Yolanda Bruno
This is the link for the podcast, video and complete show notes for this interview. The transcript is below!
Yolanda Bruno:
And that has got to be one of the most rewarding ways I've ever shared music. We talk about the research and the connection music can make between people and audiences and the effects on the brain, but that level of intimacy and sharing it in that way really was the first time I really saw in real time just how much the impact of music and connection can benefit our lives.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, you’re listening to Conversations with Musicians, with Leah Roseman, which I hope inspires you through the personal stories of a fascinating diversity of musical guests. Canadian violinist Yolanda Bruno spoke to me about her new album Dear Jeanne and her film The Immortal Serafin, which both honour the late Jeanne Lamon, the renowned baroque violinist, and Music Director of Tafelmusik for 34 years. Yolanda explains how she explores the story of Jeanne’s 1759 Santo Serafin baroque violin, which was generously loaned to Yolanda for one year. You’ll hear a few clips from the album, including Jeanne’s masterful string trio arrangement of Bach’s iconic Ciaccona, as well as a taste of a Leclair duo with Julia Wedman, another important mentor for Yolanda, and a work by Beth Silver honouring Jeanne’s Dutch-Jewish heritage. Yolanda reflects on what it means to live more sustainably with her partner, the accordionist Michael Bridge, who was previously featured on this podcast. She shared how her her annual project Music for Your Blues has impacted her life, as well as a very memorable experience performing in a high-security penitentiary, which taught her about connection and dignity, and the value of live music. I also wanted to shine a light on Yolanda’s brilliant first ablum, The Wild Swans, featuring 11 women composers, recorded with pianist Isabelle David. You’ll hear short excerpts by Lera Auerbach and Kelly-Marie Murphy. We end the episode with Yolanda’s insights about avoiding burnout by achieving balance in her life using the idea of longer cycles of time, which I loved.Like all my episodes, you can watch this on my YouTube channel or listen to the podcast on many podcast platforms, and I’ve also linked the transcript.It’s a joy to bring these inspiring episodes to you every week, and I do all the many jobs of research, production and publicity. Have a look at the show notes of this episode, where you’ll find all the links, including different ways to support this podcast! Hey Yolanda, thanks so much for joining me here today.
Yolanda Bruno:
Thanks for having me, Leah.
Leah Roseman:
I'm glad we could make this work. We're both so busy and as we record this, you are expecting a child and when this is released, you'll be a parent. So that's a big life change.
Yolanda Bruno:
It is a little bit surreal knowing that by the time this is out into the world, my life will have changed forever.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, it's hard to describe. You have to go through it. So congratulations on your two most recent projects, which are so beautiful, and we're really going to dig into those as well as some of your other life and music. So I really loved watching your film, "The Immortal Serafin". How will people be able to see this? Is it going to be linked to your website? How's it going to work?
Yolanda Bruno:
That is a very good question. So actually just this afternoon I'll be meeting with the other producer of this film, the director Rob DeVito, and we will be discussing some of the next steps. And so it might be that it'll be in the similar format to what we did in Toronto at the launch where it is part performance and part film in the second half of a concert. So if you're in Ottawa, you might be able to see it this coming summer 2026, or if you are in Winnipeg you might be able to see it in fall 2026. So we're hoping to get it on the road across Canada to actually be viewed live with groups of people through music before it goes potentially online in some fashion where the general public can access it from the comfort of their home.
Leah Roseman:
Okay, cool. Well, at the moment, my second, the city with the most listeners is in Melbourne, Australia, so they'll have to wait.
Yolanda Bruno:
Wonderful. They'll have to wait a little longer, but hopefully we'll get it to you very soon. That's great.
Leah Roseman:
So this special violin was owned and played on by your teacher and mentor Jeanne Lamon. I have to say, I always wondered why she spelled her name like that, and then I was interested to learn about that actually, can you speak to her name a little bit?
Yolanda Bruno:
Yes, Jeanne, the way that she spelled it for most of her adult life was J-E-A-N-N-E, but when she was born it was spelled JEAN and there was confusion of that name being Jean in French, which is a male name at the time that Jeanne was music director of Tafelmusik, and really these realities still exist. It was so rare to have a music director that was a woman, and this is the time before Facebook and Instagram and all this social life that we live on computers. And so she would get hired for projects with Tafelmusik or other projects and then would show up and then the promoters would be surprised to see a woman because they thought it was Jean Lamon, it was a French man. And so to avoid any confusion, she changed the spelling of her name to Jeanne as we know it, just so that that was clear.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. And her violin, this beautiful Serafin. First of all, can you tell us that you must have got a very difficult phone call when you found out that she was very ill?
Yolanda Bruno:
Yeah, this was in the middle of the pandemic when we were at home and we had spoken on the phone, but also we had met a few times with Christina just in this format over video. I actually played for Jeanne a little bit online and we kept in touch that way and she had told me that she was sick, but she didn't really reveal just how sick she was. And it wasn't until she was really close to the end that I then realized I won't see Jeanne again in person. In a way, I think she was protecting some people by not really revealing just the extent of it, knowing that we couldn't all get together and see one another. So it was really devastating to learn. She was just 71, she was so young, and this is somebody with so much energy, big vibrant personality, still performing, recording, moving around, doing yoga classes every day with her partner Christina, doing pottery in the morning. They were just bustling people with lots of life and it was a huge shock and it still, yeah, it's a very heavy and sad thing, but life is extremely fragile and we just don't know when our chapter in this current plane of existence, well, we don't know when it'll be over.
Leah Roseman:
So most people will have heard of Tafelmusik, but not everyone. Can you speak to that group a little bit? And you were never a member, but you played with them?
Yolanda Bruno:
I've played with Tafelmusik music. I was never a member of the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra. So what you're asking about is this album that I made, this project that I recorded on my former teacher's violin, Santo Serafin Violin, and Jeannne Lamon was the music director for I believe, 33 years of the Tafelmusik baroque orchestra that are based here in Toronto. They are maybe 15 players, a small group and a very versatile ensemble that play on period instruments, old instruments, historic instruments on gut strings and period bows. And she built this ensemble into a world-class organization and they had a big record deal with Sony in the early days and they were touring all over the place and she built a very different dynamic orchestra from the orchestras that existed here in Toronto, like the symphony where I work or the Canadian opera company or the ballet.
