Thursday, January 26, 2012

Former Vancouver police detective-inspector Kim Rossmo on geographic profiling: "Statistical analysis of crime locations can disclose patterns and focus the investigation on specific suspects."

Vancouver, January 26, 2012

“I think this case should have been solved one or two years earlier," Rossmo said, "but we dropped the ball."

Cameron Ward

He agreed during cross-examination by lawyer Cameron Ward that if a judge's daughter had gone missing, it would have attracted more media attention and pressure from politicians to solve the case.

Wednesday, January 25, 2012

Aunt Hortense's  (Margaret Murray) funeral garb is enlivened by Hyrangea aspera var. Villosa, a relative of the much-scorned mopheads.

Come February, even if the days may be rainy and cold that’s when I take out my plant books and look to see what I may want to acquire for another new season in the garden.


Very few who may read this blog might know that for some years I wrote a garden column for Western Living Magazine or that I occasionally reviewed garden books for the Georgia Straight. I am going to place here one that is most relevant at this time of the year although there have been some significant changes in the gardening world of our city of Vancouver since I wrote this in August 1997.

If you go to garden clubs you will find that most there are old. There are few young faces. Vancouver used to have many nurseries with huge stocks of the latest plants. The nurseries are fewer and many nursery owners are unable to sell their property while the going is not all that bad, as it gets worse and worse.

Perhaps it’s because young couples are now buying and living in a condos. Perhaps it’s the idea of having a no maintenance garden. A nearby neighbour has installed a concrete garden in which the only maintenance needed is a yearly pressure washing to remove unsightly green moss.

Rosemary and I still have that garden bug so we are looking through catalogues in anticipation of spring.

Since I wrote that Straight book review we have at least 35 different hydrangeas and about 80 old and English Roses. I will add to the piece below scans of some English roses and hydrangeas plus the original picture of my friend Margaret Murray in my garden.



English Roses, Hydrangeas Awaken Gardener’s Lust

David Austin’s English Roses
By David Austin with photographs by Clay Perry.
Conran Octopus, 160pp $34.99

Hydrangeas: A Gardeners’ Guide
By Toni Lawson-Hill & Brian Rothera
Timber Press, 16pp $49.95

By Alex Waterhouse-Hayward


Although Vancouver rosarians may not have funny handshakes, they do have their secrets. Members of the Vancouver Rose Society order their roses in July, have them delivered in the fall, and plant them in November. Come spring, roses and perennials planted the previous season will have successfully jumped the gun. Nurseries generally put their plant stock on sale in the waning days of summer – another reason to do as rosarians do. And buying plants now may just be what you want to do when you read David Austin’s English Roses and Hydrangeas: A Gardeners’ Guide.


Until recently, rose fandom was evenly divided between two camps. There were those who liked the sweetly scented, disease-resistant, but once-blooming old roses (many with the names of long-dead French women, more difficult to pronounce that botanical Latin) and those who preferred the repeat-flowering (remontant is the technical term) but higher-maintenance hybrid teas and floribundas – the moderns. Then in the 50s, English plantsman Austin started tinkering with old and modern roses in his Shropshire nursery to see if he could combine their most positive features.

Rosa 'Fair Bianca'

His first success, Rosa 'Constance Spry' ( Rosa ‘Belle Isis’ x Rosa ‘Dainty Maid’), in 1961was the beginning of a line of almost 100 beautifully shaped and wonderfully scented roses, named after Shakespearean characters (Sweet Juliet), English writers (Jane Austen), saints (St. Swithun), and horticulturalists (Gertrude Jekyll) or graced with such odd as Financial Times Centenary. You would think that this relatively new class of roses would have helped patch up the long-standing differences between those old-rose buffs who cite the ancient tradition of the Gallica roses grown by the Romans, and the modernists whose idea of a rose is a perfect, huge (sometimes scentless) hybrid tea. But despite the almost three decades of success of his roses, Austin is still perceived as the new kid on the block and his roses are considered, by some, those newfangled English ones with the funny names.

