At mesmerizing concert, Music on Main and David Pay honoured with Barbara Pentland awards
All-star team of vocalists and instrumentalists successfully brings to life Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, a technical feat acting as a pulsing reaffirmation of humanity
Vern Griffiths overseeing Music for 18 Musicians in a landmark performance by Music on Main All-Star Band. Photo by Jan Gates
FOR ITS 20TH-ANNIVERSARY season celebration at the Vancouver Playhouse on March 23, Music on Main took on a work that perfectly captures the Vancouver organization’s artistic ambition, daring, and passion.
Ahead of the landmark concert of Steve Reich’s epic Music for 18 Musicians, the Canadian Music Centre presented Music on Main with a Barbara Pentland Award of Excellence. The prize acknowledges extraordinary contributions to Canadian music and excellence in composition and performance across B.C.
The company’s artistic director David Pay was also recognized with a surprise Barbara Pentland Lifetime Achievement Award, honouring his dedication to Canadian music, his lasting impact on the nation’s cultural landscape, and his work connecting Vancouver’s musicians to the world over hundreds of concerts. Through his efforts at Music on Main and elsewhere, Pay has made a name internationally as a leading programmer of classical and contemporary music.
Presenting the preshow award, CMC’s Sean Bickerton accurately described the organization as “radically innovative”. And proving that point was the still-radical, iconic, 50-year-old piece Music on Main was about to bring to life on the Vancouver Playhouse stage.
The ensuing performance of Music for 18 Musicians will easily go down as a contender for concert of the year, the atmosphere charged by the rarity of the occasion—a dizzying technical feat that spanned several grand pianos, three marimbas, a metallophone, violin, cello, two bass clarinets, and more, all overseen by Vancouver percussion master Vern Griffiths.
The experience was mindblowing as the Music on Main All-Star Band enveloped the audience in waves of pulsing sound, all pulled off with a percussive precision. The score famously requires extreme focus from the players even as it allows audiences to escape time and space and enter a hypnotic state.
Music on Main artistic director David Pay receiving his Barbara Pentland Lifetime Achievement Award. Photo by Jan Gates
Hearing and watching the work live at this sold-out show, it was striking just how much the sound of swelling and fading voices and winds felt like the rhythmic cycle of human breath, layered as it was over the constant, mechanical beat of mallet instruments and piano keys. Adding to the visual experience, vocalists Emily Cheung, Anja Kelly, Alicia Hansen, and Hilary Ison would move their microphones glacially toward and away from their mouths, like they were caught in slow motion, suspended in time.
There was a lot to watch during the performance when your mind wasn’t transported by its dreamlike effects. You could have spent the hour simply locked on violinist Rebecca Whitling and cellist Jonathan Lo as their bows moved with the unrelenting repetitiveness of pistons and yet found expressive power within that monotony. But then there were also the marimba players’ hammers vibrating all around, never losing momentum. And one of the highlights was watching AK Coope occasionally stand to swing her big, S-shaped bass clarinet, inhaling and then breathing life into each new section of the score. Those deep, resonant instruments, usually reserved for melancholy orchestral pieces, were integral to the performance, anchoring its rhythms in a weird, woody, and somehow murmuring human undertone.
For a marathon work of minimalism, the live experience of Music for 18 Musicians had a counterintuitively deep emotional effect—acting as a sort of pulsing, organic reaffirmation of humanity, its surges of power as moving as its fragile, oscillating textures.
And for that experience—along with so many other rewarding adventures in sound at Music on Main over two decades—Vancouver music fans can be grateful. 
Music on Main’s Music for 18 Musicians. Photo by Jan Gates
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