The Toronto Consort loves to enhance its early music performances – dance, visual art, multimedia are all fair game – and this weekend’s season opener at Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre is no exception. For The Ambassadors, the ensemble has called upon frequent collaborator Alison Mackay, left, to craft a special presentation that includes projections and a detailed script in which members of the ensemble narrate and assume the personae of historical diplomats. It’s not a play as such but nor is it a straight reading of the musical scores from Renaissance Spain, England and France.
“It was a time when ambassadors were being sent out in a more formalized way all across Europe,” related Mackay during a break in rehearsals on Tuesday. “Often the ambassadors were themselves musicians and they sometimes took gifts of music books or musical instruments. So I knew there was a connection between music and the diplomatic corps and I thought it could potentially make for an interesting program.”
An avid and assiduous reader of history, Mackay combed through centuries-old diaries, autobiographies and letters of instruction to ambassadors: “It’s not really theatre but it definitely has theatrical touches,” she confirms.
For the first half of The Ambassadors, the ensemble performs beneath a large screen projection of a Renaissance painting, above, by Hans Holbein depicting French ambassador Jean de Dinteville and his friend Georges de Selve, the Bishop of Lavaur. On the table between the figures is a lute and a quiver of recorders similar to those being played on stage.
“The Toronto Consort has a vocal sextet as well as excellent instrumentation so they have a rich panoply of colours to draw upon,” says Mackay. “It means that they can do a very broad variety of repertoire quite authentically.”
Mackay was a member of the Toronto Consort until motherhood and her role as bassist in Tafelmusik provoked her to withdraw from the smaller group in 1990. In fact, as the Toronto Consort takes the stage on Friday evening, Mackay will be disembarking in Kuala Lampur, the first stop on a 10-day tour of Asia where Tafelmusik is performing Mackay’s multimedia effort The Galileo Project: Music of the Spheres. Conceived here in Toronto, the program has been seen in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico and will return to Trinity-St. Paul’s, the Consort’s home base, in March 2011.
Mackay is deeply humble about her multifarious creative roles. “I feel unbelievably lucky,” she says. “I was in the right place at the right time when it was getting off the ground and we all kind of grew together. I think I could say the same thing about the Toronto Consort (above); it started off as a very experimental thing and then people have grown so much artistically, partly because of the very supportive community here. I’ve also been extremely lucky to work with administrators who were willing to go out on a limb financially and make it possible to realize some of these ideas. I’m absolutely grateful for that.”
While not all of Mackay’s outside projects are as ambitious as Galileo, she tries to take on one larger creative assignment each year. “That’s how I stay fresh,” she says. “Each of these projects usually takes two or three years to realize.”
Right now, she’s working on a project for Tafelmusik concerned with baroque painting but Mackay is very clear that the bells and whistles are designed to enhance rather than distract from the music.
“It’s just a new lens through which to view and hear the music,” she says. “And whether by putting it in a new context or by marrying it with another art form, it makes the performers feel the music in a new way, it inspires them and excites them and that feeling is totally communicated to the audience. I think the change in context brings a freshness that everyone, the audience and the musicians, can really enjoy.”
WHERE/WHEN: The Toronto Consort performs The Ambassadors at Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre (427 Bloor St. West, 416.966.1045) October 15 and 16 at 8 pm; tickets are $21 – $50, senior discount available.
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