A few of my friends and members of my family know that I was born in Buenos Aires at the Sanatorio Anchorena on August 31, 1942 in spite that all my documents including my birth certificate state April 18, 1943. Legally I am almost a year younger. My mother told me my father forgot to register me. I don’t exactly buy that as the hospital would initiate that process.

But my legal birthday has made it impossible to forget my Rosemary’s real birthday which is tomorrow.

And because you can never deny a person’s request on their birthday (particularly when it is my wife) we went to Garden Works on Lougheed Highway (one of the best nurseries in the Lower Mainland) today. I took my umbrella. And of course, Rosemary bought plants that she says will go in a pot or pots. I purchased three miniature hostas (after all it is my legal birthday).

In the nursery I found this sensational (a word very much used, nicely, by my friend Sean Rossiter, now gone) Camellia japonica ‘MonBella’. To me it looks like a complex old rose. Like most camellias it has no scent.

On April 12, 2014 I made a friend in a relatively unlikely place. This was backstage at the Vancouver Playhouse for an Early Music Vancouver concert featuring violinist Monica Huggett. I wrote about it here.

It was then that I was befriended by Portland bassist Curtis Daily. Since then my Rosemary and I have hosted him when he comes to Vancouver to play. He comes a few days before and I give him photographic lighting classes. We drink wine ( intelligently) on evenings and we have mate cocido for breakfast.

Today I went to a concert at the Chan. It was the last performance for the season of the Pacific Baroque Orchestra produced by Early Music Vancouver. It was called Coronation Anthems which meant that we listened to Handel choral (and orchestra) music expressly written for the coronation of English kings.

Most interesting for me was the fourth work (of the first half) My Heart is Inditing HWV 261 which was originally performed for the coronation of Queen Caroline (Caroline of Ansbach - 1683–1737). 

She was so beloved that Handel wrote The Ways of Zion Do Mourn HWV 264 for her funeral. And some might know that this funeral piece was also played for Admiral Horatio Nelson’s funeral, too.

The concert on a Palm Sunday was a tad strange if seen by a strict Roman Catholic (and I am not one). This was happy music before a coming sombre Good Friday. In years past EMV had Haydn’s the Seven Last Words of Christ.

As a little boy my grandmother and mother would get me in from playing in the street in Buenos Aires on Good Friday  (around 1 in the afternoon) and we would pray and my grandmother would read those last words. I was not permitted to turn on the radio.

The happy coronation music was even happier for me as many in the orchestra I know well including the tall Curtis Daily.

The best part of the concert happened in the second half when the PBO, the Vancouver Cantata Singers and soloists Danielle Sampson, soprano, Viki St. Pierre, mezzo soprano, Ross Hauk, tenor and Sumner Thompson, bass-baritone performed Eternal Source of Light Divine HWV 7 4. The work was in honour of Queen Anne’s birthday (February 6, 1713). This lively piece was written for a woman who was a most active patron of the arts. It seems she paid Handel a stipend even though he was still under contract in the Hanover court. She was a tragic figure of many pregnancies who died with no issue.

But both Curtis Daily and I knew something else about Queen Anne! In 1705 she made a land grant of 215 acres to a little church, Trinity, in New York City. According to Daily this church is only a tad less rich than the Vatican. It leases land to huge office towers as Trinity is buried right there in the financial district. It seems that with all the money they have there is an active concert season in the church. A lot of it is early music. Our intrepid Oregonian has played there a few times. And of course Alexander Hamilton is buried in the Trinity churchyard

Sometimes it is easy to take EMV for granted. I do my best not to. There are not too many places anywhere else that would have had the concert (free of the usual chestnuts) we enjoyed today.

But best of all (and knowing there would be three players on that wickedly difficult baroque trumpet) including one all the way from Sao Paulo, Bruno Lourensetto), and Pauld Dibnik and Kristine 

Kwapis was that sound aided by Corey Rae on timpani.

It was in the first movement that featured Vicki St. Pierre accompanied by Kris Kwapis on solo trumpet, that had me feeling I, too was wearing a crown. Kwapis plays with such precision while not abandoning a beautiful tone that made the evening worthwhile.

We rushed home after the concert so I could make pancakes and sausages. We had to feed Daily so that he could leave pronto by 6 for Portland.

Lucrezia Panciatichi - 1545 -Agnolo di Cosimo, Ufizzi - Florence - Bronwen Marsden - April 11, 2019

Sometimes the reinforcement of one’s style comes after the fact.

For years my relatives were perplexed by the fact that I photographed our young daughters and then our young granddaughters with nary a smile.

Bia de'Medici -1542-1545 -Agnolo di Cosimo, Ufizzi - Florence, Rebeca Stewart July 2005

I would cite both 19^th century English photographers, the Reverend Dogson and Julia Margaret Cameron as examples of the tradition. And I would further explain that in the Victorian era children were seen as little adults and many had to work under appalling circumstances.