If roses are just plants you want to savour in other people’s gardens, Austin’s book offers and intimate history of the rose, with photographs so real you can imagine the blooms’ smell. Even those who garden and might want to try roses, this book offers plenty of practical, easy-to-understand advice from a master, including tips on that bête noire of the novice gardener, pruning. If after reading David Austin’s English Roses you absolutely must have Fair Bianca so as to smell the white licorice/lemon-scented blooms, and the local nurseries are out, try the Brentwood Bay Nursery, near Victoria. They stock most of the English Roses and will ship before November.

While I don’t need an excuse to place the exquisite Austin book on my coffee table, why would I spend $15 more for a book on hydrangeas? And why would the two men who built the National Hydrangea Collection in Windermere, Cumbria, choose to write it? After all, we know that hydrangeas, aka mopheads, aka hortensias, are boring. Or are they?

The problem is partly one of perception. There seems to be a collective consciusness associating mopheads with Hortense, everyone’s spinster great-aunt (when “spinster” was acceptable vocabulary and wearing black meant someone had died).

That’s a shame, because Lawson-Hall and Rothera enthusiastically explain that in the 13-species Hydrangea genus only two, arborescens and macrophylla, contain mopheads. Yet some macrophylla species, like Hydrangea macrophylla ‘Mariesii’, are among the loveliest lace-caps around. Perhaps the real reason for the relative unpopularity of hydrangeas (only in Vancouver, as there is a growing interest in them worldwide, judging by the innumerable articles in recent garden magazines) is that plant snobbishness dictates that desirable “specimen” plants be hard to find, expensive, difficult to grow, and disease-prone. The very opposite would define most hydrangeas.

Hydrangea macrophylla 'Ayesha'

If you’re like me, after reading these books you will want to explore the rose garden and the hydrangea bed at the VanDusen Botanical Garden. You will smell the English Roses and look for the climbing Hydrangea anomala ssp. petiolaris, the gigantic and primitive looking (the leaves are as raspy as a shark’s skin) Hydrangea aspera ssp. sargentiana. Perhaps you’ll also do what I did. I searched until I found the ultimat mophead, Hydrangea macrophylla ‘Ayesha’, and bouth her – after all, she looks pretty good. She’s next to my Hydrangea serratifolia, a rare climber from Chile and Argentina. She’s slow to get established and it may be five or six years before I see her yellow flowers. How’s that you plant snobs?

Tuesday, January 24, 2012





For many years I could not figure out who Bill Richardson was. In fact I simply did not like him when I heard him on the radio. Then the CBC hired me to photograph him at a Tupperware party that included a baby called Hayley Turner who was 16 months old. I have no recollection of the date. But Richardson had quite a time attempting to make Hayley react for my camera. My guess is that you can know your Lucias, Manricos, Brunhildes, handle dogs, write wonderful plays, write books about beds and breakfasts, create one of the best ever CBC radio shows in my memory, Bunny Watson, but he cannot handle babies.


Then Richardson became just about my favourite person in Vancouver.

It happened at a Western Magazine Awards function in which he was master of ceremonies. One particular writer whose name I will simply say was D kept winning all the awards. After each award the writer would make a speech. When it came to get the big award of the night D won it and spoke for a long time acknowledging both mother and, Martin Heidegger several times. At that point if my rubber chicken dinner had included stuffed eggs or ripe tomatoes I would have thrown them at D.


There was a door prize which was a weekend at the Empress Hotel in Victoria, all expenses paid. D won the prize!

Richardson gave D the envelope and said very clearly and quite loudly, “Congratulations D and I hope your butt falls off.” From then on Bill Richardson was my hero.

My wife Rosemary and I knew that we would have a great time tonight at the opening of Bill Richardson and Veda Hille’s Do You Want What I Have Got? A Craiglist Cantata. Hille, is  a wonderful composer, singer who can play a mean piano while standing and write music for a carpenter’s saw.

The musical play opened at the Arts Club’s Revue Stage on Granville Island and is the Arts Club’s participation in this year’s Push Festival.

