The Commitment
In July 1968, we realized that our exciting year in San Miguel had suddenly come to an end. Dolefully, my parents packed up the contents of Umarán 58. My father rolled up the hundred canvases painted during his sabbatical leave, crated the metal sculptures, and proudly showed us his Master of Fine Arts degree from the Universidad de Guanajuato, which was affiliated with the Instituto de Allende. Damien prepared cases of butterflies, cockroaches, scorpions, and two live tarantulas for his friends at the Royal Ontario Museum’s department of entomology. As we danced to the sentimental strains of “Bésame Mucho” and “Adoro,” Vivien and I choked tearful goodbyes to our Mexican sweethearts. Were we really about to leave this magical place that now felt like home? Without our realizing it, our heartstrings had become attached to this quaint little town and the endearing eccentricities of its inhabitants. How would we be able to return to Canadian suburbia, where there would be no soulful mariachis, purple mountains, or crooked cobbled streets?
The VW bus was crammed to capacity, every square inch put to use in my father’s scrupulous packing. To our chagrin, when we reached the Laredo border, the customs officials dismantled all the rooftop packages and zealously seized a jar of seeds, to discover on further examination that their “drug” trophy was nothing more provocative than parrot food. My ten-year-old brother sat motionless with blanched face and saucer-like eyes. This time he was lucky; our feathered contraband, drunk on tequila, and ensconced beneath the butterfly net, made it all the way to Canada. It took all of us several weeks to readjust to Toronto. We missed the noise and smells of el mercado when shopping at the sterile supermarket, longed for the good friends we had left behind, and nostalgically replayed mariachi tapes from our exhilarating year south of the border.
Leaving San Miguel signified the end of my carefree adolescence and left me facing a dilemma. English literature had always attracted me, but classical guitar had become an intrinsic part of my life. Eli encouraged me to audition for the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto, and after a prerequisite recital, I was accepted into the Bachelor of Music in Performance course. On the first day, we were required to harmonize “O Canada.” I desperately tried to extract from my comatose brain anything concerning triads, parallel fifths, or major and minor intervals learned from my Royal Conservatory theory courses, and burst into tears before Dean John Beckwith. He reassured me that I would be placed with the other beginners.
On discovering that we were required to play keyboards, I rushed off to an old warehouse on Queen Street West to purchase a second-hand piano. As guitar-plucking nails are too long for piano playing, I always had a poor wrist position and resented the time this new instrument took away from my precious guitar practice. With determination, I studied music history, theory, composition, and analysis, but always felt disadvantaged in keyboard harmony, being the only student without previous piano experience. How I disliked all those complex rules of music theory — rules I follow instinctively when composing today. Of greater interest was sightreading Schubert and Haydn quartets in chamber music ensembles, accompanying my fellow students Theodore Gentry, a countertenor, and Mary Lou Fallis, a soprano, in songs by Dowland and Villa-Lobos, and performing dissonant twelve-tone compositions and avant-garde creations following the trends in contemporary classical music.
In need of extra tutoring in harmony, I arranged for private lessons, which entailed early morning streetcar rides to an eccentric teacher who taught me how to hum intervals and recognize various chordal patterns in Beethoven’s symphonies, while grazing from glass dishes overflowing with candies and carrying on what sounded suspiciously like drug deals over the telephone.
Kathy Bogyo, a blond-haired violinist of Hungarian extraction whose cellist sister, Kristine Bogyo, married the renowned pianist Anton Kuerti, became my friend. Dashing off to recording sessions, she never had time to study music history, but was a natural at music harmony. During dictation exams, we draped our long tresses over the manuscripts; when the invigilating professor ducked behind his piano to play the next chord, I quickly glanced at her paper and copied the notes. In return, Kathy availed herself of my help with history essays and we both passed our classes with flying colours. This rare peccadillo of my youth proved advantageous, but to this day I remain hopeless at musical dictation. Kathy went on to play with the Saarbrücken Radio Symphony Orchestra in Germany, and Kristine and Anton run the Mooredale Concerts in Toronto.
