You may find that world-renowned, JUNO-nominated pianist Francine Kay looks familiar — and maybe it’s because you’ve seen her walking around the paths by Lake Ontario right here in Burlington.
Though she was born in Toronto and grew up in Montreal, Kay now splits her time between New York City and Burlington. Music was part of her childhood, with her parents playing records at home “in the days of LPs and turntables.” Kay’s talent and love for the piano appeared early; she remembers that her older brother began taking piano lessons, but she was too young to join in. She began playing it anyway, learning by herself. “I basically kicked him off the piano,” Kay says of her brother, but notes that he gave it up gladly.
In between Montreal and the New York-Burlington home bases, Kay earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Juilliard School in New York, and a Ph.D. from SUNY Stony Brook. She has performed at world-class venues like Carnegie Hall, Roy Thomson Hall, and Salle Gavreau, and has played as the soloist for such orchestras as the Toronto Symphony, the Princeton Symphony, Symphony Nova Scotia, and Orchestra London, amongst others.
And now, she’ll be playing at the Burlington Performing Arts Centre (BPAC) on Feb. 19, 2023, in front of a local audience that will include her mother, brother, and friends in the intimate Community Studio Theatre space. Kay says that every venue she’s played has been special in its own way, and “As long as the music is there, the public is there, I’m there, all the ingredients are there for a great experience.”
As well as performing, Kay teaches at Princeton University, and travels to the south of France every year to teach high-level students at the two-week Zodiac Academy and Festival. There, she does chamber music coaching, private lessons, the group “spends a lot of time together in this medieval ancient village in the Alps.”
Though Kay teaches others, she says that playing music professionally requires a lifetime of learning. “As with any discipline, any art form, you have to start with a foundation, a lot of education…it definitely takes a lifetime, it’s a neverending process.” Though Kay has been lauded for her originality, she notes that the goal of playing any piece of music is not actually to be original; rather, it is to “reach some kind of essence that is in the music…some profound essence that can be communicated to people and can then affect them on many levels, hopefully in profound ways…emotional ways.”
Once enough skill and knowledge have been acquired by a musician, that is when the personality of the performer comes into play in terms of affecting the music — even in a well-known and loved composition. The music comes from “notes on a page, so they need a human being to bring them to life [and it is] their lived experience, their DNA that brings it to life.” Kay chooses her repertoire by finding music that speaks to her, that she feels she understands, “that I can enter into…I live it, and I give every fibre of my being both in practice and performance to bring [its] essence alive.”
Kay’s hope is that people will be uplifted upon hearing her play, and views live performances as communication with the audience, requiring a balance of extreme focus on playing as well as engaging in any feeling or emotion coming from the audience. When she has had the experience of people being moved by her performances, or of gaining an awareness of the healing power of music, she says, “That’s the most wonderful thing.”
Recording, though, is a way of combining spontaneous performance and the musician’s vision and interpretation at that moment in time. The pandemic, though “kind of horrific,” especially as she was in New York City, a U.S. epicentre, gave Kay time to prepare for the CD she released in January, Things Lived and Dreamt, on the Analekta label, and “go deep in my relationship with music.”
The idea for the CD was already in the works pre-pandemic, when Kay came across the piece by Czech composer Joseph Suk that gives the CD its title. With “enormous quality and complexity, [yet] hasn’t been recorded a million times, a rarity in classical music,” the piece spoke to Kay, she realized it was something she could really get inside of. Upon speaking to colleagues and realizing that many of them hadn’t heard of the piece, it seemed a “meant-to-be event,” and became the cornerstone for this CD. The pieces kept falling into place; Kay was asked to play some Dvořák, another Czech composer, and that became part of this project too, as did some other music already in her repertoire, and some music by Smetana, due to his importance in Czech music. She then went looking for a female composer whose music might work with the others, but wanted one she “really, really believed in”; she found the April Preludes by female Czech composer Vítězslava Kaprálová, and it was “instant love, I knew this was the piece for me.”
With funding from FACTOR, a significant mental commitment, and a number of years, Things Lived and Dreamt was released on Spotify, Apple, all the usual places to stream music and the CD can be purchased via Analekta; Kay will also have physical copies of the CD available for purchase at her BPAC show on Feb. 19.
In terms of playing the piano for pleasure, she loves to play whatever she’s working on at the time, though her top two, with whom she has a “current and ongoing love affair” with are Chopin and Debussy; Kay feels that she is able truly “get inside that music and transmit it, and it gives me an inordinate amount of pleasure to play.” And in terms of listening to music for pleasure, Kay loves to listen to a wide variety of classical music (“an embarrassment of riches”), though she also has a particular love for jazz and old-style French chansons like Edith Piaf, and some contemporary Quebecois singers.
And what does she do when she’s back in Burlington? Kay performs concerts, teaches, and does master classes. Non-piano activities include the aforementioned lakeside walks; Kay loves the little lakeside outposts and piers and fills her camera with photos of docks, seagulls, and sunsets.
But mostly, Kay spends a lot of time with her mother. And as they say, home is where the heart is.
For more information on Kay, including her other CDs, visit www.francinekay.com, and to get the full experience, check out her upcoming BPAC performance; tickets are available online, by phone (905-681-6000), or at the BPAC box office.
