Q the End v.2.0

When the CBC does something right it ranks with the best broadcasters in the world. When it does something wrong my, my does it screw up sensationally. Not long ago the host of Q, whose name escapes me, was invited to vacate his chair at CBC Radio. He did and Shad a rapper with no previous broadcasting experience got the gig. I wished him luck, but cautioned that the Hogtown culturati would be listening. It was, but too few ordinary folks - myself among them - were not and Shad just got his marching orders accompanied by some corporate claptrap about the guy from London, Ont. staying in the "CBC family." Uh, huh.  Tom Power, a musician and broadcaster from Newfoundland is now in the Q hot seat. I wish him well, but like the parrot in the Monty Python sketch, the Q bird is dead.

I said as much way back in November, 2014. Q and its ex-host were and are inextricably linked. I suggested then, and I haven't changed my mind, that the music and cultural affairs program needed a complete retooling: a new name, a new host, new producers, writers, the whole nine yards. Go on hiatus. Wait till the air has cleared once and for all. Then come back all clean and lemon-fresh and start building an audience again. Uphill, sure, but much better than this latest 'do. By the time another heatwave is upon us next year it's better than 50-50 that Q will have gone to that great broadcast archive in the sky.  

But down here there'll still be a Q. That would be the Mighty Q, Q-107, where every Sunday, usually without fail, I get my much needed dose of '60s rock 'n' roll with Psychedelic Sunday until about 7:00pm, when I flip the dial to Jazz FM and Glen Woodcock's excellent Big Band show.  

Fireworks at Koerner Hall

I once shared an apartment with a guy whose brother was and is a big deal symphony conductor. Unsurprisingly, classical music and opera were frequently on the turntable in those days. I'd come home from work and the voices of Mirella Freni or Renata Scotto filled the second floor where we lived. Other days Boerling or Pavarotti could be heard, usually at full volume on my friend's record player - remember those? - that had seen much better days. More often than not I'd say something about "an obese tenor trying to bust a gut." Charming. Then I'd turn on the radio that was always tuned to CHUM-FM, the rock station of the day, and dj Benji Karsh, who sounded so coolly laid back I was in awe. (Reiner Schwarz also worked for CHUM, and between radio gigs years ago he had a job teaching those of us on pogey how we should look for a job. He and I also shared a girlfriend - at different times - but I digress.)

Fast forward about forty years. I'm now a fully paid up member of the opera and classical music lovers' union. I listen to Mahler and Bruckner and Mozart in the gym. I listen to Verdi and Puccini and Donizetti on the subway, in the supermarket, pretty much anywhere. Live opera broadcasts from the Metropolitan Opera in New York and screened here in Hogtown at Cineplex are, I maintain in defiance of common sense, the greatest audiovisual advance since the advent of talkies. And Koerner Hall, elegantly if oddly inserted between the Royal Conservatory of Music and Varsity Stadium to create a quirky juxtaposition of frocks and jocks, is the best addition to the city's cultural landscape in decades.

I'm getting there late, I know, but I've been raving about the space ever since my first concert at KH Thursday night. I've heard Tafelmusik before at their usual home of Trinity-St. Paul's, but the seats were bum-numbing, the elbow room scanty, the interior gloomy (it's a Methodist church - whaddaya want?), and the sound underwhelming. None of that applies at KH. The interior was bright, all honey coloured wood; the elbow room positively capacious; and the seats more comfortable than those of any other concert hall I've graced with my admittedly wide and getting wider backside. And the sound was superb. But more than that KH was intimate; not claustrophobic like some venues; nor was it masquerading as a large hall built on architectural short rations. Its scale, in other words, was human and personal.

On the program at KH on Thursday was music from Corelli, Heinichen, Telemann and Vivaldi and Handel's Music for the Royal Fireworks, with British/Brazilian violinist Rodolfo Richter leading what must be the premier Baroque ensemble in the world. To these untrained ears Corelli's Concerto Grosso in D Major and Telemann's Concerto for trumpet and violin in D Major were the highlights, and here and there some patrons gave the musicians a standing O. As important as the hall and the music were the ticket prices - and a kind soul with some money. Three concerts at KH can cost as little as $126. Sweet.