This was like the new edgy group in town and it still remains that kind of ensemble and it draws that kind of crowd that are there to experience something a little bit more dynamic like the players are standing, sometimes they're playing from memory, it's just sometimes there are multimedia productions that are happening in combination with their live music and it's taking old music and then often they find interesting ways of bridging some new repertoire or working with living composers. It's really cool to see how they've bridged both past and present at the same time. They're a great ensemble, Tafelmusik music baroque orchestra,
Leah Roseman:
And this violin is on loan to you temporarily that belonged to her. So can you tell us about that phone call?
Yolanda Bruno:
Right. It was on loan, so this was about a week after Jeanne passed. Christina Mahler Jeanne's partner of 43 years called and told me that Jeanne's instrument will be donated to the Canada Council for the Arts, that we've decided that that's where we would like to share this instrument and that it will remain a baroque instrument. It will be the first one in their collection that's not a modern violin. And that's really significant because they're quite rare, they're hard to come by, especially very good quality old baroque instruments. And then she said it'll take about a year for the paperwork to go through and Jeanne wanted to know and wanted to offer this instrument to play on for a year, and I just burst into tears. It was such a gift to be offered this instrument, to have had my former mentor and teacher think of me in that way to know that she knew that how much that would benefit me in my own growth as I explored Baroque music because it's just so hard to get access to those good instruments.
And I had the great privilege of playing on this antique old Venetian violin from Italy, an almost 300 year old instrument that was exquisite. And I got to know my old teacher more intimately by playing this violin and I realized, okay, this is it. I've got about 13 months with this violin. What do we do in that time? So I called a good friend of mine, Chantal Lemire, who's a former school friend from my McGill years. We're very, very close. And I said, she was a grant writer, and I said, do you think we can make this grant happen? It's like it's due in three weeks. I want to record an album and I think I want to make a documentary film about this violin. And we scrambled and we worked hours and hours and hours for a few days in a row and we got this grant in and we were successful and we got this project going.
So it all happened really quickly. We got into the Isabel Bader Center for the Performing Arts. We had support from them as well through someone named Tricia Baldwin and a program called the Imagine Program. And if you are a young Canadian artist, I highly recommend you look into this program, the Imagine Program at the Isabel Bader Center. And we recorded the album there in that space. It's a stunning all wood concert hall right beside Lake Ontario. So right by nature, it's a hall that Jeanne knew really well, the acoustics are incredible. And we recorded music, which we can talk about later. And then the next portion, my work was the documentary film. So working with Rob DeVito, who was the director and producer with me, and also my partner, Michael Bridge, was very, very involved in the storyline production of that project and putting the film together, which was a story about this instrument, the Santo Serafin violin that belonged to Jeanne Lamon. How did she get the instrument? What does it mean to have an old instrument? How does something so old survive almost 200 and something years and 80 years or so? So that was the project.
Leah Roseman:
One of the most special things on this album is actually Jeanne's arrangement of the Bach Chaconne. So I thought we could play a short clip of that to give people a taste of this really incredible arrangement.
Yolanda Bruno:
I'd love for you to play that clip. It is a stunning piece of music. It's about 12 minutes long, the context of the Ciaconna, so it's written for solo violin by Bach in, I don't know, 1720? And the story is that Bach had been on a tour in Europe for maybe two or three months, and in that time his wife, his first wife passed away and they had written to him, but because he was on the move, he never received the letters saying that she had died. So he returned home after having been away for a long time to discover his wife has passed. And we don't know for sure, but it's quite likely that this Ciaconna was the first piece that he wrote after learning that news. What we do know for sure is that the manuscript, the paper he wrote it on was paper that he bought while on tour.
And in this work you can spend a lifetime dissecting this work. Many people have made relationships between the five stages of grief and this work moments of complete anger and pain and then bargaining, and then this sense of acceptance, how he goes back into this major key and the way he does that transition. It's just a profoundly deep work and it really is perfect and how it's written for solo violin and it's hard to believe, but Jeanne has taken this work and has arranged it for three people, for two violins and cello. And it is just as amazing as the original and if not more magical because now she's given this opportunity where there's more space for each. There's so much going on in the original and now she's given each individual this opportunity to express something even more profound through these individual lines. It's just stunning. It's hard to describe in words, but she's made something truly magical in this arrangement. And so on the album, I've asked Christina Mahler Jeanne's partner 43 years to play on cello and then one of the violinists who I admire the most in the world today, Julia Wedman, who's also someone who has been a teacher and a mentor in many ways. She plays the other violin part in this trio arrangement of Bach's solo violin Ciaconna arranged by Jeanne Lamon. (Music: clip of Jeanne's Lamon's arrangement of J.S. Bach Ciaconna on the ablum Dear Jeanne)
Leah Roseman:
This album is linked to this film which people won't have seen, but if we could talk about the film a little bit. So one of your major themes in it, Yolanda, is the fragility of these beautiful old instruments and the fragility of our planet.
Yolanda Bruno:
You're right, I'm trying to pull up a photo that maybe you can see the violin just it's so nice to have a visual of it. So the album you're referring to is this one. Dear Jeane. So that is the beautiful violin on the cover there. And then this is Jeanne playing the violin. And the film is about, it's called the Immortal Serafin, and it's about how Jeanne acquired the instrument, which is a really interesting story, but you specifically asked about its tie to the environment. So the violin was made in 1759, but the woods that would've been needed to make an instrument that at that time would need to come from a tree that's at least a hundred years old. So we're looking at a tree from maybe the mid 16 hundreds and to pick up an old violin and to know that you're holding wood that's almost 400 years old is just when you really think about it.
