The Walleye Magazine

The Will to Make Music

The Creativity and Collaboration of the TBSO

By Savanah Tillberg You can stay up to date with the TBSO by going to tbso.ca.

As with many things this past year, the celebration of the Thunder Bay Symphony Orchestra’s 60th season did not go as originally planned. Thus, the year was dubbed the TBSO’s 59.5th official season.

It opened in the fall with a series of live performances that included audiences of 50 people and small groups of musicians performing chamber music. Ryleigh Dupuis, the executive director and general manager of the TBSO, explains that the original hope for the season was to gradually grow the performances, both in audience and musician capacity, following health and safety guidelines as the season progressed.

“What we found was exactly the opposite,” Dupuis says. “Based on government restrictions, our performances started getting smaller until instead of live audiences we began streaming performances.” To make the TBSO events as accessible as possible, all of the virtual concerts were made available to the public for free. Dupuis adds that “we decided early on that we were not going to put our concerts behind a paywall. There are not a lot of ways that the TBSO has been able to give back and support our community during all of this […]. We’re not front-line workers [and] we can’t do a lot in that capacity. I think that by being able to offer entertainment [while encouraging] people to stay home and enjoy what the city and the symphony have to offer, that was kind of our way of helping in whatever way we could.”

Due to the stay-at-home orders that were enforced mid-season, musicians were no longer able to play together, and streaming events were no longer possible. Despite these seemingly insurmountable challenges, the symphony found creative ways to play music for the community while still respecting government and local health authority recommendations. A Valentine’s Special was released in February where musicians had pre-recorded themselves performing in their homes for a virtual concert. To end the season, through a partnership with Sleeping Giant Brewing Co., an adapted version of a beloved local event, Beer & Beethoven, took place in April.

The TBSO has also partnered with Westfort Productions to create a post-season TBSO Tour Video that is expected to become available in June. In addition to that, Westfort Productions, composer Dean Burry, writer Jacob Richler, and the symphony are collaborating to produce an educational concert video for schools that is based on Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang by Richler’s dad, Mordecai Richler.

Despite the challenges that this past year have presented, Dupuis says that she has been amazed at “how creative, collaborative, and wholly invested [everyone has been] in ensuring that we were able to keep playing music.”

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