Skip to content

A little Sunday salon music

Anna Levy has been waiting a lifetime for this.

Anna Levy has been waiting a lifetime for this.

The Place des Arts' faculty member who has a doctorate in piano and musicology from the Moscow Conservatory has her dream house, a home at the end of Shoreline Circle and at the top of the College Park neighbourhood in Port Moody that overlooks part of the city and Burrard Inlet.

The Bulgarian native and her husband, Gregory Myers, also a doctor in musicology, moved into the residence last September with their two grand pianos and recently finished renovating the lower floor for their teaching studio.

And starting this Sunday, it will also be a place for public recitals.

"This is very traditional to open your home up," Levy said. "People did it centuries ago, within the Classical era, and they are still doing it today in Vancouver. I think we should be doing in Port Moody, too, having friends and music lovers over to hear good music."

Fees to rent halls for concerts have become exorbitant so transitioning into a more intimate - and virtually, free - venue was natural, Levy said.

For their inaugural series, the couple, which have incorporated a non-profit society called Yarilo Contemporary Music Society (yarilomusic.com), will host four chamber music shows on Sunday afternoons - timed specially for their European audience to view the performances via a live stream on the internet.

The first show, titled Fur Nikolai, Time and Again, marks the 10th anniversary of the death of Nikolai Korndorf, a composer and conductor who was also a Moscow Conservatory alumnus and was famous in Russia and Vancouver. Levy and pianist Jane Hayes will play his Lullaby for two pianos while Levy will join cellist Ariel Barnes for Triptych.Also on the program is work fromGiya Kancheli (Time and Again for violin and piano, with Marc Destrubé on violin) and Canadian composer Jocelyn Morlock's Half-Light and Somnolent Rains for two pianos, another tribute to Korndorf.

For the second show, called Modus Operandi, on June 19, Colin MacDonald and his Pocket Orchestra will be featured. The June 26 concert is titled Path to Simplicity and is a tribute to the late Estonian composer Lepo Sumera while the last event on July 10 is named The Classics, a program for two pianos highlightingVariations on a Theme of Haydn by Johannes Brahms, the Paganini Variations by Witold Lutoslawski and Sergei Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances.

If the series is successful, Levy said she and her husband plan more. "When you have it in your own home, you're free to do so much," she said.

Tickets at $20/$15 are available by calling 604-936-9752 or emailing [email protected] or [email protected]. Seating is limited to about 70 guests. Light refreshments will be served after the concerts.

[email protected]

ABOUT THE HOSTS

Anna Levy received her bachelor's and master's of music degrees in piano from the State Academy in Sofia, Bulgaria, in 1980. She was on the piano faculty at theState Music Preparatory School and the State Academy when, in 1987, she won a scholarship to attend the Moscow Conservatory. She studied under Margarita Fyodorova and in the musicology department, earning her doctorate in 1991. Through the Canada Council for the Arts, she has championed Russian music and, recently, has appeared as a soloistat Kwantlen University, Simon Fraser University, Douglas College and Capilano University. In March, she and Myers were in New York City to present a lecture recital at the Bulgarian Consulate to mark the 1330th anniversary of the founding of Bulgaria.

Gregory Myers is an instructor of music history at Kwantlen University. He holds a master's degree in musicology from the University of Virginia, a master's degree in library and information studies and a PhD in historical musicology from the University ofB.C. Hisprincipal area of research is Byzantine and medieval Slavic musical relations with a special focus on Kievan Rus' and the medieval Balkan Slavs. Myers attended the Moscow Conservatory and has built strong working relations with the Bulgarian Academy Sciences and the Ivan Dujcev Centre for Slavo-Byzantine Studies in Sofia, Bulgaria.Myers has a roster of articles, papers, translations and reviews on Russian and East-European music topics. As well,Myers is founder of Vox Bulgarica Music Publishers.