Brott remains the sorcerer of children's concerts in Canada
Trick Or Treat to A Wicked Beat fills Hamilton Place with 6,000 schoolchildren

October 31, 2007

HUGH FRASER
THE HAMILTON SPECTATOR

It is no piece of cake putting on an educational classical music concert for a swarm of pre-K to Grade Four schoolkids.

Become lazy or formulaic and the hordes will turn on you in an instant.

How many times have I sat through a rising, rebellious hubbub as a lone double bass droned on pretending to be The Elephant in Saint-Saens' Carnival of The Animals, sounding as distant and irrelevant as the 1886 date of its composition?

You won't ever creep up on the internationally-renowned conductor Boris Brott and find him vulnerable to such an ambush.

First he has an immediate, strong and genuine bond with the children.

Second he is very aware of the world outside his concert hall. He knows that everything else these children listen to is loud and then electronically amplified. Their most familiar mode of entertainment, TV, can be talked through, eaten through and failing all else, be a handy backdrop to a knockdown drag out fight with a sibling. And it is a world, above all, that is visual.

So, as the Brott National Academy Orchestra welcomed swarms of K to Grade Fours to Hamilton Place for Trick or Treat to a Wicked Beat on the day before Halloween - practically swamping Downtown Hamilton in a sea of kids and school buses - the Hamilton Place stage was set for a rare treat.

Jack O' Lanterns flickered around looming guillotines. A disembodied hand crabbed and scuttled across the stage with a conductor's baton waggling from its fingers, a "ghost" whooshed across the back of the orchestra and as apprentice conductor Martin MacDonald brought the uproar in the auditorium to a dead stop with the crashing, brassy explosions of Leopold Stokowski's thunderous orchestral arrangement of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, a coffin was wheeled on stage.

From its dusty, cobwebby interior came Brott. His pallor and redness of eye might well have not needed the aid of cosmetics. The night before he had conducted the McGill Chamber Orchestra in Montreal and caught a ridiculously early flight to be in Hamilton for the 9:30 11:30 and 1:30 Hamilton Place concerts.

He must have absorbed his energy from the childish horde, as, instead of cruising one more tired time through Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, he used the piece for a genuine musical exploration.

He crabbed about the stage as Peter's Grandfather as the dodderer's theme was grumped out by the bassoon. Then he had the theme played by a xylophone. A completely different vision was presented. The wolf, when its theme was transferred from the horns to the woodwinds, turned from strong and sinister to sentimental and sad in the blink of a bar of music. With elegant simplicity Brott took a tired old warhorse and used it to demonstrate that what you hear can actually change what you see and what different instruments can be used to paint the pictures.

It was brilliant and the kids strayed not one inch from the palm of his hand for the entire hour. They literally inhaled the music from the blistering dissonances of Kozinski's Creaky Door Overture to the broad sweeps of Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain and the John Williams' Harry Potter music, all of which had visual backdrops that helped enthral and are simply far superior to anything else currently being presented on the Planet Earth. Apprentice conductor MacDonald was excellent. Clear and very musical. And dashing in his fabulous scarf.

But it is Brott who remains the sorcerer of children's concerts in Canada. A maestro of the craft. If nothing else the triple forte "yeses" that burst from the kids as he asked them whether they'd enjoyed themselves and would they be back in the concert hall soon, attested to that.

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