Andras Schiff at Koerner Hall, Toronto
Nov 5, 2023
Program (announced from the stage):
Bach, Prelude and fugue in C, from WTC Book 1
Bach, Capriccio in B flat, BWV 992
Bach, Chromatic fantasia and fugue, BWV 903
Haydn, Variations in f minor, Hob.XVII:6
Schumann, Davidsbündlertänze, Op. 6
<Intermission>
Mendelssohn, Variations sérieuses, Op. 54
Beethoven, Sonata No. 17 in d minor, Op. 31, No. 2 "The Tempest"
The Royal Conservatory of Music’s Koerner Hall in Toronto has announced its 2023–24 concert season—the venue’s 15th anniversary season—including performances from Rhiannon Giddens, Brad Mehldau, Laurie Anderson, Kronos Quartet, and Richard Goode. More info here.
The Royal Conservatory of Music’s Koerner Hall in Toronto has announced its 2022–23 concert season, including performances from Nonesuch artists Tigran Hamasyan, Kronos Quartet, Punch Brothers, Cécile McLorin Salvant, and Joshua Redman. Details here.
Multitalented and multi-instrumental producer and musician Steve Marriner of the award-winning trio MonkeyJunk is set to host the 20th annual Maple Blues Awards at Koerner Hall on Jan. 23. The not-to-be-missed gala is Canada’s national blues celebration, recognizing outstanding musical achievement and gathering blues musicians and music fans from across the country each year. A…
Maple Blues gala Jan 23 features Marriner was originally published on The Bulletin
Kronos Quartet & Brad Mehldau's sets at Koerner Hall in Toronto this week, part of The Royal Conservatory's 21C Music Festival, will stream live at rcmusic.ca/livestream, this Wednesday, May 25, and Thursday, respectively, both at 8 PM ET. Kronos & Tanya Tagaq premiere her new piece for Kronos' Fifty for the Future project. Mehldau performs his Three Pieces After Bach.
Mervon Mehta’s career in the arts has seen him on both sides of the curtain. A student of the late Sanford Meisner, Mehta has performed as an actor in over 100 theatrical productions, including residencies at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, The Citadel Theatre in Edmonton, and two seasons at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival.
Since April of '09, Mehta has been the Executive Director of Performing Arts for The Royal Conservatory. He oversaw the successful launch of Koerner Hall, The Conservatory’s stunning 1,135-seat concert venue. He is responsible for programming Koerner Hall’s successful series of classical, jazz, world music, and pop concerts, as well as overseeing all of the other performances and events throughout The Conservatory’s home at the TELUS Centre for Performance and Learning.
He was born in Vienna, and grew up in Montreal. He is the son of singer Carmen Mehta (a Royal Conservatory alumna) and conductor Zubin Mehta, and is married to Carey Suleim, Senior Director of Marketing for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Bill King sat down for a conversation with...
Bill King: You are connected to both Koerner Hall and the Royal Conservatory.
Mervon Mehta: We are all the same. I run the concert part not the education part thank God.
B.K: How many students connected to these programs?
M.M: We have several levels. With the Glenn Gould school, which is our top level classical school, about 120 – 130 students - basically, a full symphony orchestra with a bunch of singers and pianists. Then we have the Royal Conservatory which is anybody like my 11 year old and eighty year olds who want to pick up a cello again. That’s a few thousand people. We are also national. We have 200,000 students across the country taking exams, guitar lessons, and flute lessons - whatever you have. It’s the oldest cultural institution I believe in Canada, maybe the University of Toronto still has us by a couple years. I like to say we are older than Alberta.
B.K: I always start my Thursday morning show at CIUT FM with the music of Mavis Staples.
M.M: The divine one.
B.K: Mavis Staples and you have a long running friendship.
M.M: She’s one of my all time favourite people on the planet. I spent ten years in Chicago and got to know her a bit just by presenting her in concert and we became friends. Pops was in the hospital at one point and she came up with this idea for a new show – a tribute to Mahalia Jackson. Just her and Hammond B-3 organ. The organist was Lucky Peterson. She started touring it and I asked if she’d like to do it in Chicago and she said of course. At the time I was booking the Ravinia Festival and the Chicago Symphony Hall; Symphony Center.
