Leslie Dala grew up and studied in Toronto, but he has built his career largely on the West Coast. We get a rare chance to see him in action on old-home turf on Tuesday night at Koerner Hall as he leads Soundstreams’ Music for China programme.
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
Although Dala is the chorusmaster and associate conductor at Vancouver Opera as well as being the music director of the Vancouver Bach Choir, he also has a lot of experience with new music.
“I consider myself a pretty quick study,” he responds when I ask what it takes to conduct freshly-written scores.
That’s a skill he built up as a pianist and organist while in school.
“As a pianist, I was always playing in people’s recitals as an accompanist,” Dala recalls. “It meant having to prepare a lot of music in a short amount of time. I got in the habit, and it’s something I really liked to do. You keep your brain very active and quite busy picking up a lot of different music.”
You have no choice but to be a quick study, because there isn’t a lot of lead time. “When you’re doing a new piece, you often ask for the piece two or three months ahead, knowing full well that it’s going to come in two to four weeks before a concert,” Dala explains.
The real attraction for him is the newness itself.
“If you’re going in to do an incredibly well-known work with a group that has played it many, many times under different people, then, really, it’s less about the piece as about what approach a person will take,” says the conductor. “In this case, we remove that, because the work is completely unknown to everyone, including the players who are playing it at the first rehearsal. So, in a way, it’s getting back to what music should be, which is discovery, in terms of not having any other reference to it, and I find that very refreshing.
“It’s like being back in baroque times when someone has just written something fresh off the page and the show is tomorrow night or next week and you really dig in and put it all together to the best of your ability,” he adds.
I ask Dala if he frequently encounters situations in new works where he might want to change something the composer wrote.
The conductor says that’s rare, especially when the work comes from composers as experienced as the ones on the Soundstreams programme.
He also points out that precussionists and pianists, especially, are used to having seemingly impossible things thrown at them. “They’ll work at it until they can make it happen.”
Tuesday’s concert is a prelude for a trip to Taiwan and China, which includes a stop at the New Music Festival in Beijing. “I’m trying not to think about it too much,” he says when I ask about his first visit to China.
But he knows he’s prepared, thanks to covering Jonathan Darlington as conductor for Tan Dun’s Tea: A Mirror of Soul, which closed the Vancouver Opera season on Saturday. “It’s been a great way to get my head into that space,” he says of Tan’s ability to connect East and West in his aesthetic.
There are three world premieres at the Soundstreams concert — Alexina Louie’s Cadenzas II for Harp and Percussion, Dorothy Chang’s Small and Curious Places and Fuhong Shi’s Distance — alongside R. Murray Schafer’s Theseus and Terrestre by Kaija Saariaho. Two Chinese composers represented on the programme are Ching-Yu Hsiau, with Intermezzo, and Chi-Chun Lee, with Layers of Waves.
The performers are a who’s who of Toronto string players, along with harpist Sanya Eng, flutist Leslie Newman, clarinetist Anthony Thompson and pianist Gregory Oh (the very embodiment of the pianist who can make the impossible possible).
For anyone interested in extra background, a pre-concert chat with composer Dorothy Chang begins at 7 p.m. You’ll find all the concert details here.
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
