Bravo … Encore! Salute our Ballet, Opera and Symphony

Introduction:

Henry Newton Rowell Jackman comes to us fresh from his last stage appearance in Stratford Festival's fundraising parody Much Ado About Something, a Shakespearean "conglomerate," in which he played-naturally- Prince Hal.

Grandson of the late Chief Justice of Ontario, The Honourable Newton Rowell, Hal attended Upper Canada College, University of Toronto Schools, University of Toronto and the London School of Economics.

Today he is chairman of The Empire Life Insurance Company and Chairman of seven other corporations, vice-chairman of five boards of directors and president of ten companies.

However, his presence here is warranted by the fact that he is a distinguished past president of The Empire Club of Canada, and is president of the Ballet Opera Corporation. Ladies and gentlemen, Hal Jackman.

Henry N.R. Jackman

Madam Chairman, I am indeed honoured to be here with you today and share the platform with one of the world's greatest conductors, Sir Neville Marriner.

Some of you may feel that the maestro and I are rather an odd couple to be sharing the same podium. Sir Neville, on the one hand, is a brilliant musician, founder of the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, and a man who has conducted in the world's greatest opera houses.

I, on the other hand, have built my career trying to defend the solvency of Canada's financial system. It is true, Sir Neville, I deal, like you in notes-but mine are not of the musical variety. There are, however, two things which the maestro and I have in common: a love of the performing arts and a passion for excellence.

Although you have visited Toronto before, Sir Neville, I would like to take this opportunity to give you a little background of this city and how it has grown in the past 40 years.

When I was a boy being brought up in what was then called Toronto the Good, there was very little activity in the performing arts of any kind. 1 never went to the ballet or the opera because there simply was no ballet or opera to go to. There were no theatres. There were no restaurants, certainly no licensed ones. My only memory of classical music in those years was being taken by my mother as a small boy down to Massey Hall on Saturday afternoon to hear Sir Ernest Macmillan conducting Peter and the Wolf. Saturday evenings were certainly not for anything so frivolous as the theatre. If my memory serves me, Saturday evenings were simply a period of preparation for the ongoing ordeal of having to attend the Methodist Church on Sunday mornings.

However, all this has changed. Our city has undergone a metamorphosis unlike any city of its size in the world.

I have had the pleasure of watching this city mature, not only to become Canada's financial and service capital, but to become its major cultural capital as well.

And in a society that marvels and applauds growth and success, Toronto's coming of age is no better shown than in the growth and achievement of our ballet and opera companies. Both ballet and opera started in this city approximately thirty-five years ago with nothing more than a dream on the part of their founders that the promise of our city could become a reality for two of the world's greatest and most enduring art forms.

In one generation, the National Ballet of Canada has become one of the foremost companies in the world. Its artists are internationally acclaimed, its company is continuing to be invited to world capitals such as New York, Washington and London. And now, this year, under a new artistic directorate, three of the world's greatest choreographers, Sir Kenneth Macmillan, Jiri Kylian and Glen Tetley, will come to Toronto, the last so named to choreograph his major new work especially for our company.

The Canadian Opera Company has secured its dynamic reputation as the fastest growing opera company in the world. This year, artists such as Placido Domingo and Dame Joan Sutherland will come to Toronto. Our opera's artistic excellence has won not only the hearts of Torontonians, but also those hundreds of thousands who enjoy its performances through the Texaco opera broadcasts on Saturday afternoons.

However, in spite of the great strides made by our ballet and opera companies, one fundamental reality imprisons them in their past. They do not have, nor have they ever had, a proper place to perform. They do not have their own home.

The O'Keefe Centre, where both companies now perform, was built in the 1950s when Broadway musicals were very much in vogue, and before either the ballet or opera company had established sufficient credibility to be taken seriously as permanent tenants.

From the ballet and opera companies' point of view, it is perhaps unfortunate that the O'Keefe was not built ten years later when both companies had become better established, because by then the requirements of classical opera and ballet would have undoubtedly influenced that theatre's design.