It's extraordinary. That's pre-industrial revolution. The planet that this wood was living on is a totally different world than the one that we live in today. And you start looking at these pieces of wood and you can see the grains and that indicates all the years that the tree was growing and when they are very, very close together, those little grains that indicates that they were growing slowly, we can actually see what type of winter and what type of summer that tree endured based on the records that we can see in this wood. And that's remarkable, very, very special. And then in the film we talk about some of the woods that are no longer accessible like Ebony, which is on the fingerboard of the violin, is a wood from Madagascar that's now an endangered wood. You cannot harvest from Madagascar anymore. The beautiful violin at the back is Maplewood and spruce wood on the front of the violin.
It's exquisite. And you look at this antique instrument and you're playing it and you think everything else I own was made a few years ago and is disposable. It's designed to break so that we buy a new one. But this instrument was built to last. It was likely commissioned by somebody who had money and it was built over the course of several months and was meant to go out into the world to be played. And then for other people to see this quality instrument and then to go back to the original maker and ask, oh, can I also have a Santo Serafin? And that kind of concept that something so old that's 300 years old could still be used today. I mean, what else in our house do we use that's 300 years old that can still benefit us in some way? Today is really remarkable and I can't help but think when I'm holding such an old instrument, something so fragile that it's a representation of another time that we lived on this planet and where will this violin be in 300 years from now?
And can we look at this beautiful instrument and see, oh my goodness, how lucky are we to live in this gorgeous world and how can we make sure that it's available to the next generation that comes after us? There's this beautiful concept, I believe Haudenosaunee believe in this seven generation sustainability, indigenous concept of looking at the decisions you make now, how will they impact seven generations into the future? And that's what I think about when I'm holding such an old instrument. It's like where will this instrument be in decades from now in a century from now when I'm long gone and forgotten? What are the decisions we're making today that are impacting the world that people will live on tomorrow when we're gone?
Leah Roseman:
Are there things, I mean it must change for all of us, but are there things you're trying to do right now to be more sustainable?
Yolanda Bruno:
Yes. Everything from what I'm buying. Where do the products come from? Are they coming from other parts of the world? Are they coming from just around the corner in the province I live in, Ontario or in Toronto. How much plastic is on this product that I can't recycle? Do I need a new phone? This phone has been cracked for 18 months, but it's still working fine. Rogers is really keen on me buying another phone, so I get messages from them all the time asking me to upgrade. So it's kind of looking at disposability culture, looking at where products are coming from. Looking at what we eat is a big one. Not to preach about food and everybody's relationship to food is different, but my partner is pretty strict vegan. He says he's Freegan, meaning he'll have some dairy, but he doesn't eat any meat and fish and that's for ethical and environmental reasons and kind of learning from him a lot about that. I didn't know anything about that until we were together. So those are some of the decisions and things I think about in terms of environmental sustainability and how we live and how we consume. My decisions are so small, how you transport yourself, do you go on a bike or do you go on a car? Can you be four people in a car instead of one person in a car? I hope we're making a difference. We have a long, long way to go as you know.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So actually I will be linking a few related episodes to yours and one of them will be Michael Bridge the accordionist, which people may not realize he's your life partner.
Yolanda Bruno:
Yes, Michael's my life partner and we are expecting our first child very, very soon. In about five weeks from now. By the time this episode airs, I believe our little baby girl will have entered the world. We're really excited about that.
Leah Roseman:
So you mentioned he helped a lot with the creating sort of the storyline of this film.
Yolanda Bruno:
Yes. So Michael and I are just, as you said, life partners. We're also in so many ways artistic partners, even though we don't necessarily do projects together at the same time, we are always bouncing ideas off of each other. I really would love to be a fly on the wall of normal people's relationships because we talk about music or about art and about what we're working on all the time, and that is exciting for us. It was Michael's idea to actually have a film about the violin. He thought the album is great, but how could you really through a story and through speaking, talk about this instrument and that can live on more than just in music. And so we had originally conceptualized a 15 minute documentary. The documentary is closer to 45 minutes and he and I discussed the different ways of bringing that story to life.
And one was through looking at the environment, looking at sustainability, looking at how this is a piece of wood, it's part of nature, and yet it's still here 300 years later. And then we also interview, I interview, Ric Heinl, the violin antiquarian in Toronto, and he speaks more to who Serafin was as a violin maker in Venice and the different aspects of the exquisite refinement in how he crafted this violin. Santo Serafin did. Ric Heinl's interview is just such a profound interview, he's so passionate about violins and about old instruments and is very knowledgeable. Then we interview Ottie Lockey who was the former managing director of Tafelmusik for 19 years. And she worked and she and Jeanne Lamon started on the first day at Tafelmusik together. They both joined at the same time and they were good friends and good working partners. And she talks about that relationship, what Jeanne was like as a boss, as a dynamic leader, as someone making decisions about the organization that she included everybody, that she was very collaborative person in her leadership role.
And then the final interview is with Jaak Liivoja and maybe do you remember Jaak from the days he was in Ottawa? So Jaak, he also did restorations on instruments, but he also collected instruments and went to auctions and purchased. He's so knowledgeable also about old and fine instruments and Jaak is responsible for having found the Serafin for Jeanne Lamon. He knew that Jeanne specifically wanted a Serafin violin and one had come up at this auction and Jeanne went to try to bid, but it went far out of their price range for the bidding. And then another Serafin came up for sale again and he called her the day before. "It's like it's tomorrow. It is a Serafin, it is authentic. I think you should come check it out." So within 24 hours she's in New York looking at this ancient instrument, it's set up as a modern violin and she has only 15 minutes to decide whether or not she wants to buy this instrument that, this is like 1992 or 91.
