It’s a crisp April 2022 evening and downtown Edmonton feels full of life after two years of desolation during COVID-19. The sun is still out at 7 p.m., its rays streaming between the gleaming new skyscrapers in the Ice District. Cars honk and Oilers fans on foot chant and cheer as they head to Rogers Place for the last game of the regular season.
Over at the Winspear Centre, construction of a $65.6-million expansion—planned prior to the pandemic—is taking shape in a former parking lot. The original concert hall, opened in 1997, is home to the 70-year-old Edmonton Symphony Orchestra. A smaller venue, the Music Box, and a series of rehearsal and teaching studios will be part of the 41,000-ft2 addition.
Inside the Winspear, hundreds of people mill about in the main lobby, waiting for one of Alexander Prior’s last few performances as chief conductor of the ESO. Seating in the hall itself is staggered to maintain physical distancing, so there are more empty spaces than bodies in the room. (The Winspear can fit 1,932 people if it opens the choir lofts.) Almost everyone is masked as they take their seats for the evening’s program, which includes pieces by two Edmonton-born composers, Vivian Fung and Alissa Cheung, and excerpts from Philip Glass’s minimalist opera Akhnaten.
“Tonight is a little exploration in relentlessness,” Prior announces from the stage. “It often takes the form of minimalism. Minimalists tend to stretch time. It feels like both an eternity and one second.” In other words, tonight’s music will comprise the ideal soundtrack for a pandemic.
Akhnaten, which sounds like the theme to a Game of Thrones prequel, hovers from dour and cinematic to lilting and pastoral. Fung’s A Child Dreams of Toys captures the joy of total abandon—or the anticipation of it—while Cheung’s Impressions, with its scratchy violins, signals (perhaps) another round of impending doom.
Prior and the ESO also throw in an unscheduled performance of Carl Nielsen’s Canto Serioso, originally written for French horn and piano. Before launching into their interpretation of the piece—complete with gongs—Prior reminisces about life before COVID-19. As it turns out, he conducted one of Nielsen’s symphonies during his last pre-pandemic concert with the ESO. The title of the work? The Inextinguishable.
“Ironic?” Prior impishly asks the crowd.
From May to September 2020, musicians performed more than 180 outdoor concerts, raising more than $160,000 for the ESO.
The day the world shut down, Prior was in Montreal, getting ready to fly to Germany for a tour with one of its orchestras as a guest conductor. He ended up renting a car and driving the 3,600 km back to Edmonton. Prior wanted to be with his ESO family and help in whatever way he could, whether lobbying the government for emergency financial support or organizing a public fundraiser.
“My first thought was ‘I really have to be here,’” he says. “But because the [restrictions] of the pandemic were so strong, there wasn’t much I could do. It was rough. It was survival mode for us and the whole classical music industry. How can we pivot?”
Like so many others, the ESO pivoted to digital. While in-person concerts were cancelled, classes for its youth orchestra, YONA-Sistema, went online immediately. By the end of April 2020, the ESO had officially called off the 25th edition of its late-summer festival, Symphony Under the Sky. But the orchestra had by then started producing a series of YouTube videos, “From Stage to Screen,” featuring musicians alone or in small groups performing in the Winspear’s empty and resonant concert hall—including concertmaster Robert Uchida playing several of J.S. Bach’s sonatas for solo violin.
“Thank you for this!” one viewer, Wendy Miller, commented on YouTube. “Everyone could use a bit of beautiful music right now. We miss the Winspear and ESO so much.”
Prior himself, on piano, accompanied principal cellist Rafael Hoekman performing Sibelius’s Two Pieces, opus 77. “The videos told our patrons ‘We’re still performing for you, we care about you, and we want to keep you connected with our players and our community,’” says Prior.
ESO tuba player Scott Whetham and trombonist Kathryn Macintosh outdoors in 2021. Photo by Colin Waugh.
While the videos increased the ESO’s YouTube subscribers by more than 65 per cent during the first three months of the pandemic, musicians and fans alike were craving live performances. Indoor concerts weren’t allowed, but outdoor shows were—with masks, distancing, fewer performers and smaller audiences. So the ESO took to the streets and parks and backyards of Edmonton, playing a series of community concerts organized by assistant principal horn Megan Evans.
