Baroque Ensemble presents inaugural Kathy Hogan ViolinViola Memorial Award

Kathy Hogan’s heart and soul was always filled with music. When the beloved St. Albert viola/violinist passed away from lung cancer Aug. 22, 2012, it was a tragedy for the family and great loss for the capital region’s chamber ensembles and symphonies.

A highly sought after chamber musician, Hogan, 52, played viola with the Alberta Baroque Ensemble for more than 20 years and was a substitute violist at the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra for nearly 25.

“She was a very fine player and she had a great interest in playing baroque music,” said Paul Schieman, the Baroque Ensemble founder/conductor.

“She was physically beautiful and she had a beautiful personality. She was always smiling, always pleasant, never in a bad mood. She was outgoing, but as a member of the ensemble, she blended in well.”

Hogan also soaked up musical theatre as a pick-up player for touring Broadway shows such Phantom of the Opera and Lion King as well as Citadel Theatre’s My Fair Lady. And when the National Ballet and Royal Winnipeg Ballet toured through the area, she was one of their go-to string players.

Her passing left a hole at the Alberta Baroque Ensemble. It is only fitting that they have chosen to honour and keep her memory alive by creating the Kathy Hogan Violin/Viola Memorial Award, a project several years in the making.

Violinist Deborah Chang, the first memorial award recipient, will perform at the ensemble’s season closer Bach – Handel on Sunday, April 24 at Robertson Wesley United Church. She is slated to play Bach’s Violin Concerto in E Major.

“Not everyone gets invited to perform with the ensemble. They have to be of a high calibre and Deborah certainly is,” Schieman said.

Chang was born in Korea, spent her youth in Mexico and moved to Canada in 2005. She studied at the University of Alberta under two phenomenal violinists Guillaume Tardif and Aaron Au before traveling to Germany for further studies.

Additional featured guests include ESO principal oboist Lidia Khaner performing Handel’s Oboe Concerto in G Minor and flautist Petar Dundjerski’s in Concerto Grosso in G Major.

For ESO assistant principal double bass player John Taylor, the upcoming concert for his wife, Kathy, will be filled with bittersweet memories.

As two young musicians, they first met while enrolled in master classes at the Banff Centre. Taylor was an English ex-patriot based in Toronto. Hogan was from St. John’s. He was fine-tuning his double bass technique. She was studying violin.

“I fell in love with her the day I met her. I knew we would spend the rest of our lives together. She had such a sparkling personality,” Taylor recalls with a slight catch in his voice.

“At the time, she was going to quit music and go into medicine. I thought I wasn’t going to see her for a long time. Then the first person I saw when I walked into the music building was Kathy. At the University of Toronto, they told her if she switched to viola, they would give her a full scholarship.”

The young couple married in 1982. Initially they freelanced picking up paying gigs with the ballet, opera, symphony until both landed a one-year contract as principals in their respective instruments at Thunder Bay Symphony.

The following summer Taylor was hired at the ESO and within a year Hogan was brought in as an extra.

While waiting to start the 1983 season, the young couple, now expecting their first child, crashed at his parents’ Tudor Glen apartment.

“We were out for a walk one evening and Kathy said she just loved it here. At first we just rented a place ’til we bought a house. She wanted the kids to live in the same house and grow up with the same friends. And we’ve lived here since 1983.”

Taylor is innately aware of Hogan’s influence as a wife, a mother of four and as a career woman with impeccable music credentials.

“She was always the strong one. She had strength of character. She was honest and open. She wasn’t a pushover by any means. And she was very forgiving. She had faith but she could think for herself and taught that to the kids.”

The Kathy Hogan scholarship is valued at $500 and is an initiative between Alberta Baroque Ensemble and Edmonton Community Foundation.