And I think the instrument was like 83 starting at 80,000 American, something like that, a lot of money and you have to make this decision in just a matter of minutes. And apparently she's in a room with all of these other players. That's how Jaak is describing it. It's kind of chaotic and it's noisy. They're all playing hacking away, trying to decide do I like this one? And she's the only player that has no shoulder rest, no chin rest. And she's just got it there in her hands and she's trying to gauge one, do I like this instrument? And two, how will it survive a restoration process? You just don't know exactly what the instrument will sound like after it undergoes a big transformation and they decided to take that chance and that's the instrument that she'd bid on. And she won the bid and she took it home and it underwent I think an eight month restoration process. And that's the violin that you'll hear on all of the Juno award-winning Tafelmusik recordings. It's just the instrument that most of her career was on. It's beautiful. Santo Serafin. So that's the film in a nutshell.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, it was interesting. It mentioned that she went to Bill Monical on Staten Island for the restoration. I had been to see him when I bought my baroque violin many years ago. And certainly in the baroque world, there's this sort of bias or thought that the original state of the instruments is less tension on the instrument and therefore they breathe better. That was always my idea and I always felt sort of guilty about the modernization somehow we're putting all this tension. But Ric Heinl actually in that interview, he had a different opinion. He talked about the potential of the box was enhanced, and I never thought about it that way because it's true. We make much bigger sounds with the modernization. So I guess I feel less guilty, you know what I mean?
Yolanda Bruno:
Yes. I think that both have their value. The original setup was designed for, I won't speak to what Ric said, it's not obviously controversial, but it could be that he has his own bias that he prefers the other setup, the modern setup, and that for him, that means it's reached its full potential for somebody else. They feel that the other voice was the instrument's place. That's how it was supposed to be designed. It depends what your relationship is to which setup, and I agree with both in different scenarios. So don't feel bad about having modernized your instrument. That's absolutely fine.
Leah Roseman:
Well, my instrument is not that old, but it probably was modernized at a certain point. But the instrument I bought from Bill, I no longer have it, but it was like an old English instrument that hadn't been, it was the original setup.
Yolanda Bruno:
Oh, wonderful.
Leah Roseman:
It was cool. And I did go play for Jeanne. I was young, I studied Baroque violin and I wanted to make that connection, but she didn't like the instrument. She said, she was very forthright. She said, I dunno, it's boxy. You know what I mean? It's boxy. I'm not sure what she meant by that, but
Yolanda Bruno:
It's so personal.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah,
Yolanda Bruno:
Maybe for her it was, but for you it wasn't at all. And maybe in your hands it's not boxy. And it's so interesting with violins, it's very personal. You and I are speaking right now and you have a certain quality in your voice and I have a different quality in my voice, and that's like a violin. You're just, I'm born with this voice. You're born with your voice,
Leah Roseman:
But it's also what I could afford
Yolanda Bruno:
That too. Not everybody can have an old Santo Serafin violin.
Leah Roseman:
So I really enjoyed, I played a lot of Baroque chamber music and you'd also grew up in Ottawa, but you're a different generation, so you wouldn't have been around at that time. But yeah, for me it was exploring the 150 years before Bach. Getting to know all that repertoire was so, so great. And I should really pass on some of my collection of music to you. I was thinking when I listened to your beautiful Leclair duo, I think I still have it, I bought facsimiles of all Leclair wrote something like 42 violin sonatas with continuo, and I think I have the facsimiles for all of those.
Yolanda Bruno:
No way. I'd love to take a look at that. I know. We think also what you just said is very true. Bach is actually at the end of the baroque spectrum. There's so much music that comes before that. I also am, it's new to me as well, and it's much less performed in the sort of symphony or chamber music realms that are a little bit more prominent in Canada.
Leah Roseman:
So I stopped playing Baroque violin. I didn't really have a context going forward. And actually I had kids and I had this full-time orchestra job, so I just decided let's just lean into the modern thing and use the money to have a better modern violin, which I think was the right choice for me my career. But I do miss it, and I have to say I regret I didn't hear Tafelmusik the couple times they came with Jeanne because I felt sad I missed that world. So I made the decision not to go to these concerts, which I do regret. But how do you feel going between because it's so different.
Yolanda Bruno:
I just want to say how profoundly beautiful that is. That obviously indicates just how meaningful that journey was for you playing on gut strings. Your question was how do you go between these two worlds? Yeah, they really are two different worlds. I mean, I first picked up a baroque violin in 2018 and I thought, okay, it's good to tell the story of how that happened. I came back to Canada and I was looking for a job because I'd been in Europe for five years and I didn't really know what direction to take exactly. And I stumbled upon this video of Tafelmusik music playing, and they're playing, it was part of their Galileo project. You can look it up on YouTube. They're standing up and it's so dynamic. They're playing Vivaldi, they're playing from memory, they're looking at each other, they're moving around the stage. And I was completely captivated and said, how do I get into that group? I want to play with those people. And so I literally, I wrote to a friend who I knew played baroque violin, and I said, how do I get, where do I start? I said, I need lessons with people. And he's the one who gave me Jeanne's email address and also Julia Wedman's email address. And I reached out to them and asked them for lessons. And I thought, this can't be so hard, you just take a violin and put gut strings on it.
No idea what I was getting myself into. It's like a completely different language. It's like, I dunno, I can't compare it to American English and British English. It is more different than that. I mean, it's just wildly different from the techniques to the way you're using your bow, how it's physically set up, the relationship with the string, how temperamental it is. All of these stylistic things like both, but also improvisation. There was a whole world I knew nothing about and it was so deeply humbling. I mean, as someone who has a pretty okay facility on my instrument and feel quite confident with intonation and with just getting around the instrument physically, it was like being a beginner again. And every time I put the baroque violin away for a while and I pick it up again, it's like starting. It does feel like, okay, there's a learning curve again.
It is so much more intricate and it requires a lot more of you. It doesn't just speak right away, a modern violin. And so that was my first introduction into learning how to play baroque violin. And going between those two worlds is quite extraordinary. It's like the one world, the violin, modern violin world feels to me like the modern world. It's like it's efficient, it's powerful, it's somehow more corporate. It's well set up and then this baroque violin is working with the earth. It's like getting your hands dirty in the garden and you're really connected with nature and it takes you back to a different time where we lived a little bit more simply and slowly and you need more patience. And I love going between those two worlds. Sometimes you're just like, I need immediate results and I just want efficiency. And then the modern violin's there for that. And then other times I want the craft of learning and playing an instrument, and that's the baroque violin offers that for me.
