Ottawa Chamberfest: From Grieg to Gaga

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The Ottawa Chamberfest will celebrate its 30th birthday this summer with more than 60 concerts and events over two weeks, featuring some of Canada’s brightest stars, including Angela Hewitt and Marc-André Hamelin. Yet, big names aren’t the focus at Chamberfest 30.

This year’s theme is “championing.” Artistic Director Carissa Klopoushak has encouraged performers to champion something they care about in their programs—be it a social cause, a little-known composer, or an emerging artist. This directive is the reason Hewitt will share the stage with rising-star-of-the-piano-world Carter Johnson, and Arion Baroque Orchestra will explore gender in a gender-bent concert of Handel arias.

The relevance of the idea of championing is twofold, as it also ties into a new capital campaign through which supporters are asked to become “Chamberfest Champions,” helping the festival meet its $100,000 fundraising goal. That figure is far smaller than the gap left in the organization’s budget after significant government funding cuts this year. For Klopoushak, who stepped into her role at Chamberfest in 2020 and guided the festival through COVID largely unscathed, experiencing cuts this season has been a particularly tough blow.

Financial pressures aside, Klopoushak makes it clear that this year’s dazzlingly wide breadth of programming, much of which will be offered free of charge, is not a strategic ploy to lure in newer, younger, or bigger audiences. Rather, yoga classes with live cello accompaniment, performances in a record shop (“like the NPR Tiny Desk concert vibe,” she says), piano recitals featuring Lady Gaga fugues, and the festival’s classic Chamberfringe series, which will feature cross-genre acts, are all avenues for Chamberfest to embrace Klopoushak’s philosophy that “music is music!”

“There’s no effort to reach different audiences through (wide-ranging repertoire). We’re not using it as a hook to pull them in for Beethoven. We are celebrating the fact that we have a very broad definition of what chamber music is,” says Klopoushak. She has noticed that she is not alone in her experience as a classical-music aficionado, who also feels drawn to a diverse array of other genres. She wants Chamberfest to reflect and respond to the vast scope of musical influences to which we are all exposed in our increasingly globalized and digital age.

That is why, when she surveys this summer’s lineup, she is as excited for Cris Derksen’s Indigenous beats as she is for Emily D’Angelo’s elegantly-programmed song recital, or the 30th Anniversary Celebration concert, which will feature a new commission, electronics, and sumptuous Dvořák. In Klopoushak’s words: “We’re making sure that everyone has that gateway to realize that this (music) is for them!”