Toronto filmmaker Sofia Bohdanowicz uncovers the forgotten history of a Canadian virtuoso violinist of the early 20th century in her latest movie, woven into the story of an academic in need of a direction.
Measures for a Funeral screened at the Toronto International Film Festival in its world premiere, and Sofia spoke to us about the story steeped in both classical music and academia.
The Movie
Audrey Benac, played with intensity by actress Deragh Campbell, is at a kind of crossroads in her life. Her mother is dying. Audrey did not, in her estimation, succeed as a musician, so she’s become an academic whose research focuses on the story of Kathleen Parlow, a virtuoso violinist who lived in the early 20th century. But, as her PhD advisor reminds her, the project is going astray, and in need of direction, even as her funding is set to run out.
Audrey’s research takes her from Toronto to London and then Oslo, a search that becomes obsessive. Audrey is a study in repressed passions and desires, and it turns out Parlow’s story is intertwined with her own. Audrey’s grandfather was a musician, and he studied with Parlow.
It also ties into her mother, an embittered woman who was not able to pursue a musical career because of the mores of the time, even as her husband became a successful violinist. Audrey’s travels abroad come, in part, as an effort to put physical as well as figurative distance between them.
Deragh Campbell is a frequent collaborator, and Audrey has been a recurring character through four films: Never Eat Alone (2016), MS Slavic 7 (2019), Point and Line to Plane (2020) and A Woman Escapes (2022). Prior knowledge of any of that, however, isn’t necessary to enjoy the movie.
Kathleen Parlow performs with an unknown violinist in 1909:
Kathleen Parlow
Kathleen Parlow’s nickname, ‘the lady of the golden bow’, came from her mastery of technique. Born in Calgary, Alberta in 1890, she left with her mother for San Francisco at the age of four, although she carried the moniker ‘the Canadian Violinist’ throughout her career. She began playing violin not long after arriving in California, moving to London, UK in 1905 to continue her studies.
Impressed with a concert by musician Mischa Elman, Kathleen and her mother sought out his teacher, Leopold Auer, and followed him back to Russia to become the first foreigner to study at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. She was also the only woman in her class of 45.
Kathleen began her performing career at the age of 17, after just one year at the Conservatory, and gave solo performances in Russia, Finland, and then a tour of Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway. In Norway, she became a favourite of King Haakon and Queen Maud, and she met met Einar Bjørnson, a wealthy Norwegian (son of Nobel laureate Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson), who would buy her a historic Guarnerius del Gesù violin, crafted in 1735.
A glittering career as a performer and soloist took her all over Europe until World War I broke out. She toured neutral countries such as Sweden and Norway, and returned to North America in 1916 to tour, but then went back to England.
There she remained until 1919 with her mother. Though she took up performing and touring again after the war was over in 2020, her career never picked up the momentum of her youth as a prodigy, and money problems plagued her throughout.
She taught at Juilliard and returned to Canada to teach at the Royal Conservatory in Toronto in 1940, obtaining a permanent position there in 1941. Kathleen would become a regular performer with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, as well as The Canadian Trio.
While her financial situation improved for a while, her performing career declined during the Second World War years. She became head of the College of Music of the University of Western Ontario in 1959.
Kathleen died on August 19, 1963, and her will set up the Kathleen Parlow scholarship for string players at the University of Toronto. Despite her many contacts in the world of classical music, her name has largely been forgotten.
As the movie points out, she had a talent of the same calibre as someone like Glenn Gould. What she lacked were backers and supporters who would have facilitated a more profitable and prominent career.
Filmmaker Sofia Bohdanowicz: The Interview
Filmmaker Sofia Bohdanowicz’s connection to the story is direct. Kathleen Parlow served as violin teacher and mentor to Bohdanowicz’s own grandfather. The idea of a film revolving around his experiences, and that connection, had been on her to-do list for some time.
In Sofia’s short film Veslemøy’s Song (2018), Audrey travels to New York to hear a rare recording of Kathleen Parlow in performance. Measures for a Funeral is an expansion of that story, and follows Audrey to the culmination of that search.
The catalyst for the story came with the 2015 discovery by a University of Toronto archivist of a copy of Norwegian composer Johan Halvorsen’s Opus 28, a violin concerto that had been composed for Parlow.
“The idea to make the film definitely came from the discovery of the manuscript,” says Sofia Bohdanowicz.
Her grandfather, as she notes, was no virtuoso. “He wasn’t a star violinist.” Still, as she points out, he played in the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s second violin section at a salary where he was able to support a wife and four children.
”I always felt like I felt I lived in his shadow,” she says. “I felt very guilty as a young a child.” Her grandfather had gifted her his violin, but under pressure, she felt she couldn’t master it. “I was so crestfallen I couldn’t play the violin.”
Sofia switched to piano, but carried the guilt with her. In the movie, Audrey carries her father’s violin, which he inherited from his grandfather, on her back wherever she goes, echoing the emotion. The battered violin case used in the film belongs to Sofia’s cousin.