Leah Roseman:
Beautiful. Well, maybe we could play a clip of the Leclair duo with Julia. (Music: clip of Yolanda Bruno, Julia Wedman - Jean-Marie Leclair Sonata for Two Violins in D Major, Op. 3, No. 3, ii. Allegro from Dear Jeanne album)
You had lessons with her as well at a certain point. Do you have any sort of main thing from those lessons or the way she teaches?
Yolanda Bruno:
Oh, Julia's a very holistic person and artist. And I would come in for a lesson and I would kind of get ready to take the instrument out and she'd say, let's sit down and have a cup of tea. And so we would speak for 30 minutes. Time would just go by or for an hour and she would just talk to me about music or she would talk to me about some art exhibition that she had recently gone to, just someone who's really alive in music and in art and the full expression of what it means to being a human being. And so I would learn so much from her and still do, just from listening to how she talks about everything from body language and playing and affect. And she studied actors facial expressions and how they internalize certain emotions quickly, how they come into joy in the body, how they come into sadness and grief, and how she learned how to incorporate some of those aspects into performance.
When she would talk about, for example, the Bach Chaconne. She's done quite a big deep dive into all of Bach's solo music for violin. And she'll look at how he has a piece that's so joyful and then suddenly there's a sad passage and it kind of comes out of nowhere. And it's like it's brief, but it's there and it really takes you by surprise. It's now in a minor key and why are we here? And she says to me in one of my lessons, she says, have you ever been so in love that it hurts? And she's like, that's that expression for her. I'm like, how do you capture that in the music? And then she'll talk about the opposite, about being in an terrible, terrible grief. But still there's this little part of you that sees hope. And it's kind of like what Leonard Cohen said. He said, there's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets through that for her is you never really truly believe in your grief that it's only grief. There has to be a way out. And that's Bach. And some of these, the D minor, the D minor partita, she says is, he kind of comes out of grief for a moment and you see the sun just emerging through the specks here. So she'll talk about that for an hour and then we'll get into the music. So just a deeply profound artist, a spiritual person, one of the best violinists and musicians I've ever come across. I'm so grateful to have been able to record those duos with her and to be able to just have her in my life as an artist and musician.
Leah Roseman:
Hi, just a really quick break from the episode. I wanted to let you know about some other episodes I’ve linked directly to this one, which I think may interest you, with Michael Bridge, Katherine Dowling, Jeeyoon Kim, Clay Zeller-Townson, Jean Rohe.In the show notes you’ll also find a link to sign up for my newsletter, where you’ll get exclusive information about upcoming guests, a link for my Ko-fi page to support this project directly, where you can buy me one coffee, or every month, and my podcast merchandise store with a design commissioned from artist Steffi Kelly. You can also review this podcast, share it with your friends, and follow on your podcast app, YouTube, and social media. All this helps spread the word! Thanks. Now back to my conversation with Yolanda.
I've played many of those Leclair duos with my husband who's a violinist, for fun. But a lot of people don't realize how much music Leclair wrote. And like I said, just these violin sonatas with Continuo, there's over 40 and they're all so different, and he's such an interesting composer that I think isn't played enough. So just a pitch. And I know that the Jeanne Lamon really loved French Baroque music.
Yolanda Bruno:
She loved French Baroque music and she introduced me to Leclair because just as you said, she told me something similar, that there's a vast body of music to explore and I had no idea. And so we recorded one of these duets, I think there are six of them, but there are tons of other pieces. The sonatas you mentioned. I think he was quite instrumental in developing this French style of the time. He was the person that was influencing the violin technique of the time. And you're right, that it is just not kind of part of the normal violin repertoire right now. It's not played as much and it's great music. And I love that you and your husband play some of the duets together
Leah Roseman:
For sure. Oh yeah. People will have heard my episode with Ruckus artistic director, Clay Zeller-Townson, and we talked a little bit about how they are commissioning new music and bringing the contemporary world and the baroque world closer together, which Tafelmusik also does. So on this album, you had a beautiful commission from Beth Silver, who's also the cellist in the Ladom Ensemble, which is featured in my episode with Michael. So there was a few connections there, and I didn't know that Jeanne Lamon's background was. So they were Sephardic Jews from the Netherlands?
Yolanda Bruno:
That's correct. So her father was, his family were in the diamond cutting industry and had been for, I think a long time, his family's background was in diamond cutting, and the family expected him to pursue that as a profession, and he was just not having it. And in 1939, him and his wife decided they would take a year away from the business and go to the States, and then the war broke out and the second World war, and he could see more clearly from the States what was happening to the Jewish population in Europe. And he urged his family to leave and many, but many didn't, and they lost a large number of their family, the Holocaust. And I didn't know this about Jeanne's heritage about her background. And so I reached out, I thought, okay, I'd love a piece on this album that can honor Dutch Jewish heritage and my mother's side of the family are Dutch.
And it felt kind of special to have that connection. And I reached out to Beth Silver, who is really someone who's diving deep into Klezmer music and into her own cultural background through music and improvisation and understanding stylistically what that means on a string instrument. And she did herself some research with someone at York University and they looked into this piece called Kamti Lehalel, and it comes from a Seder poem from the 17th century in Holland, and the work describes the world's creation and its seventh day, the Sabbath and the laws of the days of rest of the day of rest. And that was the inspiration behind the new commission that Beth wrote for me, Violeta, where she takes this original work and she incorporates it into something more personal for her. It's a beautiful composition and I love that it is a work that's old from the 17th century, and I love that it's being played on a barque violin, but it's by a living composer. It just, it's very profound. It's probably the most spiritual work on the album for myself.
Leah Roseman:
And am I right that the family was Sephardic, they'd come out of Spain in the Inquisition?
Yolanda Bruno:
That I'm not sure.
Leah Roseman:
That,
Yolanda Bruno:
I don't know. I
Leah Roseman:
Thought I'd read that. Okay, maybe I'm wrong because I know the Dutch Jewish community was both sides of that. One of my daughters has lived in the Netherlands for many years, and I feel very close to that country and had actually many Dutch artists on this podcast. And I study Dutch. It's sort of my, yeah, it's a part of my life that I've learned a lot about the history and yeah, I didn't know that you were part Dutch.