From May 2020 to September 2020, musicians performed more than 180 outdoor concerts, raising more than $160,000 for the ESO. “We played for a 95th birthday,” Evans writes in the ESO and Winspear Centre’s 2020-2021 annual report. “Cellist Rafael Hoekman performed a solo show for a music teacher diagnosed with stage four cancer. We also played a concert to celebrate a 30th and a 60th wedding anniversary.” At one show, strong winds ended up blowing a violist’s sheet music into her colleague’s face.
For cellist Julie Hereish and violist Keith Hamm, these outdoor shows were a great way to meet music fans and explore Edmonton. The couple had only moved to the city seven months prior to the pandemic. “People were excited to talk to us [after a performance],” says Hereish. “That doesn’t happen in a concert hall. There’s less of a barrier when musicians are playing on a street corner—audiences feel very comfortable coming to chat and introduce themselves.”
“[People] would bring lawn chairs onto their streets and take in the music,” adds Hamm. “We started feeling really close to the city and to the individual neighbourhoods that came out and showed support.”
By October 2020 the ESO was back in the Winspear—still in smaller and distanced configurations but with better acoustics (and less wind). Within six weeks, and 22 concerts by the orchestra, however, and with COVID infections surging across Alberta, the provincial government ordered another ban on indoor gatherings.
The orchestra wouldn’t perform again for eight months—its longest absence from the stage during the pandemic. (Some members continued to record and release YouTube videos; others started a podcast.)
In August 2021 the ESO played a series of small outdoor concerts in and around Edmonton, and relaunched its annual outdoor festival, Symphony Under the Sky, at reduced capacity, in Hawrelak Park. Here, all 56 members performed in concert together for the first time in 16 months.
Autumn saw shows at the Winspear once again, with the ESO offering monthly memberships instead of season subscriptions. After another brief shutdown in January 2022, the ESO resumed a regular slate of performances that March—some with restricted capacity, some full—and announced its 2022–23 season (including Symphony Under the Sky) and the appointment of an artistic adviser, Michael Stern, in early June.
People would bring lawn chairs onto their streets and take in the music. We started feeling really close to the city and the neighbourhoods.
Still, with so few concerts and such small attendance, COVID could’ve been disastrous for the ESO. The company made only $73,127 in ticket sales for the year ending June 30, 2021, compared to $4.6-million for 2019 and $3-million for 2020.
But the ESO and Winspear Centre weathered the pandemic relatively well. They received some $2.9-million from the Canada Emergency Wage Subsidy program to help pay administrative staff and musicians’ salaries in 2020 and 2021, as well as grants from six organizations, including the Edmonton Arts Council, EPCOR’s Heart + Soul Fund, Alberta Foundation for the Arts and Canadian Heritage. The orchestra and the Winspear did have to let go some administrative staff, but the ESO didn’t lay off any musicians.
Prior thinks the ESO’s administration and Winspear’s board of directors did an admirable job of keeping the 70-year-old orchestra and its 25-year-old venue alive. Together, the two institutions posted an operating deficit of $2.7-million for the year ended June 30, 2020, and a surplus of $1,387,032 for the following year. (ESO CEO Annamarie Petrov wasn’t available for comment, despite repeated requests.)
“We were very fortunate to have really thoughtful leadership in the board and the administration,” says Prior. “You can’t magic money, you can’t work miracles, but they definitely tried. The task was to keep the little pilot flame burning, because the ESO is such a treasure. Thousands of musicians have put so much into this orchestra, and so many audience members have supported it regularly and selflessly over the years.”
Members of the ESO perform a community concert on Saskatchewan Drive in summer of 2020. Photo by Konstantine Kurelias.
As COVID wreaked havoc on the ESO’s schedule and ability to perform, some of the orchestra’s musicians poured their energies into other projects.
Cellist Victor Pipkin focused on his family farm about 80 km northwest of Edmonton—raising goats, cows, ducks and rabbits. He spent time climbing in the Rockies, teaching music lessons outdoors, learning to play piano, writing several études and at times catching up on sleep. “I love performing, I love our audiences. Music is meant to bring community together,” says the 32-year ESO veteran. “Did I miss performing? Probably the answer is no, because I’m so busy with other aspects of life outside the symphonic circle.”
