Not bad in the icon department -- even if Dylan's unyielding stand at the keyboard and few words for the crowd made his concert the most controversial loved-it, hated-it show of the year. By contrast, the ebullient Sir Elton's long-awaited London debut is universally recalled as a magic moment with crowd and and band rocking together for more than two hours. The Who came by and so did Willie Nelson, the Dixie Chicks, Nine Inch Nails and the Foo Fighters (definitely a hit as the openers for Dylan).
Hilary Duff, Roger Hodgson, Bright Eyes, Bachman Cummings, Godsmack, Hall Oates, Metric (twice), Blackie the Rodeo Kings, Brad Paisley, Rob Thomas, Stuart McLean, INXS . . .
the list does go on. Taking in Stratford's Ovation fest, the visitors in 2006 included Nelly Furtado and the Tragically Hip. Opera was back at the Grand Theatre with Orchestra London's Rigoletto, the second flowering of its partnership with Pacific Opera Victoria, an artistic triumph which somehow lost $100,000.
UWOpera's The Merry Widow was a two-cast delight. Home-town heroes Bobnoxious, the Rizdales, Chris Hart, Legend Killers, Tim E the Yes Men, Thundermug, Shad, Shotgun Rules, Staylefish, Basia Bulat, Catherine McInnes and Trole impressed in a variety of settings. Classical music had much Mozart as many London venues joined world-wide celebrations of the 250th anniversary of his birth.
Shostakovich was also honoured, with a festival at UWO to mark the Russian composer's centenary, and Orchestra London saluting him with concerts, including a triumphant debut at the Forest City Community Church, a new venue for its Ovation series concerts. Pianists Denise Jung, the Rose Bowl winner, and Meiyen Lee were magnificent in the 2006 edition of the London Kiwanis music fest. Soprano Sonja Gustafson finished a classy second in the Bravo's reality TV Bathroom Divas.
My regrets include missing the 2006 Home County Folk Festival and downtown's Bluesfest and too many other live events. But by travelling around, I took in The Ballad of Stompin' Tom -- Londoner David Scott's bio-with-music of the Canadian icon -- at the Blyth Festival and baritone Theodore (Ted) Baerg's terrific performance in the Stratford Festival's South Pacific. I regret not travelling to Europe with the Nihilist Spasm Band for the London noisemeisters third -- at least -- all-conquering farewell tour of the Continent.
With the deaths in 2006 of such icons as Jack Fallon, Don Wright and Ev Smith, the London scene lost some of its greatest musicians, creators and true class acts. In the year's most hauntingly beautiful and bittersweet moment, ballerina Evelyn Hart came to us -- to say goodbye. Hart's performances on Aug.
23 as a guest artist with Toronto's stellar modern troupe ProArteDanza would have been memorable even without her farewell. "By the end of ballerina Evelyn Hart's final performance at the Grand Theatre, tears were flowing on both sides of the stage," writes Toronto arts journalist Paula Citron. "Hart performed three works on the program, and all of them made the 50-year-old dancer look good, drawing on her legendary acting skills and expressive interpretation.
She went out looking like a winner," Citron writes. The Free Press broke the story of her retirement from performing classical ballet after surgery on an arthritic ankle. Citron had the most thoughtful take on the finale.
Ballet teachers Dorothy and Victoria Carter inspired the young Dorchester dancer in 1970 when she left the National Ballet School in Toronto after a few months. After studying at the Carter school in London, Hart went on to international fame during a three-decades-plus career, most notably with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. "Hart ended the evening with Fokine's Dying Swan and her touching performance was followed by a parade of flower-bearing well wishers including her former legendary partner Rex Harrington," Citron writes.
Harrington gave her a final, impromptu lift at centre stage as the crowd stood up. Elton John -- If you were there, you must still be smiling. "You're absolutely fantastic," John told the crowd about two hours into the set.
That was before the crowd of 10,300 ecstatic boomers and the superstar rocked as one mammoth jukebox on the main set finale of Crocodile Rock, The Bitch is Back and Saturday Night's Alright (For Fighting). He played almost forever. He played almost everything.
He waved to thousands and signed autographs. Yes, Sir Elton, you are fantastic. Runners-up: Rigoletto, The Merry Widow, Thundermug.
Baritone John Avey, formerly of Norwich and now based in Montreal, triumphed in Rigoletto, one of the most demanding roles in all opera. Both Don Wright music faculty student casts bubbled in The Merry Widow. Thundermug's one night only reunion for a rousing take on Africa at the 2006 Jack Richardson Music Awards (Club Phoenix) was not to be missed because it may never happen again.
Knowledge is the Beginning - Daniel Barenboim and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra -- The TV documentary by German director Paul Smaczny had its North American premiere at the Wolf Performance Hall on the opening night of the 2006 London Jewish Film Festival and then won an International Emmy for best arts programming in New York two nights later. "It was definitely the most wonderful audience I ever experienced," Smaczny said of the London audience. The orchestra, made up of young Israeli and Arab musicians, was formed in 1999 by Barenboim and the late Edward Said.
Beautiful music, personal revelations, political dialogue -- all swirl around Barenboim, a tireless champion of a vision of a peaceful, harmonious Middle East. The festival is to be saluted for bringing Smaczny's film to London. The Who.
