Go West!

Dateline: May 23, 2019. Kitchener, Ontario

NACO decided to offer the job to another candidate, so the wait is over and we now have a new direction confirmed: We’re moving to Edmonton!

It’s amazing how much suddenly falls into place when for so long it was all up in the air. There are still details to work out regarding schools for my kids in Edmonton and an apartment for the family to move into out there, and what size truck are we going to move our stuff with, and when will our AHCIP (Alberta provincial health care) take effect, when will my benefits kick in through he ESO (Sep.1, I just learned)... 

But many other things are now set - namely, our summer schedule. 

This weekend is the final program I’ll play with the KWS for the foreseeable future: a pops show, “The Piano Men.” Next week I fly out to Edmonton on my own to play the last few weeks of the ESO season, except for the final few days of concerts which are a reprise of Harry Potter music concerts happening this week, which I won’t play because I’ve been invited to perform In the Summer Solstice Chamber Music Festival final concert on June 21, and coach groups participating in the connected Amateur Chamber Music Workshop from June 11-15.

My wife and daughter will fly to Edmonton a few days before I’m done, so that they can see the city a bit and investigate schools for Miss M. I’ll fly back with the little one on June 22, leaving my wife alone for a few days when she is auditioning for the ESO oboe job coincidentally now open.

On the day of Z’s audition I’ll be driving with my kids to Boston where we’ll pick her up at the airport the next morning, visiting our friend Elena Ruehr, and the MIT campus (yes, my son is that age, considering university options for after next year... yikes!). We’ll be in Massachusetts until July 1 when they drop me at the airport and drive up to Ottawa to visit my father-in-law on their way back to Kitchener. I’m flying west to Jackson Hole Wyoming where I’ve just been asked to sub last-minute for somebody in the viola section at the Grand Teton Music Festival for 2 weeks.

When I head back to Kitchener I’m flying into Buffalo to save $ and a friend has agreed to come pick me up in the middle of the night so that my wife doesn’t have to. I owe him big time! The morning we roll back into Kitchener I’ll pick up the U-haul for the final move and head home to load up all our worldly possessions that made the downsizing cut that is currently going on.

With the U-haul ready to go, my 16-year old son and I will head out on the road the next day, while Miss M and Z stay with a friend in Kitchener - M is attending a very cool musical theatre summer camp the second half of July - for a 35 hour drive (over at least a few days) on the trans-Canada highway all the way to Edmonton where we’ll unload the truck into storage and fly back one more time to Ontario.

Miss M’s final theatre camp performance is on July 26, after which we all pile into our remaining sedan loaded with a cooler full of food and our three suitcases and instruments, and drive west back to Wyoming - Beulah, this time, in the north-eastern edge of the state where my grandparents lived - to spend a week visiting with my brother’s family and our mom who now owns the inherited cabin.

After that week of play and catching up with the Florida cousins, back in the car for more driving, further west! To California for a few days visiting more old friends in the Bay Area, then a u-turn to Yosemite, Death Valley, Las Vegas, and the Grand Canyon en route to El Paso, Texas where I’ll be performing concerts with Zuill Bailey and a couple other guest artists in a new late-summer Chamber Music mini-Festival he’s getting started there. 

That brings us to Aug. 19 when we get back into the car for one last long drive straight north through Utah’s Monument Valley and everything else between Texas and Alberta, arriving sometime before August 24 when my season with the ESO commences with a weeklong summer outdoor concert series. We should have somewhere to live by then, but we’ll see what it ends up actually being, looking like, where it’s located, how long-term the rent may be... we’ll see.. and then you’ll see! ‘Cause I plan to keep sharing our journey, bit by bit.

so... 

Watch this space! 

Edmonton in May

Dateline: May 28, 2019. Edmonton, Alberta​

So I flew to Edmonton today. It’s my fourth trip this season, and it’ll be my longest, not returning to Ontario until June 22. I’ll take a moment right here to both apologize and thank my wife for waking up at 4:30 with me to accompany me to the airport in Hamilton for a 7:15am flight on the super-cheap Swoop airline. She half-slept in the car on the way and then apparently half-slept in the car on the way back home, pulling over at one point to rest and thankfully startled back awake after not-too-long by a text from me telling her I’d made it to the gate, so she got back on the road and back home in time to help our kids off to school.

word to the wise: if you’re flying Swoop early from YHM, get there early. You know, usually the airport says arrive 90 minutes early for a domestic flight, 2 hours for international? I’d recommend padding that by 30min. Swoop is cheap but it also operates cheaply, which is to say they got completely overwhelmed by travelers checking in and bag-dropping. In fact they don’t have a separate place for people to just drop their bags if they’re already checked in, so it was pretty messy and packed ​and the $35 extra I paid to be allowed to bring my viola on board as a carry-on was almost a waste of money, if I’d been a few minutes later and missed getting to board early with it to ensure getting overhead space....... anyway I made it and all was fine.

