Concert at Hazzards Corners

October 6, 2019

churchSometimes a concert is as much about the venue and the audience as it is about the music. I watched a documentary last night about Woodstock and the story focused more on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm and the hippie kid pilgrims than it did on Hendrix and Sly and the Family Stone.

The other night my spouse, a friend of ours, and I attended a classical guitar concert in the United Church at Hazzards Corners, Madoc Township, Ontario. The old white wooden church, which opened as a Methodist church in 1857, sits in a field next to a lonely old pioneer cemetery, with a swamp for a neighbour across the Queensborough Road. It has no plumbing. When you walk in you see the entrance is flanked by two wood stoves. (One was lit the other night to take the chill out of the air). The stovepipes go up and then bend 90 degrees and run along the ceiling, hung at intervals with wire, all along the aisles above the pews and past the pulpit, to heat the church with wood smoke in winter. The church these days hosts one service, at Christmas.

The Quinte Society for Chamber Music chose this venue for a classical guitar concert. I am pretty sure that this is one of the more exotic events that has taken place in the Hazzards Corners church; I’ve never before attended a classical guitar concert anywhere, and I can safely say that the other audience members, who looked the part of a kind-hearted, older, rural crowd, had not either. Let’s put it this way: the only bearded hipsters were the two 20-something musicians at the front. They are both Canadian. One lives in Amsterdam.

scene from church

View from the front porch of the church at Hazzards Corners

The musicians, Nathan Bredeson and Michael Ibsen, graciously and patiently explained the provenance of each song before they played it. They chose a selection exclusively of works written by living Canadian composers. From the sounds of it there’s a flourishing Canadian classical guitar scene with workshops and collaborative composition gatherings from Ottawa to Hamilton to Edmonton and beyond. The church’s acoustics are sublime.

Sometimes when I am trying to fall asleep I think of quiet places. The church at Hazzards Corners is one of the quietest. Perhaps this is why it sounds so special when it fills with the carefully selected notes summoned from a pair of acoustic guitars on a cloudy Friday night.