joel quarrington

It finally arrived! I can’t figure out how to open it though.

The bassist’s great triumph isn’t the Juno he just won, or even moonlighting with the LSO

Photograph by Blair Gable

Last month Joel Quarrington won a Juno award, in the category of Classical Album of the Year: Solo or Chamber Ensemble. A few days later Quarrington’s colleagues in Ottawa’s National Arts Centre Orchestra threw a surprise reception for him. There were speeches and cake.

Quarrington is the orchestra’s principal double bassist. Partly because his instrument is normally viewed as lumbering and ungainly, he didn’t get excited when Garden Scene, his latest album of virtuoso bass pieces with piano accompaniment, was nominated for a Juno. Violinists usually win that sort of thing. “It’s not in my nature that I would have ever gone to that event,” Quarrington said.

But then he won, and now people congratulate him everywhere he goes. The people who seem happiest are his fellow bassists. This is because Quarrington, a big 55-year-old with curly hair and a goofy grin, is considered by his peers to be among the finest bassists anywhere. And also because he is a bit of a revolutionary on the instrument.

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Ottawa double bassist Joel Quarrington won a 2010 Juno Award in St. John’s on Saturday for his CD Garden Scene.

Quarrington, the principal double bassist of the National Arts Centre Orchestra, won in the category of Classical Album of the Year: Solo or Chamber Ensemble.

Quarrington’s CD on the Analekta label, also featuring pianist Andrew Burashko, includes pieces by Korngold, Bottesini, Gliere and others.

Born in Toronto, Quarrington began playing the double bass at age 11 and studied in Toronto, Rome, Vienna and Prague.

Other nominees in the category included violinist Angèle Dubeau & La Pietà, I Musici de Montréal and violinist James Ehnes and Ottawa harpist Caroline Léonardelli.

Léonardelli was nominated for her CD El Dorado, for the Centaur Classics label. Quarrington was also featured as a guest performer on Léonardelli’s CD.

© Copyright 2010

Dragonetti's 3-Stringed Bass

Written by:  Matthew Hart

On a summer evening in July, I arrived for dinner at a grey house on a cliff in the Thirty Thousand Islands of Georgian Bay, and there, on a stand before the windows, in silhouette against the far horizon, stood a cello.

It made a bewitching sight, its voluptuous civility poised against a squall that passed just then across the long sheet of water. More bewitching still was the saga that unfolded that night, and captivated me, devouring my summer as I pursued it.

The cello and the island and the view belonged to Bob Williams, the descendant of a family of Toronto instrument makers who had risen to prominence at the turn of the century. They had made the cello. 

Williams bought it from a dealer, was learning to play it, and was, in what spare time he had, trying to discover the fate of a collection of instruments given by his family to the Royal Ontario Museum.  This is the story of one of those instruments, a double bass of such renown in its own enchanted world that that the mere mention of it excites a kind of longing.

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