Yolanda Bruno:
Yeah, my mother's side are Dutch and my siblings and I and my mom all have a Dutch passport thanks to my mom's side, which is wonderful. It's always kind of made the possibility of working and living in Europe a reality for us, which is in a time where things are changing a lot. It's just nice to have that.
Leah Roseman:
Your sister is a cellist, and I remember both of you growing up in Ottawa and hearing you in Kiwanis Festival and other things. So it's wonderful to see both of your developments and your mom's a violinist, so I assume you played music together growing up?
Yolanda Bruno:
We did. We certainly did. Carmen plays cello. She lives in Quebec City, works with the Quebec Symphony Orchestra, and my mom is a violin teacher and was my first teacher. Mom actually went into labor with me playing a concert. So music has really been in my brain and in my surroundings since early childhood, and it was definitely a very vibrant and musical home. I also have a younger brother who also for many years played violin, viola and piano. So other than my father who's completely non-musical and just a big support and a loving family member, there was a lot of music in the household, which was great.
Leah Roseman:
That's really great. Now I thought it'd be wonderful to also talk about your first album, the Wild Swans from 2019. Very different. And so it, it's just such an accomplishment, this album and very bold and more and more people are putting out albums by all women composers, but it was less so in 2019. And you were young at the time, it was your first album.
Yolanda Bruno:
Yeah, so this is The Wild Swans. This was a big undertaking as well. It was the time where I was kind of new to, I had just come back to Canada, we recorded that album in 2018. I was freelancing. I didn't have access to the same kind of resources that I have now. And so it was a lot to produce an album of that kind. And that was with my wonderful colleague, Isabelle David, who's playing on piano. That was a very special joint project and we worked on that for probably 18 months. I think that as an artist, I'm, I'm trying to always work out this balance of what your values are as a human being and then how you bring those into the work that you do. And I cannot separate those things. They have to coexist and women's rights and gender equity is so important to me, and it would take me too long and would be too sad to describe to you the times in my early development where being a woman has been a disadvantage or where I've experienced sexism or I have been spoken down to because I'm described as a little girl.And masterclasses is just terrible, terrible behavior from some professors and certain educational environments. And all of that has shaped me into the young person and young adult that I am today. And what kind of world do I want my little girl to be raised in? What kind of world do I want my students to be raised in? The people that I teach at the Glenn Gould School, for example, and I look at the programming of the major symphony orchestras, and it's all the same demographic of people that we're playing. It's just the same older white European composers and there's so much fantastic music, but there is from that time, but there's also so much great new music by people from all over the world, men and women. And women are still so hugely underrepresented. So it's so funny because of course, when you picked up this album and you looked at all these names like Lili Boulanger Elena Kats-Chernin, Alexina Louie, Elena Langer, Kelly-Marie Murphy, you're like, oh, these are all women composers.That's what this album is about. It's all women. But if I picked up another album and I saw Bach Vivaldi, Jean-Marie Leclair, I wouldn't be like, oh, this is an album about all men composers. I would be like, what is the story? And so for us, of course, it was deliberate to have all these women, but the real love of the album was music steeped in storytelling. All of these composers' works are hugely imaginative. They pushed the extremes of both of our instruments, violin and piano. They incorporate some extended techniques. They use languages that were, for example, Kala Ramnath Indian classical violinist. She used extended techniques, and it's another language for us to incorporate into that storytelling of the album. It really pushed us and we went far, and then we recorded Hildegard von Bingen, which is like, is that 11th century? It's very, very old music as well. And it was a really special project. And of course, like you said, it is an album of all women composers and we do really, really want to promote women composers.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I just wanted to interject that my interview with Kala Ramnath last year was one of my all time most listened to episodes and people should check it out. She's so special.
Yolanda Bruno:
I will check it out. She is very special. That's wonderful. You interviewed her.
Leah Roseman:
I was familiar with many of the composers on this album, but not Auerbach, who wrote these 24 preludes for violin and piano. They're just fantastic.
Yolanda Bruno:
That's an example of one of the works that really pushes the extreme of the instrument, both piano and violin. When we were researching Lera Auerbach, she is a profound artist. She's written poetry, she's a painter. She defected from Russia to the United States when she was, I think 17 or 18. She's just a really quite an astonishing person. And there was one interview Isabelle and I listened to where she was asked if you could describe yourself in in one word, what would it be? And she thought for a second, and she said, fearless. And when we were recording her Preludes we're like, that's what you have to be to really convey this kind of music and to get it out. It's fearless music and what a journey it was. Learning those pieces. We only recorded a few of them. I can't remember, maybe six of her preludes, but the 24 are all astonishing.(Music: clip Lera Auerbach - 24 Preludes for Violin and Piano, op. 46: No. 9 in E Major (Allegro)
Leah Roseman:
Now, the Swan Parapraxis by Ottawa based composer Kelly-Marie Murphy is with your sister Carmen.
Yolanda Bruno:
Yes.
Leah Roseman:
And I assume the title of the album came a little bit out of that?
Yolanda Bruno:
Actually, The Wild Swans is from Hans Christian Anderson.It's from a fairytale, but Kelly-Marie Murphy knew that she knew that we were going to call the album The Wild Swans and that we had this whole inspiration from Hans Christian Anderson. And so she somehow just went with the Swan research and then she found kind of a dark story, which is the story I think that the piece is about. I think it's an Irish folk tale, and it's a man who's out hunting at dawn, and he sees what he thinks is a swan and he shoots it, and it turns out to be his fiance. He accidentally kills his fiance. It's a tragic story. I'm not sure why it's been incorporated into folktale. It must have some connection to another story. And she wrote this piece and Carmen and I commissioned it together, my sister Carmen on cello. And it's very interesting. Kelly is such a great composer, and she goes deep and she will pick up,she goes and looks underneath the rock and sees what's there. And what I really like about Kelly is that she, I don't know how to say this the most eloquently, but she deals with darkness. She deals with the subject of grief and the places where we're afraid to go. That's how I would describe her as a composer. She'll look in the areas that other people would be too scared to look, and she deals with those emotions. And that's what I feel we got from the Swan Parapraxis, and I really appreciate what she wrote for us. It's quite special.(clip from (51:38) Kelly Marie-Murphy The Swan Parapraxis with clip Kelly-Marie Murphy - The Swan Parapraxis, Carmen Bruno cello The Wild Swans album)
Leah Roseman:
I went to a concert of all of her chamber music this past summer at Ottawa Chamberfest. It was like her 60th birthday celebration. And actually the Canadian pianist, Katherine Dowling was playing there and she was on this podcast last year and I discussed with Katherine the idea of beauty that's not pretty.