A few years ago I discovered 16^th century Florentine  painter Agnolo di Cosimo (November 17, 1503 – November 23, 1572) known as Bronzino. His portraits were stark and his subjects did not smile.

Laura Battiferri - 1560- Agnolo Bronzino, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence - Bronwen Marsden , April 11, 2019

Imagine going to Florence last month and being able to see the Bronzinos at the Ufizzi Gallery!  It was like meeting up with  the master.

Coming back from our trip to Italy I found myself I a conundrum. After seeing all those renaissance paintings how could I be inspired in Vancouver with its blue skies and frigid early spring weather?

Penitent Magdalene, 1533, Titian - Palazzo Pitti , Bronwen Marsden, April 11, 2019

I found the light and with my friend Portland baroque bassist Curtis Daily (here last week for an EMV concert at the Chan we photographed my wonderful long time posing subject, Bronwen Marsden in the spirit of those renaissance artist. I was attracted to the idea because Marsden has severe short hair. She no longer owns a little black dress (for 21^st century shock value) but we managed. I believe that this project has legs and I will continue.

Saintly Magdalene, April 11, 2019

You go to Italy (Venice, Florence and Siena) for two weeks, as I did a month ago with my Rosemary. You are dazzled by some of the best art galleries and museums. And then you fly to Vancouver and you see the mountains, the snow on them, the sky, and the water.

You sigh.

How can anything in our Vancouver Art Gallery compare with a Bronzino, a Pontormo, a Boticelli?

I am happy to report that while we do not have artists in Canada to match the excellence of those renaissance painters we do have something up our very long sleeves. These long sleeves are of musicians who sit (some play standing up) on very long benches of talent.

While in Venice,the Venice of Antonio Vivaldi I was tempted to attend a performance of his Four Seasons. I enquired and found out the musicians were not first calibre, and to boot they were all playing on modern instruments. Our very own Early Music Vancouver taps the best local and world musicians and the baroque music that it specializes in is played in period instruments.

So what do we have in Vancouver that matches the excellence of renaissance art? Renaissance art happened the beginning of the exploration of a new world. Simonetta Vespucci was Eve in Sandro Boticelli’s The Birth of Venus. Simonetta was the cousin-in-law of Amerigo Vespucci, a Florentine cartographer who pointed out that the new world Columbus had discovered was not part of Eastern Asia but a continent. His first name gave our continent its name.

Renaissance art, during the age of Galileo and Kepler prefigured the age of enlightenment. It was an age of discovery in art, in science, mathematics and in music.

Here in Vancouver, while other big cities around the world mostly feature music of the 19^th century, you will find not only the early baroque but also music of the 20^th century that is being brought back from oblivion. And here in Vancouver we have lots of new and experimental music. Music that wants to tear down establish barriers put up by the musical establishment.

Thus I have written here , here and here of what I call the Petit Avant-Garde. Shortly after I arrived back to Vancouver I attended that terrific Blade Runner 2049 minus sound dialogue but accompanied by music improvised on the spot.

Last Saturday, March 23 I went to the Orpheum to a projection of F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent film, Nosferatu (somehow I had never seen it before!). Toronto- based Andrew Downing (a classy and exuberant bass player, who played his standup base sitting down) composed a score (it was a world premiere) that combined a small group of musicians with a large choir, the Bach Choir. Somehow, the music never interfered, but enhanced my enjoyment of the film. The music was part of it film and it blended without seams.

The septet of musicians (certainly members of what I call the Vancouver Petit- Avant-Garde), were Cameron Wilson on violin (who imitated a couple of mosquitos to perfection), François Houle (who added humour in Downing’s every once in a while glimpse of klezmer sounding music perhaps alluding to Count Orlok’s Eastern Europe), Ingrid Chiang on bassoon (who worked beautifully in tandem with Andrew Downing’s bass), Brad Turner on trumpet (some terrific mute work), Jeremy Berkman on a trombone that to me almost seemed like it sounded like a bass trombone, which it was not, David Shiveli on an instrument new to me called a cimbalom and on piano the youthful and handsome Chris Gestrin, to whom I owe an apology.

Left, Chris Gestrin on piano and centre bassist and composre Andrew downing

I was on the second row and my Fuji X-E3’s zoom lens was not wide enough to encompass the screen, Berkman on stage left and Gestrin’s piano on stage right!

The little orchestra and the large chorus were under the baton of Leslie Dala who some say might have Transylvanian blood in him. He did a splendid job.

Narrator Patrick Davies had very good diction and he projected his voice with just enough of a lugubrious touch.

I know that Stefan Smulovitz (he of the two Blade Runners I have witnessed) did a score for the fantastic 1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc by director Carl Theodor Dryer. I can only hope that Smulovitz brings it back soon and that Dala and company do not rest on their laurels. Both Count Orlok and I enjoy new blood in our lively city.