Elisa Citterio in conversation

On Tafelmusik's ultra-cautious pandemic, the future of period performance, and how Canadian politeness often hinders communication

Elisa Citterio | Photo by Daniel Banko, Banko Media

As music directorships go, violinist Elisa Citterio’s tenure at Tafelmusik wasn’t one of the luckiest. After being welcomed with not a small amount of excitement after the departure of Tafelmusik’s longtime music director and co-founder Jeanne Lamon, and a protracted search that involved multiple concerts with an international roster of candidates, Citterio moved here from Italy with her young family, ready to conquer. She came with an impressive cross-European CV that included both period and modern orchestras, notably Milan’s La Scala. Just three years into her music directorship, which is when the new appointee usually begins to shape her own seasons, coronavirus pandemic hit and promptly shut down Ontario. And kept it shut. And shut. And shut some more, in what turned out to be one of the most restrictive shut-downs in any jurisdiction. The orchestra couldn’t, and wouldn’t, play live, and had strict protocols and masking in place for the video recordings. When they were out and about, Citterio’s toddler daughter too had to mask up. (Over in Italy, her country of origin, kids under 6 were not expected to wear masks, and orchestras had already begun returning to live performance in latter half of 2020.) By 2022, I and many others in the baroqueur audience became curious about Tafemusik’s reluctance to return. I was not surprised when the press release landed in my inbox earlier this year, informing the world of Citterio’s departure.

When I met with Citterio earlier this week, one of the first things I wanted to ask her about was the orchestra’s state of mind during the pandemic. Due to co-parenting duties, Citterio still comes back to Toronto for chunks of time but all of her professional life is now outside North America. She’s performing a solo concert tomorrow at the Heliconian Hall (of which later) but that’s a one-off. During our conversation Citterio was able to share that a lot of discussions took place behind closed doors at Tafelmusik during the pandemic, but the ultra-cautious side always prevailed. “What I think hurt the most was not the virus, but the isolation,” she tells me. “The art is not secondary. Socialization is a primary human need.” When, like every other organization in Toronto, Tafelmusik pivoted to digital, they instituted an elaborate safety policy for recordings. “For rehearsals, we took daily PCR tests, wore masks, kept 2m distance and had barriers. So I said, wait, I cannot hear the oboe, nor they me, they’re 12 meters from me, why distance and wear masks if we all tested negative?”

When you lead from within the orchestra, you lead with your face too, she explains. You also give cues with your breathing. Citterio tells me her main concern during the pandemic was supporting the musicians, both by making sure their salaries got paid but also that their spirits were up. She’d assign new pieces for instrumentalists but then couldn’t get the ensemble in one place because they were not allowed to meet indoors in groups larger than three or five. Trinity St Paul’s is a large space, but they were not allowed to use it to rehearse or record. A double-bass player’s request to be allowed to play without a mask because they couldn’t see their own fingers was rejected. “It was almost like, if the government says these are the rules, we’ll make the rules even stricter,” says Citterio. “Because we want people to be safe.” And this wasn’t only the board of directors. A number of musicians did not want to perform either. “I’ve had musicians who all through the pandemic and later said, I won’t perform if there’s a singer or a wind player. Never mind that the singer was tested. They would not play.” Citterio tells me she asked the organization if they could play outside, if they could have shorter but multiple concerts during the day for smaller audiences, and offered to give solo performances. Alas.

“Before I left Tafelmusik – I’ve been travelling all through the pandemic because my family is in Italy – elsewhere, musicians would play normally, happily, and then I would come back here, and everything was shut down. No concerts. You’re just closing yourself to life. We’re giving the message to the audience that listening to live music is not safe. Yet people go to the supermarket, take the subway… But coming to the concert is unsafe.” And somehow, I remind her, the film industry got the “essential industry” designation and they continued working through the pandemic. No one lobbied for the live music to return. “Yes, when I was trying to record and couldn’t go to the church, nor other classical music venues, I discovered that the movie studios were open,” she says. “We have our own church, already paid, empty, but we cannot use it, we have to go into the studio and pay a hefty fee, and there we could record, with no more than 5 people or whatever. That happened. But we couldn’t go into our own church with a better sound and completely gratis.”