Yolanda Bruno:
Katherine is a very, very good friend of mine and a big inspiration to me. So I love that you just brought up Katherine, and you're absolutely right. Katherine's another artist who is looking at those other parts of the human experience that some of us are really afraid to deal with and finding ways to bring that out in her storytelling, in her musical programming, in her way of speaking to audiences. And it's so courageous and it's done incredibly poetically and it's very profound. It's very personal. I really appreciate what she offers as an artist. Would you like to talk about Music for Your Blues?
Leah Roseman:
Yes. I was just going to mention that. Yes, because we were just talking about emotions and I did want to bring up Music for Your Blues, which is ongoing and does it involve other people or just yourself?
Yolanda Bruno:
Music for Your Blues is myself, but it has involved other people as well. So Music For Your Blues is a volunteer online project, musical project that I founded in 2021 in the middle of the pandemic. And essentially what it is is in the winter months, specifically January where we know there's the coined expression, January Blues, when depression hits hardest, it's like the lowest time of the year, not a lot of sunlight in this part of the world. It's very cold outside. It's after the holidays, all your money has been spent. There's not much to look forward to until spring, which is a long time from now. So I launched this project where I offered 30 minute free musical performances over Zoom and anybody can sign up anywhere in the world. So it goes online onto an online calendar, and you just select, and then I show up on a screen just like this, and I play 20 minutes of music and I share a little bit of poetry and storytelling, and we have a very personal one-on-one or one and maybe two people, musical performance.
And that grew out of the pandemic, and that has got to be one of the most rewarding ways I've ever shared music. Just we talk about the research and the connection music can make between people and audiences and the effects on the brain, but that level of intimacy and sharing it in that way really was the first time I really saw in real time just how much the impact of music and connection can benefit our lives. So I have done it primarily alone. I have also hired other artists to do it as well, and it runs every winter and it's usually done over a period of two weeks, and there are different dates and people sign up for them. And then I will share music and poetry by Maya Angelou, maybe Margaret Atwood. We'll talk a little bit sometimes about a philosophy. We'll bring in Carl Sagan, the American astronomer and tie that to music and conversation and have a really intimate 30 minutes together through music and story.
Leah Roseman:
So you're a reader?
Yolanda Bruno:
I am a reader, yes. Just as you're asking that, I'm like right now, I haven't picked up a book that's not a baby book for maybe a few weeks. But yes, I am a reader. I love sitting with poetry because it's like it's short and it is high impact. And then reflecting just when I have the time and space, I actually like to write down a poem slowly by hand and just kind of take it in. I think the amazing thing about poetry is that usually it's not very long and that it's dealing with something very specific, a human emotion or experience or something that you've probably overlooked and it can really have a high impact very quickly.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I've got back into reading poetry I did as a teenager and that I hadn't, and recently I have more someone who's important in my life has been writing a lot of poetry and kind of got me more interested in that. Another person I interviewed, Jeeyoon Kim, such a special pianist and the way she presents concerts with poetry and visual images and her books. It's all integrated. It's really wonderful. So many, yeah, I'll send you a book, of poetry I've been reading. I've just recently, I never thought I'd do this, but I've gotten into being like an e-reader. I got a Kobo, not Kindle owned by Amazon.
Yolanda Bruno:
Good for you.
Leah Roseman:
And what I love is I can just really use my public library and have so many different books on it. So just switching between genres and if I'm, yeah, it's such a wonderful gift to be able to do that. Now, in terms of the Music for Your Blues, I was just thinking about memorable performances. One of my very first paid, I think it might've been my first paid gig when I was a teenager at McGill. First year someone hired, they wanted a string quartet for a birthday party. And so we got some kind of gig book from somebody we were going to sight read and we show up and it was a tiny little apartment and it was this man and his adult children and there were maybe four people, and it was really a private concert for him. It wasn't like an event or a reception as we thought. So they were just right there and he wanted to record it. He had a little tape recorder. So it was a lesson and always being prepared, I must say. And we did our best and we poured our heart into it, but we weren't prepared as we should have been for that type of concert. But it was so memorable.
Yolanda Bruno:
I bet. When you say prepared, do you mean because it was a little bit too intimate like that you were expected to speak more than you expected or
Leah Roseman:
We didn't have a proper program. We had a gig book. I think we really thought it would be cocktails and we'd be background music, right?
Yolanda Bruno:
I see. Well, I mean that was misleading. They hired you in the wrong way because you were prepared for a different gig. What an experience. Yeah, I love house concerts. I mean, a lot of the music that we play was designed for that kind of smaller a hundred people in a room or 50 people in a room environment. And I long for that. I mean, of course it is not a great financial model. I mean, that's why the halls are so big. If you want to pay a lot of musicians, it's expensive. And so you need a lot of butts and seats. You need a big space. But that kind of intimacy of sharing art so close in proximity, being able to speak directly to a public that they can actually really hear the rawness of the sound of the violin so close or any instrument and you're speaking so close, just watching someone play, you sit in an orchestra and see the world's best soloist come in week after week. And I'm sure there are times you're so distracted, you're playing and you're like, wow, I would do anything. I'm just like meters away from Yo-Yo ma or meters away from Hillary Hahn and how did she do that? And it's just astonishing to witness something like that in close proximity, different from sitting at the back of the hall. So I love that intimacy of home concerts for that reason. Just the watching and it's exciting.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. It's interesting you mentioned the intimacy of the stage that way. I don't think the audience maybe realizes our experience, how it can be
Yolanda Bruno:
Being so close. You're really drawn in the level of the detail that you hear when you're that close. When you hear certain people breathing, you can feel if they're anxious, you can really see it in their body language just there like meters away from you. It's so exhilarating that human experience through live performance.
