Purveyor of: Raindrops on the windowpane

This Vancouver-born soprano singer has been classically-trained in piano and violin and is currently studying music at U of T. She has recently embraced the folk genre, yet cites influences ranging from Rostropovich to Blonde Redhead to Ani Difranco. Lisa Aldridge spoke with Ilana about her parents’ concert series, rock operas and Russia.

Having concert pianists for parents must've been kind of weird.  What was it like growing up for you and your sister?

Yes, I suppose so. But I think I also took it entirely as the norm for a long time. I just assumed that everyone had at least two grand pianos in their houses and that everyone's parents played four-hand reductions of Beethoven symphonies late into the night! No... it was definitely an amazing way to grow up.

Tell me about the Music Salon concert series that your parents organize.  

My mother and father came to Canada from Russia about 29 years ago and moved around with my big sister from Edmonton to Vancouver (where they had me) to Toronto where they settled teaching, at first, at the Conservatory. As in any kind life devoted to music I think they quickly realized that the only way to actually survive as a "performing" artist was to create their own performance opportunities.

I think the "salon" idea always appealed to them because, on some level, they're stuck in the 19th century... and why not? So much was happening musically towards the end of the 1800s, and so much of it was happening basically in people's living rooms. Schubert and his musician, writer, actor, painter friends would meet up and play and sing for one another. And, it wasn't so much about the big, alienating, processed, sterile concert hall - my parents' series (I work for them) has always had a sort of "off" feel to it.

Have you ever been to Russia?

Yes, in the summer of ‘06 I spent a month (at the height of White Nights, when the sun sets for about two hours between 2am and 4 am) in St. Petersburg taking voice lessons from this incredible teacher who had just retired from the Conservatory there. I went with my mother and father and we lived (all three of us) in a rented room of a communal apartment, that belonged to two "bohemian" (the Russian version borders/overlaps with insanity!) families. It felt like we were living in a set of an absurdist play about packrats.
 
I've read that you've acted in and directed a number of Fringe Festival productions. Will you be doing any more productions in the future? Any chance of a rock opera?

I thought of applying to do an opera at the Fringe Festival. Haven't done it yet. It's definitely something I could imagine doing, as a director or as a singer. But I've got a bit of a problem with "apologizing" for classical music. I am all for interdisciplinary collaborations, but I have no desire to be a kind of proselytizing herald of the genre, trying to hippify it. I love it for what it is and would love to present it in all sorts of unconventional venues/ways but I don't really want to try to change the genre itself in order to satisfy the needs/wants of a new demographic, you know? So, rock opera is probably not the way I'd roll - but accessible "chamber" opera without the snobby trimmings and devoid of the diva syndrome I would love....

How do you find your theatrical training influences your vocal performances?

There's a Nina monologue in Chekhov's play "The Seagull" where she talks about being an inexperienced actress and not knowing what to do with herself on stage, how to move her hands, how to control her voice... and I think after my year on tour, straight out of school, that I really sympathized with Nina's feelings of inadequacy (then again, show me a young actor who doesn't, right?). In retrospect, that feeling makes so much more sense to me now - I've realized that there was always something missing in my "being" on stage and that that intangible thing was music.

Where do your other influences come from? What artists are you into right now?  

There’s an amazing counter-tenor, Daniel Taylor, who has this perfect mix of insane voice (the first time I heard him I had to close my eyes because I'd never heard a counter-tenor before and was totally freaked out by the woman's-voice-in-a-man's-body thing) and incredible musicianship. I'm a huge fan of soprano Adrienne Pieczonka's too - she's just been singing at the COC in Don Carlos. There's a German lieder singer Matthias Goerne who makes me swoon.

But then, I've always loved Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Johnny Cash and I got all empowered in high-school listening to Ani DiFranco and Sarah Slean. Tom Waits blew my mind when I first got into Frank's Wild Years at McGill. Lately I've discovered Beirut (I love their sort of Eastern European accordion brassiness), Blonde Redhead, The Magnetic Fields ("chicken with its head cut off" is a favourite)...

By Lisa Aldridge