I have shared with you much of what is involved in planning a season for the Valley Concert Society. For most of the society’s history, George Zukerman played an enormous role in this process.
George wrote an autobiography in his later years. After he died, friends and colleagues worked to get it published. It is now available in major outlets under the title Have Bassoon, Will Travel. It is the account of a life that was even more remarkable than I had imagined.
Told in his imitable style, George’s life was groundbreaking in more ways than one. When his early career as an orchestral bassoonist came to a sudden end, George re-invented himself as a solo bassoonist (he may have been the first to create such a career) and an impresario.
As the latter, he brought classical music to community music societies across the nation. In fact, he was responsible for creating most of those societies. He saw a need (communities that lacked musical entertainment), created a need (facilitated the creation of societies who then needed performers), and then filled the need (provided those performers). A truly creative make-work project for himself.
George stepped in during the early days of the Valley Concert Society in its time of need. Begun at the encouragement of the Vancouver Symphony, and dedicated to performances by the symphony, the society was unable to generate enough audience and funds to support such a costly project past its first season. In its third year, the Valley Concert Society began presenting smaller musical ensembles, exactly the thing that George had been providing to communities across the county for a couple of decades.
When I looked through the archives of our society, I found contract after contract with an agency called Overture Concerts. It turns out that was George. He would arrange tours for performing groups consisting of numerous stops in his network of societies around the province and the country. The last such tour he undertook and that we were a part of involved the Canadian Guitar Quartet in 2017.
George himself was the performer at times. The Cassenti Players brought a concert here in 1988, a group I had never heard of. From his book, I learned that it was a wind ensemble that he had put together with himself included. Then there was the time he performed here with Daniel Bolshoy in 2009. Whoever heard of a concert with just a bassoon and a classical guitar? Trust George to make that happen.
George had incredible connections. He travelled to perform in Russia as a bassoon soloist. While there he made contacts that resulted in performances here in Abbotsford with the Shostakovich Quartet and the Little Eagles of Siberia.
George brought so many performers here that he made a proposal in the 1990’s to strike an agreement to plan the entire season of the Valley Concert Society. I read the minutes of the meeting in which the board firmly decided to maintain control and voted against that idea. Nevertheless, he still provided half our season in 2014-15 when he brought us Les Violons du Roy, QuintEssence, and Turning Point Ensemble. I remember that as being one of our outstanding seasons.
George’s last appearance in Abbotsford was in April of 2022 when, less than a year before he died at age 95, he narrated the program that he had assembled entitled Young Beethoven. He had wanted to celebrate the 250thAnniversary of Beethoven’s birth in 2020 with two concerts. One was this program of chamber music from early in Beethoven’s life. The other was going to be an ambitious large program of symphonies and concertos celebrating his mature years. That program never saw the light of day. It was just too expensive for organizations like ours.
George travelled to Kelowna in November of 2021 with the musicians to perform Young Beethoven there. On his way home their car was stopped in Hope and could not get home for three days because of the disastrous flooding. The 94-year-old was unfazed. He recounts this story and many, many others in his book.
It is filled with humorous anecdotes, told the way only George could spin them. He spent a night in jail in Nelson, BC, after a performance; he was paid with a wheel of cheese for a performance in the Azores; he walked down the street looking for a piano in a town pub in Australia when the concert hall did not have one.
This fascinating, humorous, and sometimes head-shaking account of a truly remarkable life and of a man who did so much to bring outstanding classical music to BC and the rest of Canada would make a great Christmas present for someone who loves music.
We don’t have George to help us anymore, but we are grateful for his legacy and are now endeavouring to fill that gap as best we can.
John Wiebe - President
The Valley Concert Society