I knew we were in for a pleasant evening because I was able to count with the fingers of one hand the times Push Festival’s dour Executive Director, Norman Armour smiled while making his shortish speech.

Of the musical I can assure you that the six performers, J. Cameron Barnett (he plays a mean tenor sax and meows a mean cat), Dmitry Chepovetsky (can grow twice the size at will), Bree Greig (plays a mean flute, can alternately use a hair brush as a mike or as a hairbrush, and enjoys smelling young men in buses), Veda Hille (plays a mean piano even sitting down) Selina Martin (a cat lady, and hat lady, to end all cat ladies and hat ladies, plays a mean saw) and Barry Mirochnick (whose beautiful hair made me ponder my now firmly established sexual proclivity) can all sing, dance, act and do just about anything else with aplomb.


The musical is cute, it is funny, it is relevant to the times (I wonder if anybody will understand it 20 years hence but then I will not be around to find out) and the songs are all catchy and, in spite of some here and there small obscenities (it is pink! it is pink!) it is in perfectly good taste. In short it is a funny musical.

But this man, who was born south down Argentine way and can dance a reputable tango noticed the extreme pathos of  Do You Want What I Have Got? A Craiglist Cantata.

I am sure that the presence tonight of those just about extinct newspaper editors (the Vancouver Sun has not had one for a while) or managing editors (the Vancouver Sun has not had one for a long while) would have found nothing to laugh about, particularly anything connected with Craig Newmark.

But for me there was much more in this musical. It seemed that all the lively songs were about lonely people, living in abject anonymity that wanted to be noticed and perceived as human beings. They were the ones wearing the pink hat, jogging sans shirt at the lakeshore or tapping with angst at their laptops at Starbucks. In a world of fame, instant fame, viral blogs and viral Youtube, they wanted to seen, not just virtually, in a world of mediocre and gutless thumb up facebook tags.


Kudos to the play’s, and the Art Club Theatre's resident  dramaturg, Rachel Ditor, who must have made countless journeys as a go-between Richardson and Hille and the director Amiel Gladstone. Ditor enthusiastically informed me this was a play not to be missed. She was right. But she didn’t warn me to bring a hanky. This is a funny musical that made me want to cry.

If at this point you ask yourself, what the heck is a dramaturg you are in good company. I happened to see Vicki Gabereau with Fanny Kieffer before the show started. I asked Kieffer if she knew what a dramaturg was or did. She answered, " I don't know and consider that I studied drama in ...." I told her to ask Gabareau whose intial reply started with an obscenity, " .... if I know," but then did reveal a good idea of what a dramaturge (Gabareau inserted that optional and usually more common e) does and is. If you want to find out what a dramaturg is and does, you might find out soon. I suggested to Kieffer that she might want to invite Ditor to her Shaw TV show and get the definition from the horse's mouth.

This daily blog which I began in January 1996 is based on Bill Richardson's concept for his CBC Radio show Bunny Watson.

Do You Want What I have Got? A Craiglist Cantata - January 19 until February 11, 2012 at the Granville Island Review Stage.

Monday, January 23, 2012

Every time I pass the Hongkong Bank building on Georgia and Hornby I think of many things including a big hole, Henry J cars, Gary Taylor's Bradley's, Henry John Kaiser, his grandson Edgar F. Kaiser Jr., French fries and a Giorgio de Chirico painting that went up in flames.

For me it all started outside the American School on Freire in Buenos Aires in 1951My mother taught there and I walked a few more blocks down the street to the American Grammar School. Parked in front on Freire, one of the students had brought his brand new Henry J. It was a smallish car with unusual fins and it was painted in a bright middle blue. I had never seen a car that colour and that shape.



