edwin outwater

I’ve made it clear before that I’m a big fan of the work Edwin Outwater is doing as music director of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony. When I met the young Californian two and a half years ago I asked whether he had any projects cooking with the region’s other outstanding eccentrics, whether at RIM or Perimeter Institute. He didn’t then, but he wasted little time. Last month Outwater and Raymond Laflamme, the director of the Institute for Quantum Computing (which is run jointly by Perimeter and the UPDATE: actually not run by anyone except the University of Waterloo), put on an elaborate and meticulously prepared concert to explain ideas in quantum physics using music.

I just wanted to let people know what an extraordinary debut recording the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony has made under its fearless artistic director, Edwin Outwater. (It’s hardly the orchestra’s first recording, just the first under the new guy’s baton.) I wrote about Outwater two years ago. He’s a Californian who rather effortlessly mixes the standard orchestral repertoire with some really wild new compositions and multimedia projects. This season he’ll lead the orchestra in… something… he’s cooked up with the physicists at Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing. That’s the sort of thing he does. K-W already had a very good orchestra and, bizarrely, one of the two or three best concert halls in Canada. Outwater takes the whole package to another level.

A few blocks west of Parliament Hill in the nation’s capital is a mysterious site called LeBreton Flats, which Ottawa’s city fathers somehow forgot to develop. It is now nearly the last pristine piece of grassland in central Ottawa. Well, “pristine.” “Trampled” is more like it. Ottawa’s Bluesfest just wrapped up, with 350,000 people enjoying such much-loved blues bands as the Arcade Fire, Flaming Lips, Santana, Metric and Stars.

From the magazine, my profile of Edwin Outwater, the very impressive musical director of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony. He’ll be taking his band up the road to Toronto on Thursday to the Royal Conservatory’s new Koerner Hall, for a program of music selected by the young composer/ party host Nico Muhly, whom some of us saw last year in Toronto opening for (and rather overshadowing) Final Fantasy at the Danforth Music Hall. The program will include a new piece by Richard Reed Parry from Arcade Fire, in which stethoscopes are used in a novel way. This Kitchener-Waterloo, as I have noted on several occasions, is an unusual and impressive place, and Edwin Outwater helps make it so.

Arcade Fire’s Richard Reed Parry has written a piece based on each musician’s heartbeat