It is becoming more common to offer music students courses in entrepreneurship, given how difficult it is to find an agent, get the attention of concert presenters and record labels. Toronto composer-pianist Adam Sherkin could provide a lesson or two.
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He is a musical, technically gifted performer and a composer who mixes accessibility with careful structure in his work. But fine artists like Sherkin are part of our embarrassment of musical riches.
What makes his story remarkable is how Sherkin has spent the last three or four years steadily, deliberately building an audience — to the point where this week he announced a three-concert series for 2013-14 at the Jane Mallett Theatre.
That’s the same venue where Music Toronto presents the world’s best pianists and chamber music performers every year.
Sherkin says he has amassed about 600 names on his audience list, which is 100 more than the capacity at the Jane Mallett Theatre.
“Of course not everyone is going to come out to a concert,” he qualifies. “But I can make it work if I hit 100 people per concert.”
Although every concert presenter in Toronto has found it increasingly difficult to sell subscriptions, Sherkin is offering a subscriber package with a substantial discount, on the advice of the people at the St Lawrence Centre.
The pianist admits this is for older audience members — “people who check their calendars to see what they want to be doing on a Saturday night three months from now.” Sherkin says these patrons are a lot less likely to make last-minute ticket purchases the way younger concertgoers do.
Sherkin, who is active on Facebook and Twitter, plans to offer last-minute discounts via social media, and says the St Lawrence Centre was a willing partner in accepting discount codes at the box office.
But the real attraction has to be the music — and Sherkin appears to have that covered in three carefully crafted programmes that mix works from the classical canon with Sherkin’s own.
The first recital, on Sept. 28, references the 100th anniversary of Benjamin Britten’s birth and the composer’s 1939 stay in Canada. We will hear Britten’s early Holiday Diary.
That programme also includes gamelan transcriptions Canadian-born composer Colin McPhee brought back from Bali — some of which McPhee recorded with Britten in New York City in 1942.
“It’s going to be the 50th anniversary of McPhee’s death,” explains Sherkin of a composer central to the development of 20th century minimalism.
Sherkin was also charmed by the Western lens through which McPhee filtered his musical imports. “He even has Italian tempo markings,” chuckles the pianist.
The anchor of that first programme is Aaron Copland’s fierce Piano Sonata — something the composer was working on during a visit by Britten.
Rather than kicking back, Sherkin is spending his summer writing pieces to complement this programme as well as the two that follow. The most ambitious will be a 20-to-25-minute fantasia for the March recital.
You can find all the details of the three programmes and read more about Sherkin here.
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Udo Steingraeber, the head of the German boutique piano maker Steingraeber & Sohne, was in Toronto in May, and Sherkin was given the opportunity to play for him at the Canadian Music Centre (which has bought a Steingraeber concert piano).
Sherkin chose to play a reminiscence of Wagner’s Parsifal by Franz Liszt, in honour of the piano firm, which cast the bells for the original performance of the opera in Bayreuth.
Here is the Solemn March to the Holy Grail:
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