We did Martin Luther King Day with Mavis Staples. The really cool thing – Pops came out of the hospital two days before that show. The racial politics in Chicago is pretty intense. To have Mavis Staples and the singers from south side of Chicago – African American Chicago –come to Symphony Center, the elite white home of the Chicago Symphony was a big deal in itself.
To do the Mahalia Jackson show on Martin Luther King Day and Pops out of the hospital sitting there in kind of the president’s box with a big gold medallion on beaming from ear to ear watching his little girl Mavis who was 65 at the time, was something. Pops passed the next year, so Mavis and I decided to do a big tribute at the Ravinia Festival. We had the Winans – Buddy Guy and a huge choir – all sorts of people. We sent Pops home right!
B.K: Richard Daly’s son was mayor at the time wasn’t he? How did you navigate through that Chicago political machine? That had to be complicated.
M.M: My philosophy has always been, I bring music to people and hopefully music brings people together. I try not to get into the politics. You have to be respectful and knowledgeable so you can make your way around. Chicago is a divided city. A lovely city, loved it. White lives on one side, Mexican another, black lives on another and then there’s the lake. It’s tricky, yet a vibrant city. Having said that, I much prefer being in Toronto.
Within the music community, you know politics comes in play. Someone will say, “That’s the greatest jazz piano player ever and another would say, “I wouldn’t step across the street to hear them.” What was it Billy Eckstine said about Dinah Washington, ”I wouldn’t pee in her mouth if her lungs were on fire.”
B.K: That’s someone I would listen to everyday.
M.M: Who knows? If the music is good I don’t care about your politics.
B.K: You must take shots from those who go on chat boards say, “Look who he just booked” – from classical and other areas?
M.M: I don’t always follow this, but the edict is, never read the comments.
B.K: I think at times people are just venting, at times hateful at others, can be constructive.
M.M: No matter what you do especially in this age of Facebook and Twitter someone can be offended by something.
B.K: My favourite is when someone posts a music video on YouTube and suddenly there’ a mysterious seven dislikes and in a matter of weeks 3,000 likes and the deficit seven never gain ground.
M.M: That’s because they are not cat videos.
B.K: The world you inhabited as a kid is quite different that most. This is music royalty.
M.M: Absolutely. It was quite a blessing but when you’re in it as a seven year old and father’s coming home to dinner with Pinchas Zukerman and Yo Yo Ma, they to me were just my dad’s work friends, no different than any other kid - just dad bringing his drinking buddies home. I didn’t know who they were other than when they arrived there would always be an instrument with them. I think I once sat on Pinchas Zukerman’s fiddle while it was in the case on the couch and got scolded. I did go to a lot of concerts and theater – a wide range of concerts beyond classical.
That’s where my love and appreciation of all types of music comes from – if it’s going to be blue grass – this is the level it needs to be at. If it’s going to be chorale music or Mavis Staples or as Ellington said – there are two kinds of music, good and bad.
B.K: What was the dynamic between father and son?
M.M: Oh, I took piano lessons and violin lessons and was horrible at all of them.
B.K: What was dad’s response?
M.M: Thankfully, he was on the road a lot. He wasn’t standing over making me practice. If he was I would probably play better than I do now. I was a Canadian kid in Montreal doing the piano lessons like any kid. At some point in fifth or sixth grade I said this is crazy,
I just want to play hockey. Unfortunately, I wasn’t much better at hockey as I was playing piano and kind of coasted for a while and found my way into theatre in my late teens and into my early twenties.
B.K: Playing sports requires you to learn new skills and be socially connected.
M.M: Certainly. My son asked me at the table the other day what the one thing you’d like to do if you could the rest of my life and I said, “To be on an NHL team, preferably the Montreal Canadians.
B.K: What is that with some musicians?