Except it was raining and Swoop at YHM doesn’t have access to a covered walkway, or even signs out on the tarmac walkway pointing to which of those three planes over there is the one you’re supposed to be boarding...​

YHM tarmac. 3 Swoop planes. No signage. No covered walk. Spitting rain. 

​So we flew to Edmonton. My window seat was fine. The window shade kept sliding down partway closed. My neighbors were two young ladies flying with a near-newborn baby boy who cried a lot at first but then settled down for most of the flight, so that was fine. Except the way they settled him down (on and off throughout the flight) was to hold up an iPhone playing some animated movie in front of him to distract him instead of actually trying to comfort him. I suppose what works works… I tried to sleep but I kept half-waking up with a stiff and sore neck because the headrest wings wouldn’t stay folded to support my heavy head. But it was fine. Because it was cheap. Enough whining! Sorry. I’ll stop.

Because we made it, and we made it on time, and even early, and my bag came out on the baggage claim carousel quickly, and I was able to catch the shuttle to town without having to wait an extra hour! So that was really fine.  And now I know what to expect the next couple of times I fly Swoop during this Crazy Summer.

And it was a beautiful day in Edmonton! I hopped off the shuttle, walked the 10 minutes to my hosts’ house in the very nice neighborhood of Windsor Park, dropped my stuff, picked up some waiting mail, printed another important document, organized my little bag of dossiers for registering my kids in schools and myself for a drivers license and AHCIP (OHIP provincial health insurance, but in Alberta), and took off walking. I walked to Strathcona to swap my ON license for an AB license, and then realizing I didn’t have correct change for the bus I decided to walk into town across the river to son’s school registration packet to the place we were hopeful would work for him to transfer into. It probably won’t work or that school, but the woman I met with seemed willing to help us figure it out for him no matter where he ends up landing for the fall term. Ultimately, he wants to complete his IB program, and we want him to be with us in Edmonton and not boarding with my in-laws back in KW for his final year before heading off to University, wherever that may turn out to be...

So I walked, and walked, and walked some more, and enjoyed seeing the city on this beautiful non-snowy day (my other visits have all been white-encrusted). And I grabbed a simple Subway sandwich dinner, and watched a cheap-Tuesday’s movie in the City Centre mall cinema, and LRT back to the University stop near where I’m calling my new home address until further notice. And those steps really add up!

And then, I got a call from a long-lost friend who happens to have settled in Vancouver recently, and we had a lovely chat. That was nice.

Tomorrow? Rehearsals for this week’s ESO program commence in the morning. Looking forward! 

Watch this space! 

Edmonton in June

Dateline: Edmonton AB, June 11 2019

10 days to go, then back to Kitchener. It’s been a whirlwind trip. Tasked with finding a place for our family to live, and a school with a compatible IB program for my son, and a school with the right sort of support system for my daughter, I took advantage of last week’s lighter schedule to roam the city searching and researching and meeting and viewing and interviewing and checking off the crucial to-do list items one by one.

I roamed mostly by foot and I must admit I’m liking this city. It doesn’t hurt to have had several sunny warm days in a row while I was out and about. But even when it rained, it was nice to be out. I think I’ll dump a bunch of photos here to show off just how nice it’s been.

Oh, hold on - it was only nice for a couple of days and then Edmonton got really smokey because of the several big fires burning about 400km north.

On the worst day of smokiness I stayed indoors as much as possible, but I still had some wandering to do, and eventually the smoke cleared, and I got back to it…

See? Lots of beautiful views. But I wasn’t just sightseeing. I found a couple of school options for my daughter and a great place for my son. And the staff/principals are (so far) all so nice and helpful! Little by little the stress has been falling away, and things are lining up nicely.

Oh - and we’ve been playing concerts and I’ve been hanging out with my new colleagues, having fun making new friends (achievement unlocked!)

That’s enough for now. Sunday we played with Thorgy Thor. Today we played with YONA Sistema. Tomorrow we begin rehearsals for the last Masterworks program of the season - Scheherazade, Swan Lake, and Rachmaninov’s Variations on a Theme of Paganini.

watch this space!

