It’s 8:00 a.m. on a Friday in June, and Brenton Chan is already rearranging the day before it has even begun.
Two artists from the Toronto Symphony Orchestra have just discovered they’re double-booked. A singer-accompanist duo scheduled for one of the morning’s concerts has fallen ill. And somewhere on Brenton’s desk is a list of thirteen concerts happening across Ontario today- thirteen rooms, thirteen audiences, all expecting music to show up on time, one way or another.
This is the part of Concert in Care Ontario that sponsors rarely see: not the concert itself, but the hour before it, when a cellist who’s also holding the whole day together is calling in a favour from a colleague at the Canadian Opera Company, adjusting a setlist on the fly, and somehow still getting ready to play.
By the time Brenton’s actually in the car, cello in the back, alongside two music stands, a spare microphone, extension cords, hand sanitizer, and the kind of first aid kit that suggests he’s learned a few lessons the hard way, he’s still on the phone.
Forty minutes later, he pulls up to Wellbrook Place, a retirement residence in Mississauga, he hasn’t visited since January. There’s construction on the block now; another care building is going up next door. Ontario keeps building places for people to grow older in, and CiCO’s job is to make sure those places still have music.
Inside, it’s a slow Friday morning. The concert’s been moved indoors; it’s too windy for the courtyard, and the team is setting up in the lobby instead for an early Father’s Day program. The director who normally books these visits isn’t in, so Brenton sends a quick note to another colleague, Diane, just so someone on staff knows he’s there. She calls back almost immediately, half-convinced she’d forgotten booking him for something. She hadn’t. He’d just never performed at her tower before.
The set opens, as it almost always does, with Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer.” It’s not a sentimental choice so much as a practical one. Brenton’s thinking is that many residents grew up with player pianos or rag tunes crackling from a record player, and a familiar melody gives him a read on the room before he decides where the rest of the hour will go.
Today, the room responds the way good mornings tend to: people singing along, feet tapping, one gentleman calling out a request for “Hey Jude” that Brenton plays a snippet of on the spot, making a mental note to actually chart it for his duo partner, violinist Jamie Kruspe, before the next visit. Another resident can’t stop praising Jamie’s playing. A woman in the front row is delighted, for reasons that have nothing to do with music, by the pin collection on Brenton’s jacket. By the end of the set, they’ve bonded over stickers and football.
It’s a small, ordinary kind of magic- the sort that happens in a lobby on a Friday morning and might never be mentioned again. Except that an audience member once told Brenton that “Fly Me to the Moon” was her favourite song in his and Jamie’s set. It’s stayed on the list ever since, even though it’s the one song Jamie, a classically trained violinist with no particular love for jazz standards, likes least. He plays it anyway, the way he plays everything put in front of him. Brenton makes sure something like it shows up in every setlist now, not for himself, but because somewhere in the room, it might be someone else’s “Fly Me to the Moon.”
The rest of Brenton’s day doesn’t slow down so much as it changes shape. He heads out to thank a pianist who’d stepped in at the last minute to cover that morning’s ailing singer-accompanist duo, only to turn around halfway there- another home has called, a general manager is finally available to talk about summer programming, and he doesn’t have his laptop with him. So back home he goes, to the part of the job that never makes it into a concert program: the emails, the phone calls, the quiet logistics of keeping thirteen concerts running smoothly in thirteen different rooms, all in a single day.
It would be easy to think of Brenton as the Music Coordinator at CiCO and leave it there. But ask him what the job actually feels like, and the answer has almost nothing to do with performing. “Visitations, whether I am performing, checking in, or surveying a new or past client, is the best part of my job,” he says. “I have grandparents all across the province. I have real bosses to answer to all across the province.” Not a metaphor he reaches for lightly. A reminder, instead, that the structure behind a single concert- the calls, the substitutions, the forty-one-minute drives, the cello case packed with everything that might possibly go wrong, exists entirely so that a room full of people can have one good Friday morning, and never have to know how close it came to not happening at all.
Brenton Chan plays the cello alongside violinist Jamie Kruspe as the Trek Duo and is the Music Coordinator for Concerts in Care Ontario.