Roger Daltrey battled the chills left from a previous stop on the tour and found his inner shout. Pete Townshend conducted, barked and windmilled all night. A friend objected there were a couple of false starts on the new material when Townshend and the drummer weren't right there.
So what? There new material, good new material -- and, hey, that was Zak (son of Ringo) Starkey on the drums. Runners-up: Tragically Hip, Bobnoxious (numerous times), Trole, Nine Inch Nails, Alexisonfire, Three Days Grace, AFI, Bachman Cummings.
Bob Dylan, Foo Fighters. Dave Grohl's raunchy schmoozing and the Foo energy were perfect for fans disappointed by Dylan's remote stage presence and his, by any standards, just-bad-at-times vocals. I still say a) Miles Davis never talked to the audience much either and b) when Dylan's singing was on, it was great and c) the band was terrific, maybe his best since the Hawks.
Runner-up: LOLA festival, with Basia Bulat, Tokyo Police Club and Born Ruffians. Okay, so it wasn't just a double bill and I didn't see enough of the bands (outdoors) or DJs (indoors). I just wanted to say -- again -- how admirable it was for the musicians, volunteers, artists and everybody who rocked Dundas Street in such miserable weather.
May LOLA come back in 2007 and the sun shine when it does. UWO music students and faculty decided to present Pierrot Lunaire, Schoenberg's 1912 settings of a Belgian poet's lunar-tinged lyrics, at midnight. When the hour struck Room 104 in the Don Wright faculty building was packed.
The performances -- with vocalists Lauren Phillips and Suzanne Henriks and Tim Crouch, flute; Copper Ferreira, clarinet; Eric Fujita, violin; Beth Lowes, cello; and Alice Yoo, keyboards -- lived up to the bold, all-or-nothing concept. More midnight concerts and more appreciative audiences, please Runners-up: Shostakovich at UWO and Western in separate events. Patricia Green.
Monica Whicher. Yves Lambert et le Bebert Orchestra (Sunfest). The Quebec accordion player and force-of-nature is further proof that Sunfest brings in francophone stars from Canada, too.
Runners-up: Blackie and the Rodeo Kings, Willie Nelson, Goin' Concern and for their road trip to Indiana for the Bill Monroe-founded Bean Blossom Festival, the Dixie Flyers. Dixie Chicks -- Hail to the Chief resounded in a satirical march to the stage and the Bush-bopping trio showed off their hits, played brilliantly and chatted. "(We) dedicate the next song to Pamela (Anderson) and Kid Rock.
You guys must be really proud," lead singer Natalie Maines kidded the crowd. The John Labatt Centre date replaced a Milwaukee stop on a U.S.
tour, where there's still deep, stupid anger over the Chicks vs. George W. Bush.
Move on, Milwaukee. But thanks for letting us in on the tour. Runners-up: Rizdales, Brad Paisley, Dwight Yoakam.
After years when Black Eyed Peas, 50 Cent, James Brown and other stars contended in the category, the best I can offer for 2006 is Nelly Furtado with Divine Brown and Saukrates in the band at the Ovation fest. Maybe I shouldn't have missed Jurassic 5. Charlie Haden and Quartet West (Guelph's River Run Centre), Phil Nimmons at Sunfest.
Bassist Charlie Haden and the quartet play a brilliant jazz-world-roots-Americana-classical style that no one else can approach. (His daughter, fiddler Petra Haden, was the best Foo Fighter in a fine acoustic band). Phil Nimmons is a Canadian jazz icon and at Sunfest 2006 he was accompanied by four London musicians who had been his students.
The Thornhill clarinetist and composer taught pianist Stephen (Steve) Holowitz, trumpet player Paul Stevenson and drummer Jeff Christmas at UWO. At Toronto, he taught former London bassist Andrew Downing. The five of them should get together all the time.
Runners-up: Hugh Fraser and VEJI, Runcible Spoon, Eric Stach's Friday night free-form bands. Konono No. 1 are from Kinshasa, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and play a Congo/Angolan village trance music with homemade electronics amplifying and distorting their likembes (sometimes called the thumb piano).
On a Sunfest night at Victoria Park, Konono sounded perfect at the bandshell, like Radio Africa calling from outer space. In the crowd was was Norma Coates who teaches music and media studies at Western and writes amazing pieces about popular music and gender, TV, the Ramones. She said she was just amazed and delighted to find a band like Konono on a summer night in London.
Happens all the time, I told her Runner-up: Amparanoia, CeU, Aurelio Martinez, Sara Tavares, Niyaz, Amazones -- all at Sunfest 2006, all excellent Motley Crue -- I apologize to the Crue fans for stupidly writing that Wild Side was called Wild Child. The fans deserve better than a 90-minutes of suspect backing tracks, bumbling and glum staging -- the four Crue guys kept well apart from each other in their so-called Carnival of Sins tour stage murk. It all looked like a cash-grab on a night off from Crue's tour with Aerosmith.
As for Wild Side, now I that I think of it, in any ugly disaster a few of the carcasses risk being misidentified. Last year, the Muttley Crew foursome put on the year's worst show, too, but it was a little livelier than this dud on arrival. Runners-up: The Cult, Danko Jones.
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