The car was the brainchild of Henry John Kaiser and Joseph Frazer. Kenry J Kaiser, an American had moved to our Vancouver in 1912 and had started the Henry J. Kaiser Company Ltd in 1914 which built the first concrete paved roads in Cuba. During the war Henry Kaiser had innovated the rapid construction of modular-built ships (using car assembly line procedures) which became the famous Liberty Ships (the later ones were called Victory Ships. One Liberty Ship was built in four and a half days. These ships transported, as an example, thousands of Sherman tanks as fast as the Germans destroyed them. Henry J Kaiser's son, Edgar F. Kaiser continued with the family tradition (he supervized the building of Liberty and Victory Ships in Vancouver) and had a reputation of pushing his employees to their limits.

It was in the late 80s that I first met Edgar Kaiser's son, Edgar J. Kaiser Jr. I was to photograph him many times. I quickly found out that he spoke a perfect Argentine Spanish. The reason was that he was in charge of the Kaiser car production in Brazil in Argentina and Brazil which made cars into the late 1960s after the company had stopped production in the US in 1955.

I remember vividly the Kaisers in Buenos Aires as they were extremely large cars in comparison to the smallish Peugeots, Renaults, Austins and Fiats that were more economically priced.



To me those Kaisers were beautiful with a curvy windshield and curvy side windows that reminded me of art deco structures like the American Chrysler Building. Only a few years ago when I photographed my favourite military airplane, a Grumman A-6 Intruder at the Pensacola Naval Air Museum did I finally notice the resemblance between car and plane.



The hole (if you notice on the top right of it, you will read Bradley's which was Gary Taylor's last venture in the entertainment business) preceded the building of the main branch of the Bank of BC. Its CEO was Edgar Kaiser Jr. When I photographed him with the model of the building which then became the HSBC bank he shouted at the underlings that told him that the architects had decided on a particular colour for the building's glass.



I remember him saying something like, "I don't care what they say, this is my building and I will decide on the colour of the window glass." I never found out if he indeed prevail with his choice.

On a previous occasion I photographed him for Equity Magazine. We used a beautiful chess set as a prop. I conciously cropped out of my camera's viefinder a beautiful Giorgio de Chirico painting (in the photograph you can get a hint of the bottom frame). Years later when I photographed Kaiser who was backing a venture that proposed installing French fry vending machines in airports, etc I asked him about the de Chirico. Kaiser's house had gone up in flames a few years before. He looked at me sadly and told me it was gone as well as most of his extensive (one of Canada's largest) art collection.


Articles had appeared at the time on the French fry venture that reported that the machines had a tendency to catch fire and also stank of cooking oil. There is no way that Mr. Kaiser will pose with chips for you, his publicist told me." I showed up the morning of the shoot and had a nice chat in Spanish with Kaiser and asked him if he would pose with product. Without any hesitation he sent the publicist to buy some chips at MacDonald's and then we filled an empty Spud Stop container and I took my shot.

Sunday, January 22, 2012

Teresa Wilms Montt

For some years I could not figure out the Spanish fact that Charles V preceded Charles II. It is only a bit later in my life that I figured it out. Charles I of Spain became Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor.

There is an apocryphal story about the multi-lingual Charles (the emperor Charles). The version that I heard came from my Spanish grandmother. Charles V was asked which of all the languages he spoke,  was his favourite. His answer was, “It depends. In matters of diplomacy I use French, for business I like English, for making love it’s Italian.  I pray and talk to God in Spanish.  I shout at my horse in German.”

Shortly after the Beatles became popular I found that the German versions of Beatles songs, and German rock’ roll off-putting. I felt the same about Mexican Cesar Costa singing roquenrol. But rock’ roll in French and Italian seemed fine to me.

Last week I went to the Pacific Cinematheque to see a Chilean film.

Some years ago there was a venerable rosarian in our Vancouver Rose Society. His name was Dennis Yeomans. He was an Englishman who had been born in Chile. He corrected my pronunciation. Chilean is to be pronounced Chílleean (with emphasis on the i). So you now know.

I was invited by that Red Riding Hood of a near past who also happens to hail from Chile. Her name is Claudia Paez. The Cinematheque was full of Chileans with a smattering of folks whose first language was English. I was careful with my wallet as we Argentines, when robbed in a bus, will immediately know that the offending thief has to be a Chilean. Strangely enough, Chileans in buses, back in their country, think thieves are all Argentines. But, "al fondo" we are friends!