M.M: It’s something I will never attain.
B.K: Do you still play a game of shinny?
M.M: Not no more. In Chicago I was part of a league of actors, musicians and stagehands and there was only one rink in Chicago you could rent and we’d rent at midnight. The head of the IATSI union was my buddy and we’d go every Monday night and shoot the puck around.
B.K: You are a roots guy – not matter what the music.
M.M: I’m attracted to that. Any authentic expression, no matter what the genre. I’m not a fusion guy.
B.K: New programming?
M.M: For me one of the most exciting concerts of the season is coming up Saturday night with Antibalas and Zap Mama. Antibalas is a Nigerian Afro-beat Fela Kuti influenced group from Brooklyn – the house band in the Broadway show Fela. I’ve known them for about fifteen, twenty years now. They are doing a tour with Zap Mama an incredible vocal quartet from the Belgian Congo but now based in Belgium with this singer Marie Dauline, who has been around awhile now. The first tour they did in America,
I brought them to Chicago in 1995 when they were acapella and hand percussion before they funked it up a little. This combination is going to kill. With Fela Kuti there was more than just the music – it was lifestyle. A concert would start at midnight and go to morning. He wouldn’t stop. Two of his sons are still playing very well.
B.K: You’ve been at Koerner Hall since day one
.M.M: I came to open the hall through an invitation from the conservatory and have love every second of it.
B.K: When you program you have the freedom to cover a lot of music ground. You’ve broken with what would be traditional programming in a hall of this nature.
M.M: I hope so.
B.K: You take chances!
M.M: Part of this is – I’d get bored really easily if we had fabulous piano recitals every weekend – if we had fabulous jazz concerts every weekend, I’d be bored. One night can be an Afro-funk band the next night a piano recital playing Rachmaninoff or Tchaikovsky – maybe the next a singer/songwriter. It keeps us on our toes and keeps me interested. Thankfully, the audience has come along with that.
B.K: What were some of the highlights of 2014?
M.M: We just had one of the most spectacular classical concerts Tuesday past – this Russian pianist Daniel Trifonov who won the Tchaikovsky competition – he’s twenty-three years old. You don’t like to compare to others but as far as a career goes – I could see him if he keeps his head together – well managed and well fed – he could have a career like Arthur Rubinstein or Horowitz.
He was paired with Gidon Kremor, a 68 year old violinist, a Latvian. The both see musically eye to eye. It was extraordinary music making at the highest, highest level. They then went on to play Carnegie Hall two nights later. We are either two days before or two days after Carnegie with a lot of these artists.
We had a reunion of the Boss Brass to open our jazz season this year with all of the guys.
B.K: How do the temperaments between the artists vary from genre to genre? You have to work with all kinds of personalities.
M.M: The kind of people who come into a hall this size are not the kind of people who are jerks. The old clichés about the green M&Ms, we don’t have any of that. We have people who really want to play. No trucks coming in with lazar light shows. It’s a different vibe on some nights – I may wear a tie – others, not so. A classical pianist may want it really quite an hour or two before the concert and a jazz band might want to be talking and laughing and Skyping with their friends.
Our job from the moment they get off the plane and walk through the doors and back on the plane, is to make it easy and comfortable for them so they can do their best.
B.K: There used to be issues with the sound in Roy Thomson – the music didn’t project beyond stage. I hear no such complaints about Koerner Hall, only praise.
M.M: I will say the designers under Dr. Peter Simon, president of the conservatory and those who managed the project – Michael Koerner who was very much involved in choosing the architect and acoustician – the only thing they cared about was the sound. It looks fabulous – Marianne McKenna did an incredible job architecturally. Marianne says the right visual does make the sound better.
B.K: Do you have a favourite seat?
M.M: I do. First, without lying, there are no bad seats. I sit in the front row of the balcony on the aisle which allows me to get up and leave when something needs attention. I can also sneak back after doing my little concert intro into my seat. I’m often there with the band manager or the band member’s wife or kids. It’s only a thousand seats, every one; a good seat.