Although the O'Keefe has done yeoman service over the years, the acoustics and dimensions of the hall require mechanical amplification of voices simply to be heard. The backstage facilities are not adequate for classical musical theatre played in repertory, and the sight lines and distances from the stage destroy the intimacy with the audience that is so important to listener and artist alike.

By 1978 both companies had reached a stage in their development when it was apparent that a new home would have to be built if their growth were to continue.

The Ballet-Opera Hall Corporation, of which 1 have recently been elected president, was formed to construct and finance this project on behalf of the two companies. Under my predecessor, Ephraim Diamond, eight studies were undertaken involving eighteen different consultants at a cost of more than four hundred thousand dollars, much of which was contributed by government. If these consulting reports are placed end to end, they will fill a good-sized bookshelf.

All of these reports, however, establish the incontrovertible fact that in no other city in the world that enjoys two such prestigious companies are our artists so inadequately housed.

The studies conclusively prove that, in terms of job creation, economic impact, tax revenues to governments, increased tourism-that public expenditures on this project will yield to the economy untold benefits.

During construction, the new hall will create more than one thousand five hundred on-site jobs and more than five thousand four hundred jobs throughout the economy. Direct and indirect annual benefits to the economy from additional employment are estimated to be thirty-five million dollars and one hundred and forty million dollars respectively.

Although the need for a new home for both companies was established as early as 1978, something else has happened in Toronto. Since 1978, audiences for live theatre in our community have more than doubled. We now have more live theatres in Toronto than in any other city in North America outside of New York. The O'Keefe Centre, which for a time had been considered something of a white elephant, has in recent years been subject to demands from other organizations and producers to make space available to them. The O'Keefe, which is owned by the municipality, has told both companies that, considering their mandate to provide other forms of entertainment as well as opera or ballet, it will be impossible for them to give our two companies any more performance time.

This is occurring at a time when the audience for both ballet and opera is also growing. Since 1977, the number of performances has doubled and subscription sales have more than trebled. The current box office for both companies is running around ninety-five percent of capacity, so that, by as early as next year, a large number of people in our city will once again-as when I was a boy-simply not be able to enjoy the experience of going to the ballet or the opera. In short, both companies are being told that, without a new facility, they have no room to grow.

If you tell a businessman that he cannot expand, he may not like it, but he will make the necessary adjustment.

But if you tell an artist that he or she has no room to grow, that is as much as denying the very reason for the artist's existence. For art by definition represents the pursuit of excellence in a creative way that simply cannot be allowed to stagnate.

The audiences for both ballet and opera must be allowed to develop, for it is the sensitivity and the imagination of the listener that allows the work of art to take on a public life of its own.

If, because of the logistics of space, we have no more performances, then Canadian singers and dancers will not be able to develop their art nor expand their repertoire. Their artistic scope will be limited and employment opportunities for singers, dancers, musicians, designers will be limited.

When I assumed the position of president of the BalletOpera House last November, I committed myself to building a home in Toronto for our national ballet and opera companies.

I am committed to this project as a Canadian who feels proud that Toronto is the home of these two great companies and that it is time that we had the courage to take pride in their artistic achievements.

I am committed to this project as one who believes that it is our responsibility as citizens to look after our artistic family. We must provide for them so that they in turn can enrich our lives and those of our children through their art.

I am committed to this project as a businessman who can clearly see the enormous economic return an investment in the Ballet-Opera House will generate.

And perhaps most of all, I am committed to this project because the people of Toronto want it to happen.

In attempting to determine whether our great undertaking would gain public acceptance, the Ballet-Opera Hall Corporation commissioned Goldfarb Associates to undertake a study as to the attitudes of the people of Toronto towards our project.

As one could anticipate, subscribers to both ballet and opera were virtually unanimous in wanting the new house. However, when Goldfarb asked a random sampling of Metro Toronto residents, very few of whom had ever been to either opera or ballet, the result was that a surprising seventy percent of the respondents favoured building a new house. They also favoured government funding towards the project.

When the random sampling was asked another question as to which they most preferred, a domed stadium or an opera house, fifty percent preferred the Dome but a surprisingly high forty percent preferred the Ballet-Opera House even though very few of the respondents had ever attended classical musical theatre, while almost all had attended or watched sporting events on television.

