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On Sunday afternoon October 15, 2023, the Cheng2 Duo premiered a short new work La Bella Strega di Sechelt by Yehudi Wyner, and dedicated to Frances Wainwright.
This tribute was inspired and organized by Claudia Sageele Cuesta, a local visual artist. It recognizes Frances’s commitment to outstanding classical music programming on the Sunshine Coast. Music is Frances’s greatest joy and she has an intuitive awareness for recognizing excellence.
“I am so grateful to Frances and the Coast Recital Society for feeding my soul. Each season is a surprise full of brave choices with innovative repertoire performed by magnificent musicians. I know am not the only one who appreciates Frances’s enormous and valued contribution to our community.”
Frances first met Yehudi Wyner in the 1960s while she was the pianist in the school orchestra at Antioch College, Yellow Springs, Ohio. Yehudi was a young pianist, conductor, and composer who led a touring opera company that performed in colleges and concert halls throughout the US.
Yehudi remembers being approached at the end of one of the concerts by a student “who was red-headed, very lively, not overly tall, with a vivacity and vigor that was very appealing. That was Frances and we’ve been friends ever since.”
Yehudi was born in Calgary, grew up in New York City, and started composing as soon as he was tall enough to reach the keyboard. His father, a composer of Yiddish art songs, helped little Yehudi notate his pieces. He attended Juilliard, Yale (where he taught for 14 years), and Harvard, studying with Paul Hindemith and Walter Piston. In 2006, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for his piano concerto Chiavi in Mano, a work commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Yehudi has also won: two Guggenheim Fellowships, the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, the Rome Prize, the Brandeis University Creative Arts Award, and the Elise L. Stoeger Prize, given by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center for “a lifetime’s contribution to chamber music.”
Yehudi enjoyed a lifelong association with Frances’s father, Hans Heinsheimer, one of the most influential classical musical publishers of the 20th century.
When Claudia asked Frances to name her favorite contemporary composer, she immediately responded Yehudi Wyner. Claudia interviewed Wyner, who was only too happy to celebrate his dear friend.
Frances and Yehudi both love Italy and the Italian language. “We’d speak Italian and Frances would sometimes identify herself as ‘La Strega.’ It’s really a term of endearment, so I’ve written a lyric piece, short and truly unpretentious. It has no hard edges and is devoid of drama. What’s notable for me is its gentleness, its lack of rhetoric, and its lack of harshness of any kind.”
Yehudi’s dedication reads: “This lyrical love-offering for Frances, a lifelong friend, is conveyed ‘con dolcezza infinita.’ The title La Bella Strega di Sechelt might suggest menace or even spiteful derision, but for us it reveals a playful affection. We would often exchange pleasantries in Italian, and it should be understood that in Italian ‘La Strega’ or ‘La Befana’ is a benign spirit of fun and beneficence, the opposite of ‘wicked.’ My wish is that this modest composition be heard as a love letter.”
He adds, “Frances is an independent spirit with vision and intensity, and with a broad and embracing cultural outlook. She is a person who knows the world of music and understands the psychology of listeners. And from that point of view, she is more than unique: she’s one of the most outstanding luminaries in the field that I’ve had the privilege of working with.”
About Frances Wainwright
Frances Wainwright with her father, c. 1938 (Photo provided)
On April 16, 1966, the old Metropolitan Opera House on 39th Street in New York City closed with a farewell gala. The leading stars of the opera world performed for a glittering audience made up of the city’s musical and social elite.
In that audience were Frances Heinsheimer and her father, Hans W. Heinsheimer. There is a photograph of them – Frances resplendent in a gold satin gown with a radiant smile.
Today — nearly 60 years later — Frances Heinsheimer Wainwright lives in Sechelt, BC, in a house full of a lifetime’s memorabilia. Her living room overlooks an art studio filled with sculptures, paintings, and prints, many by her husband, artist and teacher Barry Wainwright.
In Frances’s study, you’ll find a grand piano, towers of CDs, and shelves spilling over with books on music, philosophy, and history. Many photographs line the walls, featuring the luminaries her father worked with, including the greatest composers of the 20th century: Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, Kurt Weill, Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Alban Berg, and Leoš Janáček.
Every morning Frances, now in a wheelchair, maneuvers to her office desk to attend the day’s business of being the Artistic Director of the Coast Recital Society. She remains committed to carefully curating a concert series of the highest quality, and she is one of the finest chamber music presenters in Canada.
Frances grew up in a milieu infused with old-world culture. Her parents had escaped Nazi Germany and found sanctuary in New York — a world thriving with possibility. She inherited her parents’ devotion to music and shared their love of art, opera, and 20th-century musical expression.
Frances began piano lessons at age five. When she was eight, she remembers going with her father to the NBC Studios in Rockefeller Center. She perched in the gallery along with other special guests for the premiere of the television broadcast of Amahl and the Night Visitors by Gian Carlo Menotti.