We share a language and a similar way of life. While Jorge Luís Borges is famous around the world and to some degree so is Julio Cortázar,  Chileans, to their credit, can cite poet Pablo Neruda and Isabel Allende. And now they can even boast of Roberto Bolaño. But it is still quite a shame as both countries have a rich literature that should be better known.

The film in question was Teresa (2008) directed by Tatiana Gaviola. It was an account of the life of Chilean poet Teresa Wilms Montt, 1893-1922.

As the film rolled I had many thoughts. One was that the film was a dramón ( a Spanish word for an over-the-top performance in such stuff as telenovelas).

Then there were the many quite erotic bed scenes. Such stuff is now quite a bit more explicit. The scenes in Teresa lacked that soft focus but had a look that was so much in vogue perhaps 20 years ago. I found them nostalgic in some way. I think I appreciated that lack of explicitness.

There was little in the film that really exploited the fact that Wilms Montt was an avant-garde proto-feminist languishing and suffering in a terribly conservative society. There is a moment in the film where she tells a Chilean politician, “We women should be allowed to vote.”

It seemed to me that Wilms Montt, the protagonist of the film, had one big flaw which was her ability to quickly remove her underwear at the least provocation.

Some facts were sort of twisted. She fled to New York and the film’s version of the story is that her jealous and extremely vindictive husband reported her to the authorities so that she was accused of being a German spy and deported to Spain. Other accounts have her going to New York to volunteer as a nurse for the trenches of WW-I.



What is absolutely true, and the film shows it well, is that after her first infidelity (with her husband’s brother) she is banished to a nunnery which was more like an insane asylum/prison. She was helped to escape by a famous poet Vicente Huidobro (my grandmother would say, “Only his family knows who he is,” and this is patently unfair a statement in connection to the poet). But Wilms Montt was prevented from ever seeing her two daughters. She managed to see them later in Paris shortly before she committed suicide.

A dramón? Yes!

But there is something else that I thought about as I watched Teresa. The language of the film was poetic, the landscapes of Chile sublime. In a sense many a word in Spanish is a poem just as is. Consider ojalá (I hope, and its origin is Arab) or alcaucil for artichoke. Or susurrar for whisper.

When the actors were not speaking there was a beautiful voiceover. I soon caught on that these words were Wilms Montt poems. There was no way that the subtitles could possibly convey the richness of her passion and love of language. I felt sorry for the Anglos in the audience.

The most wonderful moment happens when her lover a young Spanish doctor, whom Wilms Montt calls Anuarí, proposes marriage and she rejects him. He comes close to her with a knife, holds on to her and stabs himself and dies on the spot. The voiceover (I will not translate it!) is like this:

Apareciste Anuarí, cuando yo con mis ojos ciegos y las manos tendidas te buscaba.
Apareciste, y hubo en mi alma un estallido de vida. Se abrieron todas mis flores interiores,
y cantó el ave de los días festivos.


Me amaste, Anuarí, y alcanzé la Gloria suspendida en tus brazos.Desapareciste, y quedé sola, los ojos naúfragos en noche de lágrimas.
Bondadosa ha vuelto tu sombra, entre ella y el sepulcro espera una hora mi alma.


My only consolation to any who might be reading this is that Shakespeare in Spanish, as good as translations can be, cannot match the original ring of the language, English.  Those Anglos in the audience of the Cinematheque need not have been jealous. As for me I see lots of Chilean literature in my future.
As I left the Cinematheque, in a hurry to look up all I could find on Teresa Wilms Montt, I understood, more than ever the limitations of only speaking one language.

Saturday, January 21, 2012

Lauren Elizabeth Stewart

While the picture of the little girl here might jar a bit with the content of what’s written it just so happens that one of the definite advantages about blog writing is that I am not subject to the whims of editors or art directors. I had enough of that in that era of my life where I was working for magazines. My wife Rosemary looked at the picture and was disgusted. Happily, she, too, is not my editor or art director.