Leah Roseman:
I know you've done quite a bit of outreach in different kind of communities and you've played in a high security penitentiary as well.
Yolanda Bruno:
Yes. That was through a foundation called Looking at the Stars. And their mission was specifically to bring music into penitentiaries. And we went to a high and medium security penitentiary in Kingston, Ontario, and we played performances for inmates. And that was a very, very different and very profound experience in itself. You see in a room like that, your own privilege and how lucky you are to been born into a stable, loving family and how your own life could have been completely different had you just a few circumstances been different. And you also see, when you see a group of individuals who are always treated in a certain way, like always treated like criminals and always treated as dangerous citizens of society. And what that will do to you psychologically when you're always treated like you're worthless or you're dangerous.
I cannot speak to arguing against how the system is set up. I am not well educated enough. But you see the ability that what it means when you offer something like music and you speak to somebody with human dignity and with respect and with kindness and love and the sound in your voice, you see the immediate impact of that, how that can shape another person and their experience in the world. And you can see it in the day-to-day life of how we interact with our friends or our children, or a stranger on the street who's having a hard time. But when you're dealing with individuals who have suffered a lot in their lives and you offer that kind of kindness and generosity through music, you see it more profoundly in real time, the impact of how we communicate with one another and how that can shape different people's experiences in life.
Leah Roseman:
Last year I had Jean Rohe on the podcast. She's an incredible songwriter, and she said some of the most meaningful work she's done has been songwriting workshops in penitentiaries.
Yolanda Bruno:
Wow. Wow. Fantastic. I can only imagine.
Leah Roseman:
And then do you know the Canadian pianist, Heather Taves?
Yolanda Bruno:
I recognize the name. Tell me about Heather.
Leah Roseman:
Well, she has this Beethoven blog, so you might've heard her about a Beethoven Journey. Anyway, she was on the podcast and she's also a writer, and we were talking about one of her writing mentors, the Kingston writer, Diane Schoemperlen. So I always go down these rabbit hole. So when I was researching Heather, I was like, who is this well-known Canadian author I didn't know about? And then I read this incredible memoir of hers, This is Not My Life by Diane. It's about how she fell in love with this murderer in penitentiary and that relationship, and a lot about the system and the psychology of it. It's a very interesting and moving and super well-written memoir. So I recommend that book.
Yolanda Bruno:
I'll look that up. Yeah, there are people living completely different lives than we are and have had very different lived experiences, and they have grown up just kilometers away from us. And that's, I think what you see when you go into a penitentiary is just, yeah, society is complex and has many different shades. And I find in our world, and maybe you would agree that we can live in a little bit of a silo sometimes, like our little classical music, our little music bubble, our arts bubble. And we are very privileged. And of course there are challenges to some of the things we do, but we are very, very lucky and very privileged and I trying to find ways to get out of just the small environment that I live in and learn about other people's lived experiences and to have a deeper, more profound understanding of the human experience and see what ways we can help each other and shape each other's lives for the better.
Leah Roseman:
I'm curious, you were living, I believe, in the Netherlands and England for a while when you were studying.
Yolanda Bruno:
I lived in London for five years. I just spent a few months in Amsterdam, but I would've loved to have lived in Holland. But I lived in England for five years, and that was a real big experience for me as a young person. I moved there when I was 20 years old or 21 and very informative years of my life and a different culture, same language, but very different culture, different way of living, different social behaviors, different ways of looking at other populations. Like in Canada, we are such a diverse community of people who come from all over the world. The English have a different relationship with people that come from different places. We're really seeing that right now prominently in the news with everything happening in the world. So that was a very interesting experience for me to live there for five years.
Leah Roseman:
And I was just wondering if maybe you want to address a little bit the way you learn music. Obviously you're a fantastic violinist, but you have a lot to process. You're in the Toronto Symphony and you have all these other projects. So do you have a routine or a way of working?
Yolanda Bruno:
Oh, such a good question. Do I have a routine? Okay. No, I don't have a real, real routine. I do have certain things that I love and that I try to get the balance of every year. I love my orchestra work, but I also love playing chamber music. I love teaching. I love doing outreach work like Music for Your Blues or performing for different communities like in a jail, for example, penitentiary. And I also like working with different artists and living composers and meeting people from different fields and learning from them. So my hope is that in every 12 month period that I've been able to do a number of those types of projects, that that variety is very rewarding. And working, for example, on modern violin, but also working during the year a little bit on baroque violin as well. And all of that informs my work part of routine for Michael, my partner and I is also, this might change now with a little baby girl, but we typically take the month of August off from working.
So we'll work for 11 months in the year, but then we financially plan to be off in August, and that is our month to really rest. Because when you go go for too long, you burn out and the creative flame starts to fizzle. You need time. You need unstructured time and unstructured time in a day. But also to see many days in a row where the calendar is empty, where you can learn new things and you can explore and you can dive deep into something or you can just rest and daydream, which is so good for the brain. I remember reading the Roman philosopher stoic, Seneca said, if there are two things that you do every single day, they are walk and read. And that's what August is usually dedicated to.
Leah Roseman:
Wonderful. Well, that is a great place to wrap up unless there's something we didn't talk about that you'd really like to talk about.
Yolanda Bruno:
I feel we had a great conversation today. Thank you so much for having me on the podcast.
Leah Roseman:
Thanks. Being here, I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please share this with your friends and check out episodes you may have missed at LeahRoseman.com. If you could buy me a coffee to support this series, that would be wonderful. I'm an independent podcaster and I really do need the help of my listeners. Keep in mind, I've also linked directly several episodes you'll find interesting in the show notes of this one. All the links are in the show notes. The podcast theme music was written by Nick Kold. Have a wonderful week.