After 12th grade, she attended boarding school on Lake Geneva as her parents thought she was too young to go to college at age 16. Her brother Thomas studied at MIT and became an astrophysicist. He lives in California. Her mother, Elsbeth, was one of the first women to practice dentistry in the US.
Next stop — Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio — a liberal arts school famed for pioneering “experiential learning” and instilling communitarian values. Frances excelled and received her BA in languages. It was during those years that she met composer Yehudi Wyner.
After college, Frances worked briefly at Metropolitan Opera in New York as a “girl Friday.” One evening at a dinner party she met a young artist from Montreal. Three months later, she married Barry Wainwright and moved to Montreal. It was the summer of Expo 67.
Frances obtained a master’s degree in French literature from McGill University with a thesis on Elie Wiesel and soon after began producing music programs for CBC Radio. Then her daughter Carla and son Julian joined the family.
For decades, Frances was the doyenne of CBC Music — revered for her vast knowledge, admired for personal connections with great musicians, beloved for her sharp wit, her capacity for friendship, and her enthusiasm for good, entertaining stories. She valued integrity and was an exceptional radio producer.
At a time when the CBC was arguably the most important cultural institution in the country, Frances set the standard for classical music on the national airwaves. She traveled abroad, interviewing Benjamin Britten at his home in Aldeburgh, and gathered material with colleague Marilyn Powell to create an award-winning documentary on Palestrina. She shared impromptu discussions on the air with pianist Menahem Pressler while he was seated at the keyboard. She produced recital recordings with Murray Perahia and Radu Lupu.
In 1980, she created and produced the annual CBC Christmas “Sing-In” at the Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul in Montreal. The idea came from her husband Barry who reminisced about a Christmas concert he had attended in Vancouver as a teenager. The Christmas Sing-In was broadcast across Canada and around the world. The scale expanded each year, drawing wide audiences and raising thousands of dollars for charity.
In 1997, Frances and Barry retired. They sold their house in Montreal, loaded up the car and headed west with only a vague idea of where they might settle. They arrived on the Sunshine Coast, and within a few days bought a house in Sechelt, where they’ve lived ever since.
“That was on a Tuesday,” recalls Frances. “On Thursday, I’m walking around downtown Sechelt and thinking, what have I done? I’m in this little town. I grew up in New York City, lived in Montreal for years. And here we are in a small, charming town totally unknown to us.”
That same day Frances walked into Talewind Books where she picked up a brochure of the Coast Recital Society concerts. “I thought, concerts? In this place, they do concerts?”
“The next concert featured pianist Anton Kuerti. I was stunned that Kuerti would come to Sechelt to perform. I called the phone number on the brochure and was informed that the next board meeting was at 10:00 a.m. on Saturday morning in the lobby of the Raven’s Cry Theatre. So, at ten o’clock I showed up and by 10:05 I was on the board.”
At that time Allan Crane was the Artistic Director. He’d overseen the acquisition of an excellent Steinway grand and put together an impressive concert series.
For the past 20 years Frances has been the Artistic Director of the Coast Recital Society. Concerts continue to sell out. Tickets are reasonably priced and feature performances by superb musicians “There’s a passionate audience for classical music on the Sunshine Coast.
Frances also oversees an Artists in the Community outreach program that awards scholarships to local classical music students, and presents world-renowned artists at schools and eldercare residences in the area.
Many outstanding musicians have made the trek to Sechelt’s Raven’s Cry Theatre for the Coast Recital Society. Past artists include Jeremy Denk, Augustin Hadelich, and Yevgeny Sudbin, who play to packed houses at Carnegie Hall. Canadian luminaries include James Ehnes, Janina Fialkowska, Marc-André Hamelin, and Jon Kimura Parker.
“I seek excellence,” says Frances. “Occasionally, I ask the musicians to perform rarely heard repertoire.” Recent performers included Juno award-winner Elinor Frey with a solo viola da gamba program. A performance by Filippo Gorini of Bach’s The Art of Fugue, for an uninterrupted 90 minutes, left the audience mesmerized.
Frances credits the enormous support of the volunteer Coast Recital board of directors, and sponsors. She acknowledges that many of these artists have been possible thanks to an invaluable collaboration with Leila Getz, Artistic Director of the Vancouver Recital Society and an internationally renowned recital impresario.
“Leila has been extremely generous to the Coast Recital Society,” says Frances, “encouraging us to present many of her outstanding artists.”
The Coast Recital Society’s astonishing success in presenting the best of the music world is an unparalleled contribution to the cultural and artistic life of the Sunshine Coast.
Denise Ball is the former Executive Producer of Classical Music for CBC and is interim artistic director of the Coast Recital Society. www.coastrecitalsociety.ca.
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