The most engaging moment came with Tanya Tagaq's 15-minute a cappella improvisation that evoked an audience member to start weeping midperformance.

Tanya Tagaq and symphony move the rebels: Review

With Edwin Outwater and the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony at the Warnock MacMillan Theatre, Kitchener, Saturday, Feb. 6

KITCHENER-WATERLOO—After being ushered to a cramped seat in a black-box theatre, I was surprised to find a room full of 20-somethings. Little kids were pointing at the tubas, a gentleman with a mohawk admired the cellos and a fellow in the front row inexplicably wrapped himself in a Mexican blanket. While I sat there, my arm hair was raised. “Is this what I think it might be? A genuine classical music happening?”

The audience was buzzing when I overheard a proclamation: “Tanya!”

That was Tanya Tagaq, an Inuk throat singer from Cambridge Bay, Nunavut. Early success came when Björk tapped Tagaq for a collaboration. The creative floodgates opened further when she won the 2014 Polaris Prize for her critically lauded album Animism. She has since become a contemporary-music superstar with the power to disarm even the most obstinate pair of ears.

Saturday was the second of two concerts as part of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony’s Intersections Series, which explores multi-interdisciplinary collaboration. I recall the musical director Edwin Outwater’s Rebel Music Ted Talk, where he argues popular music isn’t the music of rebels anymore; classical music is. This proved true on Saturday.

The first rebel came in the form of a ghostly drone seeping from a multiphonic sound system surrounding the audience. “Transported” by Toronto’s Rose Bolton opens like an ancient dithyramb undulating with gestures that pulled kindred spirits in from the cold, to dance among the oboes. Like a Houdini séance, we crossed over. Sprightly gestures in the harp led to the strings; soft brass ushered in Penderecki-like tonal clusters. The balance between the pre-recorded material and the live orchestra seemed effortless, which is no small feat.

The second classical rebel rouser was Derek Charke and his “Cercle du Nord III.” It featured Tagaq grunting, gasping and harrumphing at the orchestra like a deep-sea diver coming up from a close encounter with a shark. The piece features Charke’s ingenious method of imitating bouncing katajjaq rhythms between the violins. The orchestra did their best to keep up, but it was Tagaq’s show.

There was also “Suspension” by Vancouver’s Rodney Sharman, which acted as an open musical bed on which to lay Tagaq’s extraordinary instrument.

The most engaging moment came with Tagaq’s 15-minute a cappella improvisation that moved an audience member to weep midperformance. As a mediator between people and spirits, souls and mythological beings, Tagaq underwent a kind of vocal catharsis onstage. Somewhere between the terrifying and the beautiful, she was left on the floor, with her arms and fingers reaching like a tree toward the sky.

The only dead white guy on the program (a rebel in his own right) was Edvard Grieg. The orchestra earnestly performed “In the Hall of the Mountain King” from Peer Gynt SuiteNo. 1, but intonation issues in the winds kept it grounded.

Linda Catlin Smith’s “Wilderness” seemed to ask: if an orchestra falls in the forest, does anyone hear? The piece was compelling at times, but underdeveloped melodic material in the opening and closing solo violin kept the enchanted forest experience from moving beyond the treeline.

The Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony was a surprise, but Tagaq was the real delight. She seemed genuinely surprised at the long and frenzied standing ovation by the young sold-out audience. Rebels, all.

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