These figures surprised even me, so 1 asked Martin Goldfarb why the people of Toronto who have never been to opera or ballet support such a project? The answer was that Torontonians are proud of their city and they want it to be world class in every way. They have been caught up in the vibrance and excitement of our great city and they recognize the development of our cultural life is essential to our wellbeing. Some have said that an undertaking such as we propose is only for the elite and those who buy the expensive tickets. But it is not, however, for the dress circle that we build this house. Visualize in your mind's eye, if you can, a great edifice, a tribute architecturally to our city, occupying almost an entire city block. For this is not just an auditorium and a stage. This building will represent state-of-the-art technology in theatre and stage design. It will represent rehearsal halls for dance, for full orchestra and chorus, study rooms and classrooms for young musicians and artists of every kind. It will represent design studios and workshops for props, scenery, costumes, wigs.

It will be a veritable beehive of activity that will provide jobs for a thousand creative people working in all the various disciplines that make up the art.

Visualize the sometimes frenetic activity of a great theatre, which to the uninitiated may seem to be a sea of confusion, but, when evening comes, when silence reigns, and the houselights dim, the conductor takes his place and the music plays and the spectacle unfolds and sends its message and its art forth night after night.

For it is not simply those two thousand people in the auditorium who will gain the benefit. The impact of this House goes far beyond. Our Ballet-Opera Hall will provide a worldclass facility that will become the focal point for classical musical theatre not just in Canada, but will be one of the most impressive facilities of its kind anywhere. The spinoff effect in terms of jobs to artists, radio, television, recordings, the attraction of talented people to our city, the inevitable growth of satellite companies will all be part of our legacy.

To the end of realizing this dream, the Ballet-Opera Hall Corporation during 1987 intends to launch a campaign in the private sector for more than fifty million dollars towards the cost of this facility and towards an endowment campaign to help ensure that both companies maintain their world-class status.

We are also expecting comparable gifts from governments, making the total cost of this project in excess of one hundred and fifty million.

This will be the largest private-sector campaign ever launched in this country for a project in the arts. I do not minimize the tasks ahead, but I have every confidence that the goal can be achieved.

In 1987, when the need for this project was first identified, the ballet and opera companies raised between them approximately eight hundred thousand dollars from the private sector to support their annual operating budgets. Recognizing their need to grow and contemplating the inevitable move to more adequate premises, both companies in 1986 raised more than five million dollars, an increase of five hundred percent over the past nine years. Our two organizations now raise annually as much as the next eight performing-arts organizations in Canada put together. In other words, in terms of public acceptance of their art as evidenced by financial support from the private sector, the National Ballet Company and Canadian Opera Company stand unequalled.

We intend to build a house that will be a national monument and will stand as the symbol of the pride that we as Canadians have in ourselves. It will stand for centuries, a testament to the perseverance and passion for excellence that built this country and continues to make it great.

Nona Macdonald:

A surname of Marriner, even with its double "R", conjures up visions of tall ships and of sailors bound for unknown shores. Our guest today has upheld a tradition of world travel to exotic climes, although his ship was airborne and the shores he visited are well known.

Sir Neville Marriner has just returned from conducting in Hong Kong and his travel plans include Texas. Is there an orchestra in the world that he hasn't conducted?

His itinerary looks like an international airline brochure. In addition to being founder of the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London, he is permanent guest conductor of the national Orchestra in Paris, chief conductor of the Stuttgart Radio Symphony and the Berlin Radio

Orchestra and artistic director of the Meadow Brook Musical Festival in Michigan. He spent seven years as music director of the Minnesota Orchestra.

He is now spearheading a drive to create a music centre for his Academy which still plays concerts in the historic church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields in the very heart of London in Trafalgar Square across from Canada House.

Sir Neville was born in Lincolnshire in 1924. He learned the violin from his father, won scholarships to London's Royal College of Music and the Paris Conservatory. In 1956, he became principal second violin of the London Symphony Orchestra, and a year later formed the chamber ensemble that became known as the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields.