In the last few months family dinners at home were marred by the explosive and moody outbursts of my older granddaughter whose body is going through changes of which I have no knowledge as I was never a 14-year-old girl. I attempted to reduce the dinnertime outburst by having her sit next to me. This way I could avoid eye contact and such remarks as, “Why are you looking at me like that?” Unfortunately a grandfather that has been used to teasing his daughters and granddaughters does not know how to stop. Even after I was warned, I persisted. And so it came that a couple of weeks ago RG (raging hormones) called to say she was no longer going to opt for coming for Saturday visits.



I must, of course, mention here that my wife is extremely angry at me. But there have been some advantages. Dinners have been quiet and peaceful. They have been not stressful at all. Conversation at the table is subdued but happy. We retire to watch a film on TV.

Now, the younger granddaughter, Lauren, 9, is able to take my teasing as if she were wearing plate armour. She dishes it right back. She is impervious.



I came up with the idea a few days ago that we should call up Lauren and ask her to choose the menu for today. She was very quick to immediately ask for her chewy meat. This recipe, which I post here, has become one of the family’s faves. The meat is not too chewy as I thinly slice it at an angle. The only modification that I have made to the NY Times recipe is to reduce the oil by one half. The purpose of the oil is to make your barbecue flame up. This immediately blackens the flank stake into a crust while keeping the inside moist and rare.

My recipe for mashed potatoes includes lots of cream, butter, pepper, freshly grated Parmegiano-Reggiano, and half a very finely chopped onion. I ignore all those who would scoff at my then whipping all the above with an electric hand-beater. Both Lauren and Rebecca like my mashed potatoes.

I agree with Lauren’s choice of Jell-O but when Rosemary is not looking I do not stir the mixture too much. The result is Jell-O that is a tad soft on the surface but at the bottom it develops a chewy consistency much like gum. I love it and I am slowly turning Lauren to appreciate this, too.

Lauren states, “Rebecca is going to miss out on this meal. There is more for us.” I presently agree but I do hope that Rebecca does eventually come back and that I will be able to sit her in front of me. I will try not to tease her, but I am not promising.

Friday, January 20, 2012




Carol Tsuyuki, Craig Tomlinson, Marc Destrubé, Byron Schenkman, Natalie Mackie Photo Mamiya RB-67 Pro-SD with Polaroid 1500 ISO Sepia Film

Tonight my daughter Hilary Stewart and I were privy to an intimate concert (I don’t think I am over the top if I add with plenty of  “quiet virtuosity”) of French Baroque music in the West Vancouver home of harpsichord/instrument maker Craig Tomlinson and wife Carol.



The trio performing in a living room of wondrous instruments, including a beautiful viola da gamba consisted of Marc Destrubé, Natalie Mackie on viola da gamba (two musicians I have followed since 1996) and and Bryon Schenkman on harpsichord.

The “excuse” for this concert has an explanation that is quite simple. The three performers were rehearsing for a week in Tomlinson’s house and there may be another one that is simple, too. After the performance Mr Schenkman told me, while glancing with longing at the Tomlinson harpsichord (in splendid black, red and gold), “I love that harpsichord.”

The performance area was an L-shaped living room dining room. I chose to sit on the dining room side for two reasons. For one we were two feet away from Natalie Mackie’s back and I could easily peer into her sheet music. From our vantage point we could see Schenkman’s face and Marc Destrubé full frontal. In most concerts you see him in profile. We could also hear, right there, the concert (and that gasp of air when Destrubé is about to swing his bow) and be able to enjoy all the subtleties of the sound of the viola da gamba.

If you look at the programme you might agree with me that you may have heard music of Rameau and Couperin before. But the others, as my Spanish grandmother would have said, were, “ilustres desconocidos”. All three performers are keen and knowledgeable in music history. In fact Schenkman teaches music history at Seattle University. This all meant that we were given lots (but just enough) of tidbits and useful knowledge on these French composers and their contributions.