Like paired species in the ark, most of the students in my class married one another during the four-year course. Those studious boys held no appeal for me, so I gatecrashed wine-and-cheese parties at the Graduate Students’ Union and attended dances at the International Student Centre. Looking back, it was obvious even then that I was destined for a different lifestyle from most of my colleagues at the music faculty. All the major names in the classical guitar world came to Toronto for recitals, which I attended with religious zeal. The playing of Segovia, Yepes, and Bream inspired me, as did classes with Oscar Ghiglia and Alice Artzt. How exciting to be able to study with people who had given concerts around the world! Works by Manuel Ponce, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Alexandre Tansman, and Reginald Smith Brindle were added to my repertoire as my interpretive and technical abilities improved.
The faculty often arranged recitals where I played to small audiences at universities around Ontario, but my first major concert was presented by the Ottawa Guitar Society in 1970. Needing moral support, I persuaded my mother to accompany me to Canada’s capital, about three hundred miles east. Fraught with pre-concert nerves, I feared a complete collapse before curtain time, but once I was onstage the music relaxed me and all went splendidly. The program, including Bach’s Chaconne and Lennox Berkeley’s Sonatina, received a favourable write-up in the Ottawa Journal. En route to the airport our host insisted that we take in the city sights, including the residence of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, where we dutifully snapped a photo. Not even in my wildest imaginings could I have believed that within a few years I would be a frequent guest there.
When the first Communist Chinese delegation visited Canada, I was honoured to be invited to perform at a private dinner party for them in Toronto. Dr. Michael Kasha, co-founder and first director of the Institute of Molecular Biophysics at Florida State University, had developed a revolutionary guitar design and flew me to Colorado, Washington, and Florida to demonstrate his impressive new instruments. We were the guests of honour at several receptions after these American concerts, where I felt thrilled to be so doted on — all because I had plucked a few strings attached to a curved wooden box! What a fantastic way to make a living, I marvelled, as I was rowed through the Tallahassee mangrove swamps by Dr. Kasha’s son and treated to a fine southern meal by his wife, Lilly. The seeds were being sown for my nomadic life as a performer.
Besides studying music, I took classes at the university in English literature, Spanish culture, Italian, and psychology, but never a day passed without two or three hours’ practice on the guitar. For a Mexican friend, I laboured to compose a romantic theme for his short film El Llanto del Gaviota and recorded it using the excellent acoustics of our family bathroom! During warm summer evenings, I serenaded the neighbourhood kids while perched on our front porch steps. The guitar had become so much a part of my daily routine that I never dreamed of leaving it behind, even on family outings.
Each summer we returned to San Miguel to continue our love affair with the quaint hillside town. Many of our golden gringo friends had moved on, yet the adobe walls and familiar cobblestones echoed with the comforting feeling of home. Like seasoned residents, we proudly showed the newcomers around the town. Escorted by Tony Ponce, a boy from the neighbouring town of Celaya, and Fernando, Vivien’s bullfighter friend, my sister and I were often driven to the nearby sulphur springs of Taboada, where we floated around flirtatiously in the steaming water while the strains of ranchero music drifted through the jacaranda trees. On Sundays, mariachi groups added to my appreciation of the experience as I watched the guitar players finger their way through my favourite Mexican songs. The summers drifted by in a haze of art gallery openings and fiestas.
Before we set off for Mexico each summer, my sister, who was studying dentistry, found temporary jobs: collecting dew worms on the golf course at night or photographing kids on ponies. Not to be outdone in the workforce, I decided it was time to find a source of income. On the supermarket bulletin board, an advertisement of my skills as a classical guitar teacher soon netted a man and his daughter, who came for Saturday lessons, but ten dollars a week was not exactly impressive; I needed a “real job.” A notice in the window of the restaurant in Westway Plaza advertising for a waitress caught my eye. I was offered the position and told to report for work the next morning. All evening I agonized over my decision, realizing that eight hours a day waitressing left precious little time and energy for guitar.
