BISQC Blog:

What makes it great?

Posted by Christy Mackintosh
Monday, 30 August 2010

It’s Day One -– the start of the Haydn-centric Recital Round — and there was a definite buzz about The Banff Centre campus as 400 resident audience members wound their way into the brand spanking new Kinnear Centre for Rob Kapilow’s 10 a.m. talk, “What Makes it Great?”

“The audience is what’s most special about this competition,” BISQC director Barry Shiffman claimed in his introduction. But was he flattering us? Trying to take the pressure off the musicians? He warned us that what we were about to experience was akin to Trudeau’s “Participaction” theme of the early seventies. No idle, holiday listening allowed at this competition!

Rob Kapilow, photo by Don Lee. Click photo to enlarge.

Kapilow began with a knock-knock joke about Phillip Glass, which we all played along with because everyone knows how knock-knock jokes work. Hey, we thought, this participaction thing was going to be easy! But it was a trick. Before we knew it he had us clapping and knee-slapping like dutiful Orff students while the Calliope Quartet took us through phrase after artful phrase of humourous Haydn.

And that was the point. When you listen closely, there is plenty of humour in classical music, and Kapilow was deconstructing Haydn to show us why and how he was making us laugh. Like an ultra-sophisticated knock-knock joke, Haydn gives us a pattern, sets up our expectations, and then subverts them.

Photo by Don Lee. Click photo to enlarge.

There’s nothing like a little humour (not to mention the mild embarrassment of reciting aloud, in public, the many permutations of “dya-dum-dum” and “8-4-whack”) to break the ice and bring an audience – and its musicians – together. Which brings us back to Barry’s claim. The BISQC audience IS special. A community has already begun to form among strangers that have come from all over the world: New Zealand, Japan, Seattle, Jasper. And as one BISQC connoisseur I know explained, other music competitions tend to keep artists and audience members separate. Not so here at Banff. In larger centres, people stay in separate accommodations and stick to themselves in between performances. Here, everyone lives and dines on site. There’s nowhere else to go, and that’s a good thing.

Listen to the talk on iTunes

More photos on our Gallery page

Our intrepid BISQC blogger, Christy Mackintosh, is a music lover and freelance writer who lives and works in Banff. She holds degrees in piano performance and English literature, is a contributor to Calgary’s Fast Forward Weekly, has written features for The Globe and Mail, and is working on her first book. She recently participated in The Banff Centre’s Literary Journalism program, where (it could happen to you!) she got a little too used to the buffet at Vistas. She looks forward to feasting of all kinds throughout the exciting week ahead.

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