You can call Ladom Ensemble a lot of things.
Made up of a pianist (Pouya Hamidi), cellist (Beth Silver), accordionist (Michael Bridge), and percussionist (Adam Campbell)—who all met many years ago at the University of Toronto studying music—the group blends their classical and cultural backgrounds to make something entirely unique.
You can call it “world music” (“It’s wildly unspecific; technically everything is world music. It’s from this planet, but I personally like it,” says Bridge) or even “borderless music” like some have described it.
But the term Bridge has come up with to describe their sound: concert music.
“Concert music to me means any piece of music of any genre performed in a way that is worthy of being listened to with focused attention in a fairly quiet, focused concert hall, where there’s such intricacy in the music arrangements that you really want to catch every note,” he says.
And there’s good reason to listen closely.
“Ladom is a unique group in that we don’t know of any other ensembles in the world with the same instrumentation,” Bridge says. “That means we have to compose or arrange everything—even if we play a well-known song, it’s with our own twist. It necessarily has to be our own twist.”
Their most recent album, The Walls Are Made of Song, released in 2019, for instance, features their take on both classical and folk tunes from Iran, the Balkans, Argentina and Central Europe.
For their next album—currently half recorded—Silver, the group’s cellist, wanted to bring her Jewish heritage into the fold through klezmer music.
“That’s been the most exciting aspect for our group’s growth: we have half recorded a new album that’s focusing on klezmer and Persian-influenced music,” Bridge says. “Our cellist Beth Silver … is the most recent member of the group. She hadn’t caught up with sharing her influence with the group yet.”
Ladom Ensemble will perform some of those new songs when they travel from Toronto to B.C. for a short West Coast tour this month. Alongside a stop on Salt Spring Island and in Oliver, they’re also set to perform in Whistler on Sunday, April 16 as part of the Whistler Chamber Music Society’s concert series.
In addition to “klezmer and Iranian-informed” pieces, they will likely “cap it off with some tango and some East Coast Canadian music, which we always love to bring to the West Coast,” Bridge says.
(Campbell, the percussionist, hails from P.E.I.)
But, above all, the audience can anticipate a shared energy at the show.
“The Walls Are Made of Song, the album title of our last album, is a quote by the Persian poet Rumi,” Bridge says. “The reason we chose that is it captures the energy we try to give off in our concerts. We’re not just performing onstage, one-way into the room. We’re very much aware of what is going on in the room. We interact with the audience a lot. Everything that goes on in those four walls, it’s partly improvised. It’ll never be repeated. The audience is part of that too.”
Catch the Ladom Ensemble on Sunday, April 16 at 4:30 p.m. at the Maury Young Arts Centre. Tickets are $25 for adults and $20 for youth under 20.
Get them here.