As the early morning sun hit our little corner of suburbia, I made up my mind. I could not visualize myself balancing dinner plates and smiling for tips. Instead, I would experiment with a scheme dreamed up overnight. With guitar in hand, I set off by bus to the Kingsway, an affluent area just south of our neighbourhood. Walking bravely up the imposing driveways, I offered whoever answered the door a ten-minute recital, explaining that I was a music student earning next term’s tuition fees. The curious homemakers invited me to play; one kind granny ironed away happily as I serenaded her with Tárrega’s “Adelita.” The carol-singing escapades of my youth had been good training; I made more money in four hours than I would have all week as a waitress! Sometimes I wonder if any of those women who listened so attentively later recognized me when they read about “Canada’s First Lady of the Guitar.” Eventually, for two evenings a week after my university classes, I taught at Eli Kassner’s guitar academy, where I was assigned students of all ages. I enjoyed the challenge of inspiring my pupils and helping them learn the pieces and exercises that I had once struggled with. Looking back, I cannot imagine how I found time to teach, attend classes, prepare essays and recitals, practise piano and guitar, and still squeeze in concerts, dances, and parties. The days must have been longer then!
It was becoming obvious that I needed a better guitar, so one summer Eli suggested I travel to Madrid to hand-pick an instrument by the master luthier José Ramírez. The chance to visit my grandmother in Spain was an added bonus, as the years had been passing between us. I flew to Bilbao to spend a week in the company of my father’s mother, sister, nieces, and an odd assortment of elderly Spanish relatives. Interminable dinners that lingered well past midnight, day trips to Santander, and excursions to my father’s birthplace in Portugalete rekindled fond childhood memories of Spain’s Basque province. My grandmother, Anita Boyd, spoke English with a Spanish accent as she recounted stories of her youth in Linares — the birthplace of Andrés Segovia — and of her only son, who had chosen to live in distant Canada. My grandfather, whose family tree could be traced back to Mary, Queen of Scots, had been spared in the trenches of the First World War when a bullet was deflected from his heart by a can of sardines in his knapsack. How fragile are our human destinies. But for a few sardines, I would never have existed!
On the train to Madrid, I shared a compartment with two elderly Spanish ladies. Fascinated by my playing, they invited me to stay at their house, thus eliminating my need for a pensión. A few guitar tunes for the hospitable señoras and their neighbours yielded free lodgings for four days!
Consulting a tourist map, I negotiated my way to Calle Concepción Jerónima, where the famous guitars used by Andrés Segovia were sold. After introducing myself, I was led by an aristocratic Señor Ramírez to the auditing room. Five instruments were laid out for my evaluation. All sounded exquisite; it was going to be a tough decision. Each one had its particular appeal, timbre, tone quality, and balance. Ramírez repeatedly returned to listen in the doorway, congratulating me on my playing. “Señor” I said apologetically, “this is very difficult, but I have narrowed it down to three. These two have wonderful trebles, but this one has a fantastic resonance in the bass notes.” Then I asked, “Whose is that guitar in the glass cabinet?” “I keep her for a special performer, somebody who will make her sing beautifully on the concert stage. Would you like to try her, Liona?” he offered. I cradled the lovely guitar and began to play Eduardo Sainz de la Maza’s “Campanas del Alba.” Ramírez sat transfixed and breathed a sigh of appreciation as the last note died. “My dear young lady, it is obvious that you are destined to become a performer. If you want to buy her, she will be yours.” I was over the moon! This was the guitar with the richest tone of all, and I had been envying the future owner while playing. With profuse thanks, I counted out my thousand dollars’ worth of crumpled traveller’s cheques, which I had earned from teaching, and promised that he would not regret having chosen me for his special guitar.
In their tiled patio, my Spanish ladies were treated to an inaugural concert on my new instrument. The next day, while exploring the winding streets, museums, and markets of Madrid, I was offered a guided tour by a bearded Harvard history professor, who also invited me to eat paella in an outdoor restaurant redolent with musty wine cellars and Spanish cigars. The following evening, José Ramírez and his family took me to a flamenco tableau, where in the small hours of the morning I was handed one of the brittle gypsy guitars. Perching precariously on a stool, I played Albéniz while the flamenco troupe cheered with Spanish “Olés! ”
Guitar mission accomplished, I travelled by bus to Paris for a few days of sightseeing in the city I vaguely remembered visiting as a child en route to Spain. A raucous Galician bagpipe player ensured that no one on the bus slept more than forty winks. Our arrival on Bastille Day found the city in a festive frenzy. A Toronto friend had arranged for me to stay in the Montmartre apartment of a film director friend of his who was away. Claiming the keys from the concierge, I dragged my guitar and suitcase to the third floor. Exhausted by the long trip, I slid between the satiny sheets of a double bed. Something cold and hard touched my foot; I reached down to see what could be concealed beneath the covers. In my hand lay a gun whose shiny metal surface glinted in the moonlight. In whose bed was I about to entrust my body and why the need for such protection? My heart quickened as I gingerly placed the pistol on the night table, bolted the windows, and checked the doors.