With all his podium-hopping, it is hardly surprising that Sir Neville, who was knighted in 1985, has been named as the most recorded conductor in the world with a discography exceeding 400 titles. Prodigious as this is, let me add that he scores, too, as the music director of two acclaimed films: Amadeus and Out of Africa.

He is in Toronto as guest conductor of the Toronto Symphony. We are honoured to welcome him to our podium for our salute to that international language-music.

Sir Neville Marriner

I must admit to being somewhat overwhelmed by my colleague on the podium. But such an articulate plea for a building for cultural purposes is exactly the sort of thing that I wish to emulate in London at the moment.

The Academy of St. Martin's-in-the-Fields has been homeless since its outset. It started in the drawingroom at home and my wife moved out all the furniture every time we had a rehearsal, and it was just among friends, many of whom have since emigrated to Canada. I believe John Churchill has since returned to England, but the rest of them are still here.

Now we are looking for a building where we can make gramophone records and rehearse up to the standards that modern gramophone requirements need. It is interesting to work with American orchestras, Canadian orchestras, European orchestras, to see how they all differ.

Today I am really picking your pockets. I've been asking people to support my orchestra, to buy tickets to come to all our supporting events.

In Minnesota, I found the most extraordinary enthusiasm for the community in itself; very similar in a smaller way to the appeal that I have just heard from Mr. Jackman. It was very familiar. What 1 liked about it was that the Minnesota orchestra is being built entirely by the successful business community there. The people who had made their fortunes in the last hundred years in Minnesota felt that the cultural fabric of the community was so important that they should reinvest part of their wealth in the community itself.

It has the Walker Gallery, the Guthrie Theatre, the symphony orchestra and a chamber orchestra. All these things had been made possible by people who had lived there all their lives and, although they themselves would probably admit they were probably tone deaf, weren't in the least bit interested in going to symphony orchestras, would rather stay at home and watch television than go to the theatre, dance didn't appeal to them at all, they did feel that they would like their children to be brought up in a community where all these things were available.

So, for seven years I absorbed that attitude even though it was completely alien to me, having spent most of my time in England.

More recently, I've been working in Germany where the orchestra is entirely government funded. We have as much money as we need. If you ask for ten rehearsals, you have ten rehearsals. There is no interference with artistic policy. There are no members of the board who will say they happen to have a niece who plays the piano beautifully.

Rather, there is a great pressure on you particularly to develop contemporary music. One of the great challenges we have there is the perennial problem about how to present contemporary music, how to represent what is happening in your profession today and is going to happen tomorrow. You can expect part of your audience to leave rather smartly if you put too much twentieth-century music into one program.

On one famous occasion in New York when Pierre Goulet was doing one of his more exotic pieces, an irate lady stomped out of the hall after about the first ten minutes,

breaking her ankle as she strode up the aisle. But she lay there for the rest of the piece.

One of the great advantages of having a radio orchestra is that you can say you are serving your public well by broadcasting all the contemporary music, but, with the flick of a knob, people can take it or leave it.

To compare the privately resourced orchestra and the publicly funded one is dangerous, because I have the Academy in London that has absolutely no funding at all.

I would not like to alienate either party, the government or the private sector, but we have proudly been able to say that, for the last twenty-five years, we have had absolutely no subsidy from any quarter whatsoever and we've managed to make a profit of about one hundred thousand dollars in most years.

For the orchestra, this accomplishment is quite extraordinary, because, as you know, most orchestras are very labour intensive and the conditions under which they work are fairly secured now in contract form.

In America, every three years I suffered contract negotiations-abysmal confrontations between players and management. They created more bad feeling than I've encountered anywhere else in the world.

In contrast, without any sort of contract, the Academy has survived. It has no security whatsoever. All we do is invite the best players in the country to join us. As you know, some of them have been from Canada, some from European countries. They are all welcome. They are given absolutely no security, not even for the next twenty-four hours. They join us on those conditions; they are playing for their supper.

Of this I heartily approve, although I know there are exceptional circumstances. For instance, in Minnesota, 1 know that, if someone had uprooted his family from New York or Philadelphia to come to work in Minneapolis, geographically it would have been very hard for him to be fired, a couple of days after he had arrived there, at the whim of the music director. Thus, he did need some protection.

