WATERLOO — Canadian fiddler Frank Leahy stands in the vestibule of his Waterloo home cradling a Canadian treasure that at first glance looks decidedly old, a bit worn even. Yet this scene illustrates all that is wonderful and unique about Canadian music.
Leahy, a fiddle champion and cousin of the chart-topping family group known as Leahy, has been a solo performer, actor and composer for several years. In his hand is the 1897 French violin that once belonged to Canadian icon Don Messer.
Musician and fiddle together represent Leahy’s philosophy on music, that despite age and a few worn bits, it is ever engaging and evolving, a message he’ll deliver this weekend when he performs A Fiddler’s Take on the Symphony Orchestra with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony.
“When you hear a live orchestra playing a symphony, it’s a life-changing event,” he said.
Classical music has suffered a reputation as elitist, he said, a reputation it does not deserve given its beauty and flexibility, something he has tried to show audiences through shows he’s created over the years attempting to break down the barriers.
This idea of debunking classical music’s reputation came to him in university.
Leahy’s father had stuck a fiddle in his hand as a young boy, insisting he learn how to play. By the time he was a young man, he was the Canadian champion.
“My dad said, ‘I want you to get trained classically,’ ” he recalled. So he was off to Wilfrid Laurier University for a performance degree, studying under Ed Minevich, with whom he would form a long collaboration. However, not everyone at the school appreciated Leahy’s fiddling background.
“Somewhere in my second year another professor said to me, ‘What are you doing here, this is only classical,’ ” he recalled. That blatant display of “snobbery within the genre” not only ticked him off, but gave him an idea.
From 1995 until 2005, Leahy and Minevich, former concert master for the symphony, created funny and entertaining symphony pops performances with such popular shows as Bending the Bows, Road to Carnegie Hall, Master Clash, An Unlikely Affair and, more recently, A Fiddler’s Take on the Symphony Orchestra.
Leahy is well-suited to these performances, first as a virtuoso violinist, and as a bit of a character, a fun-loving guy who has never been willing to just stand on stage and slide his bow.
“I love to act up,” he admits. In this show, created with longtime friend Tom Szczesniak and conducted by Brian Jackson, the three will take symphonic music to a new, possibly slightly skewed and hilariously funny angle, like the tunes from “Johnny Back” a.k.a. Johann Sebastian Bach. “It’s not such a stretch,” he said.
Basically, Leahy will poke fun at the classics, bringing various musicians from the symphony forward to show the versatility of both the music and the musician as they perform traditional folk music as well as parodies of works by Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Chopin and Szczesniak.
Each of the symphony musicians easily switches between among the genres he intends to throw at them: jazz, blues, country, pop and anything else he can come up with.
“They can play more than Bach or Tchaikovsky,” he said. “It’s endless what you can do with all these instruments, it’s endless.”
Leahy grew up in the farming community of Teeswater, where he first experienced fiddle music. Although his father, a medical doctor, and most of his relatives played, Leahy learned by ear and didn’t read music until attending university.
Leahy, a father of seven, said his dad, now in his 90s, lives just around the corner and continues to offer little Franky advice on how to improve his playing. “He still says, ‘I think you could do that better.’ ”
Even when you’re a star, you are never above instruction.
vhill@therecord.com
Concert
A Fiddler’s Take on the Symphony Orchestra
Frank Leahy and the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony
Today, 8 p.m., River Run Centre, Guelph
Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m., Centre in the Square, Kitchener
519-745-4711; www.kwsymphony.ca
Article source: http://www.therecord.com/whatson/artsentertainment/article/473363–spoofing-the-symphony
Category: Spoofing