If you look around, want to find out, are curious enough, there are a lot of interesting, unusual things happening in the little town of Halifax. It�s not like New York, not like Montreal, where it's frontal, in bold type, where there is so much to choose from. Here it is pockets of exquisite surprises.
Last night my friend Inge took me to an �event.� She had told me to dress warm and bring a flashlight. That was all I knew beforehand. (Well, as it turned out my flashlight, a fancy one I had bought to get me through all the possible blackouts in the future, the batteries faded just as I needed them!) We had dinner first and then went up Citadel Hill, into the fortress, across the field, up the ramp, around a corner, down some stairs into a dank basement gun room, once a prison, now a concert hall lit with candles. And, to my surprise, one of the performers was Peter Togni, the moderator on the CBC Weekender program, one of my favorite shows, one of my favorite voices on the radio, on of my favorite Canadian composers. And furthermore, it turns out that the Tognis had been the previous owners of Inge�s house and their children had gone to school together. This is when I love living in a place like this, when the links grow longer and more intimate.
The concert was entitled New Music In New Places: Comtemplative explorations on Gregorian Chant, presented by the Canadian Music Centre. The performers were Peter Togni, Jeff Reilly, and Christoph Both. They played their improvised, abstract, continuous, sometimes wailing, sometimes gentle, sometimes melodic music for an hour without stopping. There were times when I would have liked to bottle the music and take it home with me. At other times, I was happy to leave the strange music within the confines of the strange concert hall. As we slowly found our way down the hill in the dark, the evening felt warm and perfect, even without the flashlight.
Posted by leya at October 2, 2005 08:00 PM