In London, it is not so bad. We have a great deal of employment for musicians, and I think the musicians themselves are not nervous to take on a job such as the one we were offering them.

I have no intention of changing this policy. I would be mortified, I think, if the musicians ever demanded security from me. I think my answer would be:

"Perhaps, if you wanted security, you should have joined another profession."

I know that it's not possible to walk on stage, when you have an audience waiting for you, to find a little notice on someone's chair saying, "I'm sorry the baby kept me awake last night," or "1'm in the process of a divorce."

There are no excuses when you are performing; the public paid its money and expects a performance. I think that perhaps the sort of security the contracts offer induces a complacency that is misplaced in the world of performing arts.

Nevertheless, I promised that I wouldn't talk about musical politics, because I know very little about them here in particular. _

It was suggested that I focus on the growth of Canada's place in the performing arts. Well, as a guest, I have very little background and I think perhaps just a comment would be a better thing to do. I'm never quite comfortable to pass judgements when I've only just observed these things from afar. I must say that in only a few days I have been immensely affected by the enthusiasm that I find here.

Overseas, we see the Toronto Symphony on tour and hear it on gramophone records. That is a remarkable step from what it was twenty years ago. A national orchestra is now an international orchestra and you will find that the public all over the world is now anxious to hear the Toronto Symphony play.

I think that in Canada, in fact, you have five major symphony orchestras. Two of them are truly international now and, of course, your National Ballet and Opera are very well known.

Your television theatrical performances have received great acclaim in Europe, whereas perhaps in the old days we used to think in terms of the BBC providing the quality product we were looking for. Now, 1 think, dramatically speaking, we would look towards Canada for some of the best television programmes that we ever see abroad.

Let me tell you more of my background and that of the Academy. I started in a provincial town in England halfway up on the right-hand side of Lincoln, which boasts of a very fine cathedral. Lincolnshire was on my home territory and I was brought up in the era of competitive music festivals.

I don't know whether you have them here. But, there, annually all the small children were paraded with their instruments to be judged.

I don't think I've ever been more miserable in my life than standing in the wings, age seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, year by year, to be judged by the gentleman from London who told you if you were first, second or nowhere.

But eventually I moved on and went to Nottingham and then to far distant places-places as much as fifty miles away from where I lived-generally competing against the same students.

Then I was invited to go to the Royal College of Music. I picked a bad year. It was 1939-40 and quite noisy in London then. I spent a great deal of time on the ground or in the cinema that I recently revisited. In fact, in the last month, for the first time, I went back after all those years to sit in the same cinema, bringing back many memories, such as one of hoping that the cinema was louder than the noise outside.

I was then inducted into the army and put into a brigade that split itself up into small groups. I was a most unsuccessful soldier; 1 think I endured three trips across the Channel and then was put into hospital rather smartly, the best thing that happened to me in my life. It was six weeks before D-Day and 1 was tucked away in a hospital bed nicely out of trouble.

I stayed there for a few months and met a man named

Robert Thurston Dodd, who was in the next bed. He was a Cambridge mathematician whose airplane had fallen down somewhere in France and he'd been fished out. We discussed our intentions over the next five months.

Now Thurston Dodd may mean nothing to you, but, in fact, he became England's first real musicologist who studied seventeenth and eighteenth-century music in detail. When the war ended, he went off to Brussels to study musicology; I went off to Paris to try to improve my violin playing. We met again and he really got me interested in seventeenth and eighteenth-century music and performing conventions.

Nowadays orchestras proliferate what are called "Stone Age Orchestras" by the rather cynical musical profession, but more respectfully "old instrument orchestras." They play music on original instruments it was originally written for. I joined one.

That experience stimulated a certain amount of independence. I did not want to be a member of a symphony orchestra-no one wants to be a member of a symphony orchestra really. As Sir Thomas Beecham said, "They are all disappointed soloists," and it's quite true. One of the hardest things is to commit yourself to playing in a large organization.