Russians in Edmonton… and the lighter side of Schubert

Dateline June 22, 2019 Edmonton AB

where was I?

We did a fun side-by-side concert with the YONA Sistema kids to help raise money for the program on Tuesday June 11. Then we dived into the week’s last Masterworks program of the season: Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” Suite, Rachmaninov’s Variations on a Theme of Paganini featuring Sara Davis Buechner (with whom I and a couple other friends grabbed a drink, some nom nom, and some hilarious stories post-concert Friday night at nearby Joey Bell Tower), and Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade” to finish the epic program.

So that was fun. And a great way to finish the season, at least for me. There was still a weekend of Harry Potter music to play, but I was off the hook because I’d booked out of the services in order to participate in the 2019 Summer Solstice Chamber Music Festival, featuring a week of amateur chamber musician coachings followed by a series of faculty and special guest artist concerts.

It was fun to catch up with Ensemble Made in Canada, who were in town for maybe 36 hours. I caught part of their noontime Mosaique show at the Art Gallery of Alberta, and part of their evening performance of Faure’s Piano Quartet at First Baptist Church on 109th St. I joined them for drinks at LeRonde (rotating restaurant overlooking the Saskatchewan River, or downtown Edmonton, or all of the above), andESO concertmaster Robert joined us all as well. Good times!

And then rehearsals started for the concert I was to play Friday night at the festival’s conclusion. That program? Mozart Kegelstadt Trio for viola clarinet and piano; Weber Clarinet Quintet; and Schubert Trout Quintet. Fellow performers were violinist Mark Fewer, clarinetist Jim Campbell, ESO violinist Laura Veeze and principal cellist Rafael Goekman, and bassist Max Castili, with Festival director Patricia Tao at the piano. Made for a great few days!

Jim Campbell taught at Indiana University for a long time, until retiring just a couple of months ago, so I’ve known of him as an amazing teacher and musician ever since I was a student there 25 years ago. It was awesome to reconnect. Look, I'm all grown up now! 🤣

The concert came and went, and more fun times were had.

The other great thing to happen this week was my wife and daughter flew out from Kitchener (all right, Hamilton) to visit for a few days and attend that chamber music concert. I was so glad they had a chance to finally meet my wonderful hosts, and to visit the pair of schools we’re considering for my daughter for her transfer into the EPSB as a 7th grader this fall. Today, Saturday the 22nd I flew back East with my little girl both to prep for our upcoming road trip to Boston and to leave my wife with some much deserved peace and quiet to concentrate and hopefully relax some in the last few days leading up to the ESO’s principal oboe audition she’s doing on the 26th.

My host-mom drove us to YEG airport this morning and her daughter gave my daughter an extremely adorable new-friend goodbye squeeze, and we all had a nice moment of goodbyes before parting ways…

Next up: end of school in Kitchener for the kids and a road trip to Boston to visit old friends and MIT - one of a handful of universities worth checking out for my math-&-science-y son.

watch this space!

And in this corner…

Dateline: September 9, 2019. Edmonton Alberta

So we've moved to Edmonton! We're in our new apartment, the school year has started, the orchestral season is about to begin. There were even a few days of decently sunny summer weather to enjoy before it gets all gross and pre-wintery probably in the next couple of weeks. (Days later, while this draft sits languishing, it's still sunny!)

I had a blast playing in the ESO's annual Symphony Under The Sky summer fest- 4 programs, 5 concerts, 5 days (13 services in 7 days). It's a lot of music and the weather was not exactly cooperating, but I suppose it could have been worse. Crowds were big and the guest artists were pretty cool. Resident pops conductor Bob Bernhardt was fun to work with, and the whole thing was a great way to bring summer to a close before (after a couple weeks' break) officially starting up again for 2019-20.

It was also my last bit of sitting principal for a while, since the new principal, Keith, starts his time with the ESO with our first Pops show coming up in another week or so…. I'm really looking forward to working with him sharing the front desk - we've met briefly before when I was first living in Kitchener and figuring out the freelancing scene, and our mutual friends have sung his praises, but I haven't worked side by side with him yet, so I'm looking forward to figuring things out as the two new guys here…

Little by little the family's sorting things out: getting the car registered (expensive fixes necessary! Ugh.), getting auto and renters insurance policies, updating credit cards and other accounts’ mailing addresses… helping our kids find their way in their new schools, our son starting rehearsals with the Edmonton Youth Orchestra,