Cellist Hereish and violist Hamm welcomed two daughters—Charlotte in May 2020, then Claire 20 months later. “Having kids was kind of the perfect project for that time,” says Hereish, as she cradles and breastfeeds her youngest during a video call. “I mean, I was pregnant before the pandemic started, but it ended up being the perfect timing. We both had so much time at home.”
Their experience wasn’t always seamless. Due to COVID precautions, Hamm was only allowed to join his wife in the hospital for the last two hours of Charlotte’s delivery. “It wasn’t fun,” Hereish remembers. “I was alone in labour for hours, and then Keith was able to join only at the very end. It wasn’t the experience you’re supposed to have.”
The couple also pursued their own musical side projects—starting a duo, The New Cohort, and performing livestreams. Hamm even recorded an album and toured Ontario with his ensemble, the Rosebud String Quartet. (He hails from the southern Alberta town of Rosebud and is the artistic director of its chamber music festival.)
Hamm says he’ll always think of the COVID years whenever he plays Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The ESO performed the classic with conductor Mario Venzago at the start of 2022, back in the Winspear but in front of a more intimate audience. “As we were playing it, I remember thinking there was some part of the pandemic I could associate with each of the passing movements,” says Hamm. “Then of course, there’s the huge, victorious finale that we all wish and hope for as far as being on the other side of it all. I found a lot of parallels there.”
ESO concertmaster Robert Uchida, left, and former chief conductor Alex Prior at the Winspear Centre, March 2022. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz.
For the ESO’s chief conductor, however, much of the COVID period has been a challenge. A young (he turned 30 only last month!) and naturally gregarious man who’s been writing orchestral music since childhood, Alexander Prior missed performing regularly and felt incredibly lonely. He worried about the future of the arts and his future in the arts. For a brief time, he flirted with the idea of learning to code.
“[The pandemic] was awful,” he says. “Thankfully, a few close friends really rallied to my aid and kept me going. I found it incredibly challenging for my mental health. It was also really stressful to see what was happening to the industry and to music. People need music, right? Music is one of the oldest things humanity has.”
For some relief, Prior listened to music. Perhaps more surprising, however, was his chosen prescription—country music and road trips. The UK-born and Russian-trained composer spent days driving through southern Alberta and Saskatchewan, even (once the border reopened) Wyoming and Montana. His favourite drive? Highway 40, which runs through Kananaskis and is only accessible in summer. “It’s just fantastic,” he says. “Open the windows all the way and blast country radio.” (Alberta cowboy Corb Lund is one of his favourite artists.)
In addition to the pressures of the pandemic, there was the question of Prior’s future with the ESO. He wanted to stay, but his five-year contract was expiring in June 2022. “I didn’t decide to leave,” he says. “That was a bigger-picture thing. So my job was to get another job.
“But I’m full of gratitude. I’ve had quite a long run here, and we really love each other. It’s really good to leave on good terms. Many conductors don’t.”
Prior is now the music director of Erfurt Theatre and the Erfurt Philharmonic Orchestra in Germany. (Flying to and from Europe for auditions was “rough and full of bureaucracy.”) He says Alberta and its capital city will always be close to his heart. He began his tenure with the ESO when he was only 24, so he feels like he matured as an adult in Edmonton. “It’s hard to say goodbye,” says Prior. “But it’s hard because it was beautiful.”
The ESO is now looking for his replacement. New artistic adviser Michael Stern is helping with the search. He’s also scheduled to conduct 11 concerts himself, including Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The ESO’s 2022/2023 season also features repertoire by titans such as Bach, Mozart and the Beatles. As for the Winspear Centre’s expansion, the goal is to open next spring.
“The ESO is a real treasure and it has an awesome future ahead of it,” says Prior, who promises to return to guest conduct at some point. “I’m proud to have been part of the history. I’ll be part of the future, too, in a different way, and I’m very grateful for that.”
Sandra Sperounes is a music journalist based in Edmonton who was formerly on staff at the Edmonton Journal.
