Don Anderson
Don Anderson is an internationally recognized advocate of classical music. He has more than 30 years’ experience in celebrating it through print, radio and teaching. He is the author, publisher and distributor of the best-selling book Tuning the Forks: A Celebration of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. It has been hailed as “the best book on music-making in Canada (and for that matter, much wider afield) that I’ve ever read, and a serious work of art in itself.”
– Bramwell Tovey
Don has written more than 130 seasons’ worth of program notes and feature articles for more than 20 orchestras, chamber ensembles and schools throughout North America, from British Columbia and California to New York and Vermont, from Manitoba and Minnesota to Texas and Arkansas, and as far afield as the United Kingdom and Switzerland. His clients include the major symphonies of Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Rochester (New York) and Fresno (California). He has also written notes for touring performances by the orchestras of Montreal, Ottawa (National Arts Centre Orchestra) and Quebec. His CD liner notes appear on the CBC and Harmonia Mundi labels. For the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, he has also written season brochures and concert presentations.
Don has contributed articles to magazines in Canada and abroad, such as Opera Canada, the SwissAir Gazette, and the program books of England’s Birmingham Royal Ballet and the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. He wrote for the Winnipeg Free Press, the city’s major newspaper, over a 25-year period (1977-2002). His contributions included reviews of concerts, recordings, videos and movies, plus feature articles and interviews. He is also a contributor to The Encyclopedia of Manitoba. MORE >>
TUNING THE FORKS:
A Celebration of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra
Excerpt from Chapter 14: On the Road
The WSO’s toured northern Manitoba in September 1998, under the baton of artistic director Bramwell Tovey. In a column published in the Winnipeg Free Press on October 13, Tovey wrote,
Unless you’ve been to Flin Flon you cannot begin to imagine how a town could ever exist literally upon rock. Unless you’ve been to Thompson you’ve never seen ravens the size of large dogs, nor waterfalls like Pisew, twice as beautiful as Niagara yet one tenth the size.
Unless you’ve been to Gillam you can never truly appreciate how the human race has managed to harness nature to our advantage to provide hydro electric power for millions from the desolate wilderness. And if you’ve never been to Churchill then you haven’t really lived at all.
The tour is now a memory of snatched breakfasts and quick cups of coffee with newly-made lifelong friends, but it took many months of careful planning. Teresa Yeo, Karen Conway, Bill Burbank and Jo-Anne St. Godard each worked very closely with the WSO’s Annemarie Petrov to ensure the smoothest-running tour imaginable.
On a CBC radio documentary about the tour, Petrov said, “This has been in the works for a good two years. When Bramwell began as artistic director, this was at the top of his list of things he wanted to accomplish in his tenure. We started doing more run-outs about three years ago, which got us into the swing of doing performances in other communities. We found that it was so incredibly rewarding, not only for the communities but also for the orchestra, that we had to do more.”
Tovey’s Winnipeg Free Press article continued,
What music should we take with us? That was almost the easiest decision to make. It would be Beethoven – the most direct and meaningful of the “greats” to the inexperienced listener. We took the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Symphonies, Three Métis Songs from Saskatchewan by Malcolm Forsyth with the brilliant young Canadian singer Susan Platts as our mezzo-soprano soloist, as well as Bizet’s Carmen Suite and Rossini’s Overture to William Tell. We added a potpourri of encores including Percy Grainger’s arrangement of Danny Boy, which has become the WSO’s signature tune for signing off our concerts around the province.
In Flin Flon the WSO concert became a “hot ticket,” and 700 people ended up attending it. The CBC’s Sandra Thacker, who produced and hosted the radio documentary, said, “It was more than sold out: high school band students were lined up at the door, and the youngest audience member was seven weeks old. Even with that many people, you could still hear a pin drop.” A community choir joined the WSO for the occasion, singing music by Handel.