I take us further back in time and ask Citterio what it was like to move to Canada, a country she knew next to nothing about, when she was appointed Music Director. What surprised her the most about the society, about the city? “When I moved here, my daughter was one, and the first thing I’ve noticed was how many playgrounds there are! Each park has one. And people will help you with the stroller any time, that just doesn’t happen in Italy,” she laughs. “And there are no playgrounds, and when you happen upon one, the swings are missing etc. The city here is more accessible to strollers and to the less mobile. You push a button in a lot of places to open the door. It was amazing for a mother with a baby.” Another thing that she noticed is the multiplicity of cultures from around the world in this one city. “The number of people you encounter daily from all kinds of backgrounds, is just amazing. Large Italian cities are nowhere near that diverse.”

How did you find the social side of things, I ask her? I think Canadians are super polite in every situation, but they will not be your friend, necessarily. “I agree! Here the politeness is the first rule, I felt really welcome. But maybe it was my position that made things complicated for potential friendships… as a music director I tried to make friends, but people would see me as the music director first and foremost.” When she moved to Toronto, all of  her old Italian friends kept asking her when she would be coming back, telling her that they missed her and wanted to play with her. When she moved back to Italy, she heard from hardly anyone in Toronto. She’s stayed in touch with two or three people from here.

“But I’m not sure if it’s because I was the MD and also had a small child and not a lot of  time for socializing. Plus, the pandemic.”

Canada and Italy differ in this one key aspect, she says. “Italian style of communication is really direct. Sometimes people will tell you maybe even not nice things in a very direct way. But at least you know exactly what they’re thinking. For example in rehearsal, I would say, let’s play this forte and this piano, and then the faces would show that some people are not really convinced, and I’d ask Do you like that idea, and they’ll say no, and then you go, OK let’s try this different thing. And here, in Toronto, what would happen is, you would say Let’s play this piano and this forte, and you would immediately get agreement. But then it wouldn’t happen. Do you guys like this? Yes we do! No one would really express open disagreement.”

This was hard to manage, especially, she says, as you have tight rehearsal schedules. It’s more efficient for a musician to say “I think this bit is not working for me, can we try it differently.” Here, says Citterio, the people would tell you “it’s fantastic, it’s beautiful” but not follow through. “It was hard to conclude what anyone was really thinking. They would be polite to a fault. But I had no idea if they liked it or not.”

“That said, they are all consummate professionals. But I wished so many times that we could have met halfway; of course we are polite to each other but we need to tell one another what we really think. Because it makes things easier.”

What presented an additional challenge, she soon after the appointment found out, is the relative smallness of the Historically Informed Performance scene in Canada, and in North America in general. Tafelmusik literally have no competition in their field. No other baroque ensemble with that longevity, subscriber base, operating funding and media reach exists in the GTA, nor probably in Anglophone Canada. I put it to her that one of the worst things, paradoxically, that can happen to a successful band is, not having any healthy competition in their league. She agrees. “Tafelmusik has had the same music director since its inception. She was amazing. I was lucky to meet her, she supported me a lot. I have so much admiration for what she managed to build in that time. But she gave a strong shape to this organization. And sometimes it’s difficult, when you’re new and many of the same people are there--it’s difficult to make a change.”

We in Canada and the US, I think, are still at a remove from the centres of all the HIP research and performance. “In Europe there are so many ensembles,” says Citterio. “What I found when I moved here, it was a little bit like returning to the past. Tafelmusik has definite preferences—this is the right approach to playing—and it sticks to them. It’s been difficult to make any changes. So I had to adapt to their style.” I tell her that my impression is that the HIP vs. modern performance is still a strict divide in Canada and the US, and that few musicians stray into the other camp. While we’re being tribal among ourselves, the general audiences are… turning to Netflix. “While I played in La Scala orchestra, I also trained in baroque violin in Basel,” she says, “and those two worlds were separated in Europe back then too. I did wonder why and concluded that it all came from the pioneers of the period performance: they were breaking into institutions and questioning the one dominant approach. But the early music and baroque period had a multiplicity of approaches. I think over time the interpretation of what those were narrowed down. Baroque performance for me is, let’s see how we can interpret this music, and not This is how you should do it to be authentic.” 