“I try to interlace [it] in my filmmaking,” she says. “Everyone in my family are musicians. I guess it’s a natural subject.”
An uncle pointed out the discovery in a news story. “I think I went straight to the archive,” Bohdanowicz recalls. “The document is stunning.” The recording was even more impressive. “It was absolutely exquisite.” She wonders why it has also fallen into obscurity.
“Much like Audrey, I took the film and mission of having this concerto performed.”
Like Audrey, Sofia set out to find an orchestra that would perform the work — and learned much about the business of presenting classical music. Most that she approached could not find enough in the work to justify risking a performance of an unknown quantity. Ticket sales, the usual theory goes, come from familiar works and artists.
“I got very, very lucky,” she admits.
The music was recorded in performance by Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Orchestre Métropolitain with violinist Maria Dueñas in November 2023. According to the film’s notes, the orchestra and soloist had to perform the demanding concerto twice to capture different angles for the camera.
“Maria Dueñas is an incredible talent,” she says, noting that the violinist reminded her of Kathleen herself. “She’s a very generous, humble person.”
Maria appears in the movie as a gifted music student, one who eventually takes on the task of learning and performing Halvorsen’s quite difficult and virtuosic Opus 28. Her appearance in the film and performance are the results of Bohdanowicz’s persistence.
“Maria was brought to my attention my music producer,” she recalls. “I found Maria’s agent during the pandemic.”
Over a series of phone calls that stretched out over a three month period, Sofia had explained the entire project, her grandfather’s lifestory and connection to the story, Kathleen Parlow, and more. Finally, he agreed to let Maria listen to the music. She would have the final verdict: if she connected with the music, she would talk to Sofia. “Lucky for us, she had this tremendous, magnetic connection to the music.”
Sofia says that Maria was easy to work with as an actress as well. “The dialogue felt very natural to her, to the character.”
The violinist in the story is a teenager, someone with less experience than Dueñas in real life. Bohdanowicz asked her to modify her playing a little, to make it sound like someone a few years younger who might struggle here and there. “It was a very strange thing to ask a prodigy violinist to play less good,” she laughs. “I think it was really amazing that she offered that.”
In that sense, the film offers a glimpse at the artistic process, and what it takes to not just reach but maintain technical and artistic skills at a world class level.
“That was important for me to explore too,” Sofia says. “The question: What is a good life?”
In the story, it comes as a theme of sacrifice, and visually as a puddle of blood as an image. “What does a person have to sacrifice to have that kind of career?” she wonders. There are people you’d leave behind, and the elements of a typical life that simply wouldn’t fit because of that high level of dedication to your art.
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with either choice.” Those who don’t make those sacrifices in favour of a more balanced life are just as valid. “There are a lot of assumptions we make about people who are really successful as musicians,” she notes of people like Maria. “She’s a person that works incessantly hard.”
There’s grit mixed in with the long hours of practice. “What it boils down to is a sacrifice.”
Yannick Nézet-Séguin came on board with the project. “I just happened upon the right person,” Sofia says, pointing out that he’s not only a champion of new music, but of rediscovering and performing lost music like Halvorsen’s concerto.
“You really need someone like Yannick to advocate for this music,” she says. “For him, it wasn’t about marketablility. I was so incredibly moved and touched that he took Opus 28 under his wing,” she adds. “We pitched the project to OM and they were all there.”
Sofia says many of the musicians were very moved by the project, and there were tears in many eyes during the performance. Maria Dueñas told Sofia she had goosebumps performing the concerto, and felt like a presence was beside her, performing alongside her.
The Montreal performance was the Canadian premiere for Halvorsen’s Opus 28.
“I think in terms of an experiment, we succeeded,” Bohdanowicz says.
The Filmmaker’s Art
The movie is shot with a poetic eye; Toronto’s downtown has never looked so romantic, and locales like libraries and conservatory practice rooms reveal interesting angles.
The filmmaker employs the interesting technique of using sound in opposition to visuals; what we see and what we hear are often do not describe the same scenario. As we see people playing violin, we hear a noise that sounds like a distant train on a whiny track. As we watch failed musician/academic Audrey Benac sift through documents and visit libraries, we hear the voice of forgotten Canadian violinist Kathleen Parlow relate the details of her life.
It’s an ingenious way of adding to the texture of the scenes as they unfold, as well as to the drama; let’s face it, however beautifully shot, academic research isn’t typically all that scintillating from a cinematic standpoint. The double layer of perception also adds to the story, in that the audience becomes aware of details that Audrey has not yet uncovered in the story.
Next Steps
Measures for a Funeral will screen next at the Festival du Nouveau Cinema in Montreal in October, and subsequently at the Vancouver International Film Festival.
“After that, we’ll see.”
World sales rights, excluding Canada, for Measures for a Funeral have been acquired by Paris-based Totem Films.
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