Music: Appreciation

Ken Winters: ‘He always listened again, to everything’

         

ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN

From Saturday's Globe and Mail

“Out of this world.” Ken Winters used that phrase about the last concert he ever heard, in the last review he wrote for this paper, published the day before he died at 81. He didn’t mean it in the usual sense, as a synonym for other words worn down by overuse, such as “wonderful” or “awesome.” He meant it in a visceral, almost literal sense, of something bursting in on him from beyond the ordinary plane of life.

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Ken Winters, live

A brief excerpt from Ken Winter's time as a CBC Radio show host

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In his writing, he was a master of the well-crafted phrase, but in his listening he was a purposely vulnerable man. He was always ready and willing to bare himself to any experience of musical truth.

“He knew what the ecstatic feels like, and he always wanted to get to that, whatever the music was,” says Jon Siddall, a CBC music producer who worked with Winters during his years in the eighties and nineties as host of the CBC Radio program, Mostly Music. When writing a few lines for The Globe and Mail last fall about the kind of classical music that moved him, Winters referred to “a kind of poignant beauty and intensity” that “touches on the very susceptibility that keeps me alive.”

You could see it in his writing, when the assured current of his prose would suddenly have to grapple with the internal storm that shook him when he heard something that left him no room to stand back. And yet he never lost his discriminating ear, which promptly told him when something went awry in a performance that had deeply moved him minutes or seconds before.

“He had a firm sense of his own vulnerability,” says Tom Deacon, a long-time friend and retired record executive, referring also to Winters’s attitude toward his reviews. “He didn’t lay down the law, and he never felt that his was the last word on anything. It was just his opinion. He might be right or wrong; he was going to listen again. He always listened again, to everything.”

He had his particular loves: vocal music, Bach and Stravinsky, Beethoven and Mozart, Elgar and other English composers. He came to music first as a singer, initially as a prize-winning boy soprano in his home town of Dauphin, Man., and later as a baritone, organist and choirmaster. At some point, probably very early, he discovered that he liked to read and talk about music, to try to reflect in words what happens in the wordless realm where music works on us. He respected and treasured facts (he was one of three founding editors of the Encyclopedia of Music in Canada), but personal response lay at the core of his interest, and he was always curious to know how others experienced what he heard.

“Frequently, after he’d written his review for The Globe, he would phone me the next day, especially if we had heard the same concert,” says James Norcop, another friend who met Winters during his time in the sixties as a critic for the Toronto Telegram. “There were always things he wanted to amplify. It wasn’t enough to write about it; he wanted to talk about it, too.”

As a professional talker, on radio, Winters was one of a kind, and prized as such during the prime of his CBC radio career. He savoured consonants and especially vowels the way some people savour wine.

“He didn’t fit the CBC mould,” says Catherine McClelland, another producer who worked on Mostly Music. “He didn’t speak in short sentences, with the subject always at the beginning. He defended his prose, and always wanted to say everything there was to say about the piece. Sometimes, we would just have to stop tape and wait for him to finish his script, in longhand. He was always very kind, very old-school.”

He had another great passion: the Pekingese dogs he bred and showed competitively throughout his adult life. As with music, he was a keen critic of the breed, with very particular ideas about what each aspect of the animal should look like.

“He was my oldest mentor,” says Gary Tucker, a Newfoundland breeder who, at 14, approached Winters in the early sixties to ask if he could get stud service from a prized Pekingese sire in Winters’s kennel. “He had some very sage advice, about who I should breed to, and did I really know what I was getting into, because it was a long, rocky road breeding Pekingese.”

Winters kept and pampered dozens of dogs at the kennel he kept on the 10-acre farm he shared with his wife, Anne Gibson, at Orono, an hour east of Toronto. He put a prefab house on the land several decades ago, built a garden and tended it carefully, and planted many now-mature trees, which he knew and cherished individually, much like his dogs. He loved good food, and books on a huge variety of subjects, and always regarded friendship as an active verb that should be practised often.

In his more than 400 reviews for The Globe and Mail, he was a fair and forthright critic, who could write sharply about things that displeased him (trench coats in operas by Handel and Verdi, for instance), but who never forgot that to compose or perform music is an act of self-exposure, and a gift to everyone who listens. I learned a lot from his generous example.

His last words in The Globe, in a review of the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra and Choir published on Tuesday, were: “There are no others quite like them.” There are no others quite like Ken Winters, and we’re all poorer for that.

A funeral service for Ken Winters will be held next Friday at 2 p.m. at Trinity College Chapel, 6 Hoskin Ave., Toronto.