With four days to explore the City of Light, I set about learning the metro routes that took me to the Impressionists in the Jeu de Paume, the Old Masters in the Louvre, and the dusty guitar editions in Left Bank music shops. While strolling along the banks of the Seine, I was approached by a dark-eyed man who engaged me in conversation, intimating that he was a count with a château outside Paris. Never for a moment doubting his sincerity, I chatted away in high-school French over a croque monsieur lunch. I should have known better than to let myself be charmed by a dubious stranger picked up on the streets of Paris. But trusting only in the best of human nature, I naively let him walk me around until, as dusk began to fall, I realized I had no idea where we were. After mentioning I needed a phone to confirm my flight to England, I was ushered into a deserted office off a darkened courtyard. Before I knew it my “Count” had bolted the tall wooden door and was now looking upon me with the eyes of a predator who had just cornered his quarry. He lurched against me, pressing his mouth against mine, grabbing my breasts. My heart pounded with surges of adrenalin. What an idiot I had been not to have foreseen his real intentions! As he dragged me to the ground, I realized there was only one way to prevent being raped. Feigning passion, I panted, “Wait, I have a fantastic apartment, the best French wine, and sexy silk sheets. Let’s go there to faire l’amour.” I prayed he would believe my heart was pounding with desire rather than pure terror.
Arm in arm, we started out along the winding back streets until we hit a boulevard filled with jostling students. I scanned the sidewalks, desperately searching for a gendarme to whom I could plead for protection. To my relief, a blue-uniformed saviour eventually came into view and, grabbing on to him, I let forth a torrent of Kipling Collegiate French. Admonished by the law, the potential rapist fled the scene. Greatly relieved, I wound my way through the convoluted streets of Montmartre, but not without the paranoia of imagined footsteps, which kept my heart racing until the apartment doors were double-locked. From then on, I resolved to be more cautious when alone in strange cities. Perhaps the gun in the bed had been an omen.
Next stop was London. Under Eli’s guidance, I had been learning “English Suite” by the guitar scholar and composer John Duarte, with whom I had arranged a meeting in England. Carefully guiding my precious Ramírez through the maze of the London underground, I travelled to his flat above a grocery store. Duarte chewed on his pipe as I played. “Mmm, not bad, my dear,” he mumbled. “Don’t tell me you’re planning to be the next Segovia? Unless you started at age six and can run through all the repertoire by age fourteen, you haven’t the foggiest chance of giving concerts! It’s too bloody competitive, and girls seldom stick with it. Face the facts and become a teacher.”
López Ramos’s chauvinism was echoed by this dour Englishman, who spent the next two hours disparaging my guitar idols, Lagoya, Bream, and Williams. In disbelief, I listened to his negative assessment of the guitar world, depressed by his prediction that I would never play concerts. Perhaps it had all been a Pollyanna pipe dream and Eli was too encouraging; after all, Toronto was a provincial backwater compared with London. Later, back at the home of my parents’ friends with the prized Ramírez close to the bed, I felt weary and disillusioned. Had all my dreams of performing been nothing more than a misguided chimera? Duarte’s words haunted me as I continued my courses at the University of Toronto.
Once my career took off, I crossed paths with him again. He wrote critical record reviews for the British press, dismissing my repertoire as pretty picture postcards. “Your programs should include more substantial contemporary works,” he advised. To that end, he composed for me Danserie no. 2 — so trite and musically unsatisfying that, after learning it, I decided my audience would be better served without his contribution. Duarte is a gifted arranger and is often included on international guitar juries. We even maintained an intermittent correspondence, but I have to wonder to what extent his acidulous critiques have crushed the spirits of other budding performers. How easily my own faith might have been sabotaged had I taken to heart the barbs aimed at me over the years. One has to develop a thick skin to survive in music business, I was learning.
