james campbell – …Theresa Kishkan

Note: our Pender Harbour Chamber Music Festival begins today, a joyous weekend of beautiful music. We are hosting a young violist and his wife and all week we’ve heard him practicing at the far end of the house. There’ve been long sweet breakfasts where we’ve talked of music and everything else and a celebratory dinner at the home of our Festival Chair —a stone terrace overlooking the sea, set with tables, and everyone relaxed in the beautiful light, the clarinettist Jim Campbell and his son Graham (whom we commissioned to compose a piece for the Festival’s 15th anniversary this year) performing as the sun set. I was reminded of this 2016 post, in part because every year there are moments when I know I have been gifted with happiness. It’s transitory of course but worth remembering and celebrating.

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It came to me while picking beans, the secret of happiness.

I was hunting among the spiraling vines that envelop my teepees of pole beans, lifting the dark-green leaves to find handfuls of pods, long and green, firm and furred with tender fuzz. I snapped them off where they hung in slender twosomes, bit into one, and tasted nothing but August, distilled into pure, crisp beaniness… By the time I finished searching through just one trellis, my basket was full. To go and empty it in the kitchen, I stepped between heavy squash vines and around tomato plants fallen under the weight of their fruit. They sprawled at the feet of the sunflowers, whose heads bowed with the weight of maturing seeds.

–from Braiding Sweetgrass, by Robin Wall Kimmerer

I have to confess, John picked this particular basketful yesterday. But the happiness is mine too. To tie up tomatillos, cucumbers, to re-stake the tomato plants falling over with their abundance, to cut a bouquet of sweet peas on an August morning, a handful of rosemary, a Merton Beauty apple with exactly the right notes of sweet and spice — I wait during the dark mornings of January, the windy March afternoons, the damp Junes, for just these days. Sometimes I’m so busy just watering and deadheading or coiling hoses or weeding to notice. But we don’t get these days again. Or we do, but they’re changed, charged differently. We’re different. Older.

I’m going to sort the beans and then briefly steam a large pan of the smaller ones to dress with green Maille mustard, a squeeze of lemon, and walnut oil to take to a dinner tonight. And some of the larger ones, grown from seed I’ve saved for years, will be frozen. I’ve been pickling the really small tender ones. And tomorrow or the next day, there will be this many again.

The secret of happiness is that it’s momentary and transitory. I’m trying to remember to claim it and celebrate it when I realize it’s often as simple as beans, a dragonfly perching on the top of the trellis, the warm breathing of my husband in the night.

The last concert of the Pender Harbour Chamber Music Festival was this afternoon. In way, it’s something of a secret, known to a devoted group of music lovers. Our lovely small venue, the Music School in Madeira Park, holds slightly more than a hundred seats, though with the new roof over our patio area, we can put out a few more chairs for the overflow crowd that has come the norm for this annual event. I’m on the organizing committee, along with Barbara Storer, Margi Skelley, Kathy Harrison, Marg Penney, Ann Munro, Janet Falk, Elaine Park, and Lee Ross. Those of us with husbands volunteer them and many community members volunteer too. They host musicians, tend bar, arrange flowers, organize the venue, manage parking, sell tickets, write programme notes and brochure copy, and every job you can think of.

This year’s Festival was the 8th. When we began in 2005, we had 5 musicians come for three days of concerts, though in truth they arrived earlier in order to rehearse together. This year there were four days of concerts, several parties, a lively and eager audience, and the most beautiful performance of Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor, Op. 21 that you could imagine.

And imagine, if you can, a pretty room overlooking a harbour bright with boats, some of them pleasure craft and some part of the harbour’s fishing fleet. Huge baskets of flowers — hydrangeas, dahlias, heads of dill flowers, bullrushes, tansy, Queen Anne’s lace, sword ferns, salal, huckleberry, daisies, and gladioli. People everywhere, glad to be among the audience, holding glasses of sparkling wine. The sound of instruments being tuned in the room upstairs. Last minute pleas for tickets.

And imagine the musicians themselves: our Artistic Director, pianist Alexander Tselyakov, violist Guylaine Lemaire and her cellist-husband Julian Armour, violinists Dale Barltrop and Kai Gleusteen, Guy Few and his trumpet, pianist Catherine Ordronneau, double bassist Dylan Palmer, James Campbell and his clarinet, Salvador Ferreras performing magic on percussion instruments for one enchanted evening, and Alec Tebbutt narrating Anthony Plog’s Animal Ditties.

There were so many memorable moments. The way the ensemble made Mozart’s familiar Clarinet Quintet in A Major, K. 581 sound utterly new. The unexpected delight of Alexander Glazunov’s Album Leaf (for trumpet and piano). The unbearable beauty of the Trio for Clarinet, Cello and Piano, Op. 114 by Brahms.

We’re already planning for next year. As audience members left, those who’d been to our Festival in the past said that this one was the best yet. But some said that last year. And the year before. So it goes without saying that the 2013 festival will be worth taking in. But keep an eye on the website for the programme and ticket information in early June. Seats sell out quickly and after this year, I predict that the Pender Harbour Chamber Music Festival won’t be such a secret any longer.

Here’s a selection of photographs, courtesy of John Farrer.