Craig Tomlinson

Of Elizabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre Schenkman told us that from the moment she was four she was a favourite in King Louis XIV’s court and when she was older she was offered an important post in it by the Sun King himself. But it seems that de la Guerre had obtained her own private patrons and held her own musical salons in Paris. She did not want to travel to Versailles. De la Guerre and Jacques Duphly were catering to a new and growing audience that was beginning to shift from royal courts to the private quarters of wealthy patrons.

Both the music and our audience which included a prominent Vancouver jeweller and an arts patron was a 21st century version of what may have been that of de la Guerre’s this concert also included pleasant chats in the kitchen with nice things to eat and drink. Through it all my daughter appreciated those good things that our city has to offer if one looks.

After the concert, Hilary chatted with Destrubé who enquired about Rebecca and may have been wondering when she will return to these concerts. Since Destrubé has his own children he must know about the “teenage dark ages”!


As we drove back to our side of the bridge we reflected on a special evening in which the musicians catered to a royal audience and that royal audience was us.

Of special note for me was Marin Marais’s Sonnerie de Ste-Geneviève du Mont-de-Paris. It’s incessant vamp on the harpsichord (a constant smile on Schenkman) reminded me of the Dave Brubeck Quartet playing Paul Desmond’s Take Five (with that lovely vamp on the piano) and I could imagine that happy hunchback, Charles Laughton jumping up and down, pulling on the bells while the harpsichord’s red reminded me of Esmeralda’s (Maureen O’Hara) red hair.

 

 

Photo from Programme

Byron Schenkman on the piano

Rossi: Sonata sopra la Bergamasca (Venice, 1622) for two violins and continuo
In that Rossi, Byron Schenkman plays continuo, which means that he is playing the bass parts on his harpsichord. But there is another delightful continuo player, on the cello. It's Nathan Whittaker. Whittaker plays for our very own local and wonderful Pacific Baroque Orchestra. And the video below while lacking in a bit of video quality is quite unusual. This is a core group of the Pacific Baroque Orchestra with Marc Destrubé on the violin.

The Pacific Baroque Orchestra plays The Scaramouche Suite


Addendum:

The instrument used at the Friday concert, is a French Double manual harpsichord that I based on an instrument that was built in Paris in 1769 by Pascal Taskin. The original instrument had a range of FF to f3 (61 notes). I have increased the range to a high g3 as well as adding a note so that the instrument may be used at both high (modern pitch where a=440 hz) and low (baroque pitch where the a-415 hz) pitches. This increase in range to 64 notes is much needed in this instrument as it quite often will be used by Early Music Vancouver or The Pacific Baroque Orchestra one week at low pitch and a few days later will be used by The Vancouver Symphony Orchestra or Vancouver Opera at high pitch. The instrument has a disposition of 2 x 8' and 1 x 4' with a buff rail on the principal 8' register. The two manual keyboard has a typical French shove coupler that engages the upper and lower manuals together.

I measured the original instrument in Edinburgh in 1987 and was able to take a multitude of photos of it at the same time. Overall, the original is still in very good shape, has an incredible tone and a wonderful action. I was lucky enough to spend a week measuring and photographing the Taskin and a few of the other Harpsichords at the Russell Collection in Edinburgh, while the building where the collection is housed was closed off to the general public. On one such day, as the '1769 Taskin' is missing some bottom boards, I had my head, two hands and my camera inside of the instrument photographing internal braces. The curator of the collection, upon seeing my legs oozing out from under the instrument, proceeded to play a huge C major chord that, from my position, was about the loudest thing I had heard to date.

The woods used in my harpsichords are gathered from locations around the world. At the heart of the instruments is the European Spruce used for the soundboards. I buy the Spruce in log form in Mittenwald, Germany. At its thickest the finished soundboards are 4.5 mm thick and at the thinest are 1.9 mm. Other woods include Ebony, Swiss Pear, Yellow Poplar, European Beech, Holly and Basswood. Once after picking through a pile of logs in Germany in the 1990's I was gladdened to see the Steinway Piano manufacturers coming in to pick through what I had left behind.

Craig Tomlinson

Tomlinson Harpsichords