is most evident actually during the progress of the Festival.

It is not a pleasant subject to talk about and most people will claim to be above caring, really. Nevertheless, there never was a competition that did not hurt a lot of feelings. Judgment being so personal, everyone in the audience feels that his visceral response is the only possible truth and that the man whose viscera actually matter in the event is obviously hard of hearing and an insensitive ninny besides. And then, really, who does like to lose? Rhetorical question. People go into the Festival not to play for their or other’s pleasure but with the idea that they have a definite chance of winning. Losing is a bitter pill.

And so, for fifty-nine years now the Festival has brought humiliation to many and glory to a few. Somehow, it always ends up being considered a worthwhile exercise. Certainly it is a useful device for teachers who must give motivation to otherwise flabby students. It is also motivation for teachers to do their best, and often the ruffled feelings are, in fact, more painful in the teacher than in the competitor. There is no doubt that behind the youngsters who nervously do their thing on the stage there is another, more discreet, competition going on among the oldsters.

Maybe one of the reasons for the Festival’s continuing to exist is that the final concert (held this year on March 23 in Centennial Hall) always turns out to be such an interesting display of individual talents, many of which would otherwise never be revealed to the group from which they come. I always feel myself that the Festival has a very strong community feeling about it that nothing else in the arts here provides to the same extent.

But maybe this community feeling that I sense is sentimentality on my part or at least a waning ingredient of the proceedings. Every year audiences are smaller. Parents appear to have become so indifferent to their children’s activities that it is almost a miracle that young people ever manage the discipline necessary to master the hurdles that the Festival requires of them. Indifference towards their children and/or music: in both cases it is tough indeed on the young performer. Even at the final concert this year the size of the audience seemed to me unimpressive.

Well, people do not realize what they are missing. The final concert proves that, even if the poor adjudicators made all those mistakes, they nevertheless chose some very interesting winners. The final concert also reminds us of the great range of performance the Festival embraces. In fact this music competition is not just pianos and fiddles and choirs but includes a fair variety of speech classes as well as some highly unusual instrumental fare — solo percussion, handbells and piano-accordions doing what the pianoforte was originally intended to do.

A number of these unusual items were programmed on the final concert. John Mayba, a talented violinist and pianist, expertly manipulated his handbells in “The Lord’s Prayer”; Ken Kuchma astounded me with a rendition of a Mozart piano sonata finale on the accordion; Terri Walsh recited D.H. Lawrence’s “Snake”, hampered though she was by the annoyingly troublesome amplification system.

At these events it is always hard to resist the mixture of sweet innocence and expertise of the youngest performers. Holding an endlessly long bow and a violin that seemed enormous, Julia C. Kim negotiated a Bach Gavotte with utter sang-froid, and the Maple Leaf School Choir (grades 1-4) proved to be absolutely enchanting in their two songs.

The older choirs were good too, of course. They seemed smaller to me than they used to be when choral singing was such an important part of Festival activities. As in the past, however, we heard the struggle going on about what accent to sing in. Canadian singers and actors have such a problem … Least fretting was evident in the Bass Clef-Better Half Chorus, which produced beautiful sound, excellent ensemble and a remarkable group sense of rhythm.

Of the more advanced solo performers there were some particularly remarkable talents. I would point out especially the violinist Laurence Leydier (who unfortunately has wasted his time mastering a long, flashy “Round of the Goblins” by a certain Bazzini) and Peter Barnes (whose voices problems of the evening allowed him to sing only Vaughan Williams’s “Silent Noon” — but so beautifully!) Winners of trophies (Leydier was given the Edmund James Memorial Trophy and the Victor Feldbrill Trophy, Barnes the highly competitive Rose Bowl), performers of this calibre lead one to entertain thoughts of a serious musical career.

And the pianists? I suspect that they were all betrayed by the piano. Ah Winnipeg! — when will it be able to afford a couple of truly decent concert instruments? This is such an old problem that it is tempting just to stop talking about it. But no — the fight against cruelty to pianists must continue. Helen Choi (Beryl Ferguson Memorial Trophy) and Michael Dolovich (Aikins Memorial Trophy etc. etc. etc.) had to struggle with a piano that sounded poorly regulated and unevenly voiced. A pity, because both show considerable promise. Dolovich curiously — and modestly — chose to represent himself as a player of Liszt’s “Liebestraum”; he would have been wiser to have chosen something like the Dohnanyi that he played for the Aikens Trophy competition.

I cannot mention everyone. I can only repeat the pleasure and interest of the final concert and of the trophy competitions. I can only say that I would be sad to see the Festival ever disappear from our musical life, that I have faith that more good than hurt comes out of it and that I wish Winnipeg were as musically interested a city as it likes to think it is.

— John Eliot Clark