I stayed away from it as long as 1 could, learning to play chamber music and seventeenth and eighteenth-century music. Eventually, when I wanted to get married, I thought perhaps I should have a more secure income and joined the London Symphony Orchestra. Well, one year in a symphony orchestra is enough for anyone if you're a violin player. You are one of about thirty similar animals, all being told by a conductor to play music his way. All your years of training to be an independent individual go by the board; you are just like a herd of brainless animals being made to play the same way.

So I studied about a year. And then several others within the orchestra thought we needed a little more responsibility, individual responsibility. So we created a small group that started in our drawingroom, about thirteen of us, a good number, and we played just for pleasure. The keyboard player-the man who played the harpsichord for us-was a man called John Churchill, who was the music director of St. Martin-in-the-Fields.

The church is no longer in the fields, as you know; it is in the middle of Trafalgar Square. It used to be a sort of local church for the Palace in the seventeenth century and then all the area around the Palace was a park, but it has long since been overbuilt. So St. Martin-in-the-Fields is now in probably the busiest part of London.

At any rate, John said:

"If you want to give a concert, why don't we play in the church, maybe after the service one night. There's no one there and people just drop in to keep warm."

So we gave our first concert there. None of us was paid, of course. There was no money involved. Sure enough, there were about twenty people there, including strangely enough, a rather eccentric Australian sheepfarmer, a lady whose passion was seventeenth and eighteenth-century music. She had already started a publishing company in Paris called Louis of Leer and she invited us to be the first people to make a gramophone recording for her.

To be offered a gramophone record after our first concert was exciting. We always used to say she had to kill a sheep every time she wanted to make a gramophone record, just to pay us off. We made three records for her and they became visiting cards for the orchestra around the world.

Our good fortune snowballed. Once you've made a record, people come and ask you to play, and, the more people ask you to play, the more record companies are interested in making your records. We just happened to capitalize on this at exactly the right time.

The church very quickly became the wrong place for us to play. First of all, it holds only six hundred people. It's too noisy to make records in. You can't even broadcast from there, it's so noisy. The buses come thundering down the nave pretty well and also there are a number of local inhabitants who virtually live there. The church is most remarkable for its social outreach. It looks after drunks, drug addicts, poor and needy, out-of-work actors and musicians-anyone can drop in there.

There have been occasions when we were giving concerts when people would feel that, because they slept there, they were entitled to that seat rather than paying customers.

In fact, we were waiting one day to give a performance of the St. Matthew Passion, and, in a little green room at the back, a chap appeared brandishing a knife and demanding that he should see one of the vergers there, really a terrifying event. The verger came along and said:

"Oh, Fred, please put it away; you are not impressing anyone."

He was used to this man who came in regularly to demand cash for whatever he needed at that particular time.

It is a rather exceptional building in which to try to give concerts.

So we have at last, after twenty-five years, moved out of there and now we are going down to a place at Wapping of ill repute for all of you who are in the publishing business. You know that Mr. Murdoch and his Times newspaper are imprisoned down there at the moment by all those pickets. But we have an old pumping-station that we are going to convert at considerable expense.

We have no idea of where we are going to get the money. It's going to cost us five million pounds and we haven't even thought about it yet but, somehow, with musical adventures like this, there are always people who come to your rescue. We are full of faith.

The models of the building are now on show at the Royal Festival Hall. Any of you who are going to London should have a look at them.

What we need is a sort of studio where we can make high-fidelity recordings in peace and quiet away from aircraft and Underground and the general public activity. We can have it by the river.

We're just as intent on getting it as you are on getting your building. One of the nicest things about coming here is to have such an impassioned plea as this not falling on stony ground. 1 can see by the way you responded to Mr. Jackman that you are going to support him to the end of the road.

If at any time, sir, you can come and spend a week or two with us, we could use some of your style and some of your articulate pleading on our behalf. I am very enthusiastic about what I have seen in Toronto this week. When 1 leave on Sunday, I will take a great deal of the optimism that 1 found in Canada with me. I hope 1 can convert it into something practical.

The appreciation of the meeting was expressed by Montague Larkin, a Director of The Empire Club of Canada.