Since I am not a music critic and just a photographer I can write about a concert without any rules that I must follow. And now I enjoy, that since my photographs are not going to a magazine or newspaper, I can experiment with slow shutters with my digital Fuji X-E3.

Tonight's performance of the avant-garde Vancouver group Yarilo, which included a couple of young 13 year old actors (Farah Berkson and Benjamin Jacobson), the Yaletown String Quartet and percussionist Jonathan Bernard had me thinking of other extraordinary musical happenings in my past.

The first happened in Buenos Aires in 1950 when I was 8. My parents took me to the Teatro Colón for a performance of Arthur Rubinstein. This was my first ever classical one. The man sat down and before he began to play (perhaps because it was a Buenos Aires winter) people coughed. He waited. People coughed. He got up and faced us. With a pen or pencil in his hand he told us in Spanish, “Cough, cough!” He then sat down to play. He could not and it was then we found out he was drunk. He left the stage and returned 45 minutes later. I was told he was brilliant.

Perhaps 20 years ago I was driving my car and listening to CBC Radio. They began to play a Beethoven Bagatelle. I had to stop my car to listen to it. I was wonderful. Because I wanted to share my experience I called my friend Linda Lee Thomas, the former  pianist of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, with my primitive cellular phone. Her remark to me when she answered, “Oh, Alex, to hear something for the first time! I am jealous.”

And so it was last night. Every composition I heard was for the first time. With the proliferation of the availability of music now, I feel sad that my mother’s desert island music consisted only of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. She would have never heard of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. What would she have said to me when Leslie Dala came to my house the day of my birthday, August 31, 2020 (my wife was visiting our daughter in Lillooet) and I was depressed. Dala told me to sit down in my piano room ( I have a refurbished 130 year old Chickering baby grand) and played the variations for me?

Last night was a refreshing performance which since it included some narration, it became theater. There is one more experience that I want to share here.

A couple of years ago while listening to CBC Radio Ideas they featured theologian and saint, St. Augustine. Augustine wrote that when you listen to music you hear that first note in the past, the next one in the present and the third you can predict in the future. It is obvious that Augustine did not have any knowledge of the yet to be invented atonal music!

And so last night I could not predict any of the next notes (except perhaps with some of the Phillip Glass compositions). My experience was one of constant surprise.

Because I am 82, I can state here that I never ever want to hear Bach’s Double Violin Concerto. It will more than suffice for me to go to a performance of his 6 Suites for Unaccompanied Violin that I heard this year and last played by Marc Destrubé who was present last night.

The vocal parts by the two young performers were based on author Kathy Kacer's book To Hope and Back, all about that ill fated SS St.Lois. She was present and is in one of the opening photographs.

Because I had met and photographed composer Iman Habibi in 2011 all I could do was to smile when I listened to his Radiant Light and imagine that poem by the 13 year-old Elizabeth Woods (was not able to find it).

Iman Habibi & Kethleen Allan

I was wowed by the two pianists, Jane Hayes and Anna Levy playing Gheorghi Arnaoudov’s Two Litanies for Two Pianos and Percussion (with Jonathan Bernard on percussion) and Philip Glass’s Four Movements for Two Pianos. These piano pieces were nicely interrupted by the two 13 year old actors.

I had never been to a performance by the Yaletown String Quartet. Amazingly they imitated to perfection the noise and whistles of a stream train and the sirens of a bombing mission in 1939.

The whole concert/performance centred on a ship the SS St.Louis that circled Cuba and the US with a boatload of Jews and was unable to find a save heaven. It had to return to Germany with the obvious consequences.

The program was all about the Jewish Holocaust. That it all happened then and stuff is happening now was what made the evening a sobering one.

But there is something that I am looking forward. South African music critic Willoughby Blew has unearthed a long lost version of John Cage’s 4’33” for two pianos. Could I persuade Jane Hayes and Anna Levy to tackle it next year?