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Days before Friday’s concert by Ottawa’s Thirteen Strings, its conductor Kevin Mallon, who is also a violinist and composer, is putting the finishing touches on an original composition he will debut.

The concert will offer music for reflection on Good Friday, including an Easter Cantata by Bach. But Mallon’s contribution is entitled Holi, and it’s inspired by the Hindu festival of the same name, which celebrates Spring and which fell this year on March 25.

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Mallon says he’s trying to be innovative, a little off-beat, and expansive in his outreach to listeners. “I’m going to invite the Hindu community,” he says.

This is not Mallon’s first cross-cultural gesture with Thirteen Strings but it will be among his last, as he is stepping down at the end of the season from the helm of the chamber orchestra. Mallon has wielded the baton in front of Thirteen Strings for the last decade and a half of its 48-year history.

“I’ve enjoyed it and we’ve done incredibly good work together,” says Mallon.

“I’m going to leave with a warm feeling about it. I believe that these sorts of positions have a cycle, a life cycle… I’ve been there a long time (and) it’s just time to move on.”

Mallon, 61, was raised in Northern Ireland but he now lives in Toronto, having previously lived in Ottawa. He moved to Canada in 1993, after he accepted positions to teach at the University of Toronto and perform with the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra.

As a freelance conductor, he has led not only Thirteen Strings, but also the Aradia Ensemble, which he formed in Toronto, and the Toronto Chamber Orchestra, among others. His musical exploits have also involved some globetrotting, including work for the Opera 2005 project in Cork, Ireland.

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Julian Armour, the principal cellist of Thirteen Strings, recalls that when Mallon was hired, he received unanimous support from the orchestra’s musicians.

In the DNA of Thirteen Strings is baroque music, and Armour calls Mallon “one of the world’s great authorities on baroque performance.”

Mallon says he has conducted about 70 Thirteen Strings concerts. He has led the ensemble through works large and small, including the masterpieces the Bach Passions, Handel’s Messiah and the Bach Mass in B Minor.

Mallon also helped the orchestra make its 2015 recording debut on the esteemed Naxos label.

The Thirteen Strings album focused on symphonies by Franz Ignaz Beck, a German composer of the 1700s. At earlymusicreview.com, reviewer Ian Graham-Jones wrote of the recording: “Kevin Mallon produces some neat, stylish playing from his Canadian chamber band Thirteen Strings. A good, honest performance of some interesting music.”

Armour says that Mallon loves music from all eras, and that “you always feel he is enjoying immensely whatever piece he is conducting.

“Kevin has done so much for the group, and he has prepared the way for a wonderful future,” Armour says.

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Mallon says he’s proud that six or seven years ago, he was able to start an ongoing composition competition for University of Ottawa music students that would see Thirteen Strings read their works.

“That was producing five new works a year,” Mallon says. “We’re trying to have as much Canadian content as possible.”

Before this Friday’s musical outreach to the Hindu community, Mallon has shown his sympathies for other cross-cultural projects.

In 2016 and 2017, an initiative supported by the Canada Council for the Arts subsidized hundreds of Syrian refugees who attended concerts by Thirteen Strings. Noting that influx of Syrians in his audience, Mallon commissioned new music that featured singing in Farsi and Arabic.

More recently, Mallon hosted two Ukrainians, displaced by the war with Russia, in a spare room at his home in Toronto for two years.

After his tenure leading Thirteen Strings ends with a swan-song concert in early June, Mallon says he wants to do more composing, more writing and more conducting abroad.

He is to tour Europe this fall and next year, conducting productions of the operas La bohème and Carmen, he says.

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“I’ve just got to jump in and conduct,” Mallon says of these concerts. They are a sequel to a run that Mallon did in 2009 as the touring conductor for the Odesa Opera Theatre in Ukraine, which he took to the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and Spain.

“I don’t know if it’s ever going to make my name internationally. I look at them as adventures, really,” he says. “I need new adventures.”

Thirteen Strings

Reflection — Music for Good Friday
When and where: March 29 at 7:30 p.m. at Carleton Dominion-Chalmers Centre
Tickets: from $10 to $45 at thirteenstrings.ca

phum@postmedia.com

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