Each time the great Andrés Segovia came to play, I was enchanted by the delicately romantic interpretations of the elderly maestro. It was Segovia who had initiated a renaissance of the classical guitar in this century, inspiring a new generation of concert guitarists: John Williams, Narciso Yepes, Alirio Díaz, Oscar Ghiglia, and Christopher Parkening. Many of the well-known pieces of the guitar repertoire were dedicated to the great man by Rodrigo, Torroba, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and Ponce. For years, people flocked to his recitals convinced it would be their last chance to hear the master, but amazingly, he always returned the following year, until his death in 1987, at the age of ninety-four. Segovia’s concerts and albums inspired me profoundly, but because of his renowned rigidity in teaching, I was reluctant to participate in his classes. On several occasions, however, I had the chance to play for him.
Once, in 1970, Eli Kassner decided to attend a post-concert reception in Segovia’s honour and take two of his prize students to show off before the maestro. Sometimes the last thing a concert artist wants to hear after performing is a student nervously plowing through guitar pieces. Segovia, however, graciously consented to listen to Eli’s pupils. As Lynne Gangbar presented her pieces, I sensed that our maestro was tiring; perhaps he would rather pay some attention to his buffet plate than to another student. After I played “Madroños,” which he applauded, I plunged into Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Sonatina, on Eli’s urging and against my better judgment. Segovia became redder and redder in the face, stomped his silver-tipped cane, and bellowed, “She is playing at twice the correct speed and has changed all my fingerings!” Then the enraged maestro stormed out and did not emerge from the bathroom for twenty minutes. Perhaps his famous temper had been inflamed by a bursting bladder. When a becalmed Segovia returned to “the scene of the crime,” all seemed to have been forgiven as he congratulated Eli and me. In future, I promised I would slow down my fingers. This man’s life was too precious for such shocks to his nervous system!
Segovia heard me play several times after that traumatic initiation; he was always most courteous and complimentary, never again uttering a harsh word. In New York, the day after my concert at Town Hall, after I had become a professional, he suggested I join him for coffee in his suite at the Westbury Hotel. “My dear, I do regret that I was not able to attend your concert last night,” he said in that soft, old-world Spanish voice. “I was obliged to attend a dinner held in my honour.” How immensely grateful I was for that dinner, as my nerves might have snapped had the great maestro honoured me with his presence at the concert. After coffee he invited me to play on his lovely Fleta guitar; what a privilege to feel his well-worn fingerboard and strings beneath my fingers. “You play beautifully and with much expression, my dear. You will have a magnificent career,” he said. Then he wrote on a little card, “Through your beauty and talent you will conquer the public,” adding as an afterthought, “philharmonic or not.” How prophetic were those last three words. Segovia must have already sensed that my career would not be directed exclusively toward the symphony orchestra set. The old maestro had great intuition!
I, and the entire guitar world, was saddened at Segovia’s death, yet I marvelled at what a fantastic life he had experienced. How fulfilling and rich his career had been, giving concerts that touched, and even changed, people’s lives the world over. Segovia had struggled for recognition at the beginning of his career, withstanding years of prejudice and criticisms that the guitar was not a serious instrument. I admired his perseverance and dedication. If he was rigidly against classical guitarists delving into pop music, as did his student John Williams, or flamenco, as did his other protégé, Christopher Parkening, one has to keep in mind that after a lifetime fighting for the classical guitar to be accepted as a concert instrument, he resented its “debasement” in other styles. Even though he played in huge concert halls, he remained adamantly against amplification, insisting on natural sound. Most guitarists today have sacrilegiously embraced amplification, but Segovia was of another time, another generation. Whenever I feel jet-lagged from long concert tours, I wonder how a corpulent Segovia in his eighties and nineties used to survive a schedule that spanned the continents. How privileged I was to have shared even a few brief occasions with such a musical giant.
