{"id":74771,"date":"2022-04-12T11:13:02","date_gmt":"2022-04-12T15:13:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/?p=74771"},"modified":"2022-04-13T14:34:19","modified_gmt":"2022-04-13T18:34:19","slug":"memoriam-appreciation-one-boris-brott","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/2022\/04\/12\/memoriam-appreciation-one-boris-brott\/","title":{"rendered":"IN MEMORIAM | An Appreciation Of The One And Only Boris Brott"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Maestro
Maestro Boris Brott (Photo: Courtesy of the Brott Music Festival)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The horrible news arrived in fragments. One of the first reports was of \u201ca chain of crashes that has left an elderly man dead.\u201d<\/p>\n

Elderly? Boris Brott?<\/p>\n

It is hard to think of a word less suited to this matchlessly energetic conductor, who left us on April 5 in Hamilton, the Ontario city where he almost single-handedly created an audience for the kind of music he believed in and loved.<\/p>\n

The whereabouts of his senseless demise might have come as a surprise to people in Qu\u00e9bec, who equated the artistic director of the Orchestre classique de Montr\u00e9al with the city of his birth. It was Brott\u2019s nature on the podium to seem connected to the audience in a neighbourly way. Very likely his listeners in Thunder Bay, Regina, Winnipeg, Halifax, Ottawa, Toronto, Cardiff, Newcastle upon Tyne, and Los Angeles \u2014 to name some of the cities in which he held appointments of one type or another over a career of six decades \u2014 felt the same maestro-next-door magnetism.<\/p>\n

The happy paradox is that Brott combined populism and openness to experiment (his last performance, in Montr\u00e9al, was of a creatively scaled-down semi-staging of Bizet\u2019s\u00a0Carmen<\/em>), with a thorough grounding in symphonic and operatic literature and a classic baton technique.<\/p>\n

It needs to be remembered that Brott trained in his teens as a student of Pierre Monteux (1875-1964) and Igor Markevitch (1912-1983), and had contact in the family household with dinner guests as formidable as Otto Klemperer (1885-1973) and Charles Munch (1891-1968).<\/p>\n

Even his parents \u2014 violinist-conductor-composer Alexander Brott (1915-2005) and cellist-administrator Lotte Brott\u00a0\u00a0(1922-1998) \u2014 were well positioned to pass on tradition. Dad, born in Montr\u00e9al to Russian and Latvian immigrants, combined Jewish consciousness with a natural enthusiasm for things British, while Mom, a native of Mannheim, applied Central European charm (and determination) to the management of the ensemble long called the McGill Chamber Orchestra.<\/p>\n

This broad influence, combined with communicative instincts, made Brott effective in many kinds of music. He was not a period-instrument specialist, but became known in Montr\u00e9al for his annual performances of Handel\u2019s\u00a0Messiah<\/em>.
\nThe remaining programs in the OCM 2021-22 lineup include baroque, classical and contemporary selections. The closing concert on May 27 \u2014 Jacques Lacombe will conduct \u2014 features Beethoven\u2019s Eroica Symphony<\/em>, presented as a tribute to healthcare workers. No one could accuse Brott of failing to connect the dots between music, current events and civic life.<\/p>\n

His activities were not confined to his native land. I recall discovering to my astonishment in 2012 that Brott was in charge of a run of\u00a0La battaglia di Legnano<\/em> \u2014 possibly Verdi\u2019s least-known opera \u2014 in Parma. Indeed, he enjoyed a career in Italy that few of his Canadian followers knew anything about. Opera was only half of it. He led Beethoven\u2019s Ninth Symphony in Verona and Mahler\u2019s Second in Trieste.<\/p>\n

If the 2010 world premiere in Bari of\u00a0Zephir<\/em>, a violin concerto by the American minimalist Terry Riley, sounds like an improbable assignment for Boris Brott, there is a\u00a0YouTube clip<\/a>\u00a0to confirm it. This program included\u00a0Oracle,<\/em> by his father, an excellent (and undervalued) composer.\u00a0Arabesque<\/em>, which both Boris and his brother Denis judged to be Alexander\u2019s greatest hit, will figure on the OCM program of April 28.<\/p>\n

Brott also conducted Leonard Bernstein\u2019s Mass<\/em> in 2000 in the Vatican before an audience including Pope John Paul II. That sounds like a good gig, and Brott was rightly proud of it, not least because he had served as Bernstein\u2019s assistant with the New York Philharmonic in the late 1960s. But it was not a typical subscription concert with an established symphony orchestra.<\/p>\n

The question arises \u2014 as it does in a Ludwig Van\u2019s Critical Mass<\/em> podcast<\/a> on Brott and his career \u2014 as to why this manifestly capable Canadian was never attached as music director or principal conductor to what might be viewed as a major ensemble. The answer probably has to do with the expectations he brought home after the Bernstein experience and whether Canada was ready, in either French or English, for a jolt of brash domestic energy on a podium viewed (and perhaps still viewed) as a platform for imported leadership. Cambridge-educated Sir Andrew Davis, only a few weeks older than Brott, was hired as music director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in 1975. The Montr\u00e9al Symphony Orchestra opted two years later for the debonair Swiss, Charles Dutoit.<\/p>\n

Happily, the extrovert qualities viewed with suspicion by big-city musicians and administrators (not to mention critics) made Brott a natural in a community like Hamilton, where he was hired in 1969 to professionalize the local Philharmonic and build its audience base. When that relationship unravelled 20 years later, Brott remained in town (where he married and started a family) as the director of his own Brott Music Festival and National Academy Orchestra of Canada.<\/p>\n

Whether his success as an entrepreneur militated against his wider acceptance is an interesting question. Many are the prejudices in symphonic circles. Excellence as a conductor of children\u2019s concerts (the example of Bernstein notwithstanding) does not conform to the qualities that Norman Lebrecht writes about in his book\u00a0The Maestro Myth<\/em>. Nor does a sideline as a motivational speaker fit the mould. And for whatever reason, Brott did not often find himself in a recording session at a time (witness Dutoit and the MSO in the 1980s and 90s) when a hefty discography really meant something.<\/p>\n

He will nevertheless be remembered as an orchestra-builder and agent of musical democracy. A great Hamiltonian, to be sure, but the loss will be felt just as keenly in Montr\u00e9al, where he could rally anglophones and francophones into a music-loving bloc and attract them to performances of a wide range of repertoire.<\/p>\n

As for that \u201celderly\u201d howler, we can let it pass. Boris Brott died at 78, forever young.<\/p>\n

#LUDWIGVAN<\/b><\/em><\/h3>\n

Get the daily arts news straight to your inbox.<\/em><\/p>\n

Sign up for the Ludwig van Daily \u2014 classical music and opera in five minutes or less <\/em>HERE<\/em><\/a>.<\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maestro Boris Brott will be remembered as an orchestra-builder and agent of musical democracy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":74772,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[39907,875,6992,9567,41],"tags":[5244,23566],"yst_prominent_words":[7200,17823,36282,36259,21102,21098,7138,28036,6807,6985,7694,6616,6648,7410,6886,6613,6637,6826],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2022\/04\/Boris-Brott-IN-MEMORIAM.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9bakr-jrZ","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74771"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74771"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74771\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":74815,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74771\/revisions\/74815"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/74772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74771"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=74771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}