Musicians celebrate beloved late classical administrator

When Rita Menzies died last spring, musicians across the city echoed a common sentiment in interviews and eulogies: she didn’t just cultivate Manitoba’s classical musical landscape, she helped create it.

A pioneering director of the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, the administrator who also led the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra (twice) during crucial periods is being honoured at a tribute concert on Wednesday.

Whether or not you’ve heard of Menzies, known as much for her self-effacing ways as her diplomacy, determination and savvy, there’s a good chance you’ll have heard of the musicians who perform at this concert.

“I approached many of the most important classical musicians in Winnipeg and asked them if they’d like to be part of this concert. And every single one said yes, they’d love to,” says Paul Marleyn, cellist and artistic director of Agassiz Chamber Music Festival, with which Menzies had a longtime association.

Local luminaries such as violinist and WSO concertmaster Karl Stobbe and opera singer Tracy Dahl will join many other musicians at Desautels Concert Hall to perform a program, selected by the performers, that Marleyn says reflects “the team spirit that she fostered everywhere around her.”

Marleyn promises the program, whose pieces haven’t been announced, is all chamber music, the tradition with which Menzies is most associated.

Initially, the MCO (founded in 1972) was run as a volunteer-driven passion project out of Bill Stewart’s basement.

“Maybe I was paying more time to the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra than I was to my business,” Stewart told the Free Press last July. “It became apparent … that we would have to get some kind of administrative help.”

Menzies joined the MCO seven years after its founding and remained in that role until 2003. Over that time, she grew the orchestra into one of the Prairies’ most eminent music ensembles — overseeing the MCO as it picked up Juno Awards, toured Europe, commissioned dozens of new Canadian works and rose from a precarious young organization into a stable pillar of Winnipeg music.

She could have rested on her laurels, but when the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra came knocking — looking for an interim executive director — she didn’t say no.

The WSO was 10 times the MCO’s size, but this was actually the smaller challenge for Menzies, with the organization struggling under a $3-million deficit.

“There were a lot of highfalutin people who came in and absolutely burned out within a month. I really have to give (Rita) credit for saving the WSO in a time when people were not sure it could be saved,” Stobbe recently told the Free Press.

Under her helm, the WSO finished its 2003-04 season with a considerable surplus.

While officially retired, Menzies became Agassiz’s director, a role she held for 11 years. She even returned again to the WSO, serving as its interim executive director in 2006, and served as Agassiz’s board president until her death in June at 83.

It was through this experience that Marleyn, who came to Winnipeg in 1997, came to know Menzies.

“I then witnessed what a wonderful administrator and leader she was. She was very pragmatic, very practical, very efficient,” Marleyn says.

“I (also) got to know Rita as a mom to her daughters, and as a friend as well. She had a wonderful, dry sense of humour but she was a very warm person and had fantastic sense of integrity, of honesty.”

One of Rita’s daughters, Jeanette Menzies — a Canadian diplomat and former ambassador to Iceland — will be speaking at the fundraiser concert, hosted by former CBC producer Andrea Ratuski.

All the musicians are donating their services to the event, which will support Agassiz’s activities, including its annual music festival, its two music competitions helping to establish young musicians and its celebrated cello festival.

“We miss her very deeply. This concept is, we hope, a worthy and much-deserved tribute to the huge contributions she’s made to music life and arts life in Winnipeg and in Manitoba over the last 50 years,” Marleyn says.

winnipegfreepress.com/conradsweatman