As she immersed herself as a young musician in period and modern performance equally, she realized each was feeding the other. “I realized that the violin is one. If I practice on baroque violin I’ll understand more about the later style and the romantic violin too, because you get to understand where the sound comes from, where the bowings comes from. I’ve always been in the middle when it comes to these debates. I say I play the violin. I think reading up on treatises and the musicology of course gives you a lot of useful information, but no one can say they have the ultimate truth.”  

“I think you really have to be open,” she says. “Now what’s happening in Europe and in Italy is, those two worlds are getting closer and closer, and I’m happy to see that. Now I teach in Udine, a conservatory in North East of Italy, I started this year a baroque violin class, and there was so much interest I counted 26 registered students, which is an impossible number of students. Some of them are playing in modern tradition and on modern instruments. But they are interested, and other teachers are interested and we are really working together. I’m one of the people that are trying to build bridges. Of course with gut strings and baroque bows it’s easier to play baroque music. But you can understand and learn many things even if you’re playing on metal strings and modern bows.”

Baroque era also had a multiplicity of pitches; there was no such thing as the baroque pitch, Citterio would like to remind us. It’s because period replica winds are made in one pitch, the rest of the orchestra ends up adopting that pitch. “Oboe exist in 415, 430, 440 Hz, and players can’t own them all. When it comes to baroque, there are so many schools, and pitches as well. Baroque style is a lot about creativity and asking questions and finding the way. And when you say “the baroque bow”… there were many different kinds of bows and they would not be played in the same way.”

What’s been happening in Europe, she says, is the rapprochement of the two sides of the divide, the HIP and the modern. “Period ensembles are pushing their boundaries and exploring classical, romantic and even late romantic eras. Almost all of them are, except those that specialize in the renaissance era. I think this is a good development. They will each find for themselves where the line is between period and modern. Some ensembles would play Mahler on gut strings but use vibrato as well. There’s really a strong process of cross over. I’m a baroque specialist and I’m a modern musician, equally.”  

There’s a much smaller HIP scene here and I suggest that this is perhaps why period performance musicians and orchestras are feeling they are fighting an uphill battle and insist on “the right approach”. “There are fewer ensembles, definitely, and I think it’s important to be able to live next to other organizations, see what they’ve been up to. How are these other period orchestras in our vicinity approaching this? It’s tricky, not having anyone to share the stage with and compare your approach with.”

A lot of her 26 students in Udine will have busy professional lives, thanks to the sheer quantity of ensembles across Europe and the Schengen free movement. For a baroque violinist in Toronto, she says, she would recommend not putting all your eggs in one (and only baroque!) basket. “Keep playing both modern and baroque. Try also playing the viola. I’m a big fan of viola and there’s a great repertoire for it.”

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For her Heliconian Hall concert on Monday, Citterio mostly chose pieces that are not frequently heard in Toronto. There may be a cute cameo from another musician.

Heliconian Hall, January 16, 7 p.m.

Sola in viaggio: Elisa Citterio in concert

Tickets:

https://bemusednetwork.com/events/detail/981

Program

London
Nicola Matteis (1650, Naples, Italy - 1714, London, United Kingdom)
Fantasia in La minore, Passaggio rotto e andamento veloce 6'

Stockholm
Joahn Helmich Roman (1694, Stockholm, Sweden - 1758, Kalmar County, Sweden)
Assaggio a violino solo in Re minore in quattro tempi senza indicazione 10'

Germany
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685, Eisenach, Germany - 1750, Leipzig, Germany)
Partita prima a violino solo scelta di movimenti

Italy
Giuseppe Tartini (1692, Piran, Slovenia - 1770, Padua, Italy)
Sonata A2 per violino senza basso Adagio "La mia Filli", Allegro - Presto - Giga 10'

Antonio Maria Montanari (1676, Modena, Italy – 1737, Rome, Italy)
Giga senza basso a violino solo 2,5'