Fantasizing about a new guitar duo and hoping that a romantic chord might be struck between the American Christopher Parkening and me, Eli Kassner encouraged me to stay overnight and cook breakfast for his Californian house guest, who was just a year my senior. Parkening was Segovia’s favoured prodigy and a rising star in the guitar world. That breakfast was one of my all-time culinary disasters. Sadly peering through toast smoke at his amorphous grey glob of rubberized eggs, he commented, “Geez, Liona, it sure is good you play the guitar.” After going to see a movie together, we savoured a few friendly kisses on a park bench, but we were both too involved with other romances to pursue a relationship. Much as I adore Chris’s playing and find him to be a rare and exceptionally generous human being, we would not have been the best match, as my horse-riding, bible studies, and fly-fishing skills are severely deficient.
For most of my university days I lived at home. During the day, guitar in hand, I hitchhiked to the subway, as the ’70s were kinder and safer times. In my third year, deciding to reduce the time spent commuting, I rented a small lopsided room near the campus with a household of vociferous Hungarians. Living alone for the first time, I felt proudly independent and pleased with my decision to move away from the shelter of my family. On the very first morning in my new quarters, I was abruptly awakened by the unmistakable sound of a close gunshot. A drunken tenant had killed his landlord in the adjoining house, which was soon swarming with police officers. I wondered if I had perhaps made a mistake in exchanging the quiet of suburbia for this turbulent neighbourhood, but after this dramatic welcome, things quieted down. I played guitar in the morning hours before classes, and late into the evenings after cooking dinner on a grimy iron stove in the cellar. Realizing the entire house was a fire trap, I secured a long piece of rope to a radiator beside the window, in case a creative exit from my rickety third-storey room became necessary.
It was easier, living downtown, to attend the opera, ballet, or symphony whenever my frugal budget allowed. An ensemble of singers, flute players, and a harpist from the University of Chile in Santiago came to give a concert on the campus, and I sat in the first row soaking up as much of their inspiring music as I could. In some sense, their music touched me more profoundly than much of the contemporary classical music I was studying, yet none of my professors or fellow students from the music faculty had deemed this performance worthy of their attention. Afterwards, the group whisked me away to a Latin night spot, where I faked my way through rumbas and tangos! There should be more to a music student’s education than dissecting harmonic structure in Schoenberg’s symphonic string quartets.
The muse aroused Peter Anson, an intense young poet, who wooed me with candlelit readings of Yevtushenko and harpsichord performances of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. We lay in each other’s arms as he recited the abstruse poems he dedicated to me, which were later published. However, “la donna è mobile,” and a few months later, it was Claude Emanuelli, an international law student, who lulled me with his gentle Côte d’Azur voice reading Le Petit Prince. During my fourth year at the university, 1971–72, I entered the Canadian Music Competition, where I won the first round of auditions and was chosen to travel to Trois-Rivières, Quebec, for the finals. Having never returned to la belle province since docking there as a child, I enjoyed the bus ride along the scenic banks of the St. Lawrence River: those very banks I had sketched as a ten-year-old to win both first and second prize in the SS Ryndam art contest. I was the only competitor opting to stay in a local seminary, and was ushered by the priests into an austere little room with a cross hanging above the narrow bed. How much more atmospheric it felt than a hotel. The alarm was set for six in the morning, but before it even had a chance to ring, the young novices roused me from sleep with their Gregorian chants, which floated sublimely through the stone cloisters. Luxuriating in this unexpected offering of sacred music, I crunched on some crackers I had brought along for breakfast. Perhaps their auspicious pre-dawn chorus inspired me. That day, I walked off with first prize.
One of the organizers, Eleanor Sniderman, wife of Sam Sniderman, owner of the Sam the Record Man stores, approached me after the awards ceremony in Toronto. “Would you like to make a record?” she inquired. I was speechless. “Thank you, but I am not at all ready for that and plan to continue studying,” I replied. “Please call me in a few years.” After rushing home to share the amazing news with my family, I phoned Eli. My teacher had said that one day I would make a record, but I had dismissed such flights of fancy. Although this tempting proposal had just been dangled before me, I wisely resisted, realizing it was premature. Ahead of me lay thousands of hours of scales to practise, technique to polish, and repertoire to conquer.