Michael Friedman’s concert of a lifetime did take a while to come together, as these things do.
Plans had been under way since 2018 for a special performance to celebrate the songs of the 69-year-old Sunshine Coast singer and guitarist. To make the event truly extraordinary, Michael would be accompanied not only by an elite, three-piece band of Canadian musicians, but also by a concert orchestra and four choral groups, two of them children’s choirs. And, given Michael’s longstanding European fanbase, the performance would take place at the stately 1,700-seat Konzerthaus Berlin, in the heart of the German capital.
Producing a show with so many moving parts takes time, and the disruption of the pandemic only put things back further. But the 14-song show titled And we float away: SONGS OF HOPE, finally happened on Oct. 17 this year, and it was glorious.
Anyone familiar with Michael’s four solo albums would have marvelled at the exhilarating orchestra-and-choir arrangements on songs like Oh, Sarah Love, Finding You, In Your Love, and The River, not to mention The Bridge of Jessica and River Swim, Mountain Climb, with which the 1,500 or so audience members were invited to sing along. The lyrics of two songs in the lineup were in German, Wir Haben Wind Gesät (We Have Sown Wind), and An Tagen Wie Diesen (On Days Like This), and the stirring Morris Rosenfeld elegy, Mayn Rue-Platz (My Resting Place) was performed in Yiddish. A standing ovation brought the whole ensemble back for an encore with a rousing rendition of Friedman’s zany and upbeat I Got Friends.
“The show was based on my own experience as a young Jewish Canadian who grew up in two worlds, East Germany and Canada, during the Cold War,” Michael said. The song selection explores topics of love and loss, reunification, and redemption, he added. “These are motifs that resonate in the past and present in the national stories of both Germany and Canada. The program is a message of hope.”
So how did a Vancouver kid grow up to become a popular folksinger in Germany? It began, you could say, in 1965 when 10-year-old Michael and his two younger brothers learned that their father was going to study for the next few years at an esteemed conservatory—in Germany. That meant the whole family would be moving from East Vancouver to East Berlin, a place the boys hardly knew existed.
The trauma of that uprooting, of dealing with a strange language, new schools and classmates, and the disorienting realities of life behind the Iron Curtain, would mark the Friedman kids forever. Michael has written songs about it, like Tied in Knots: “When every thought in your mind leads to a knot/ Endless repeating lessons never learned.”
Though challenging, those first five years in East Berlin also saw Michael first pick up a guitar, form friendships, and gain fluency in German. He’d return to Canada for his late teens but then chose to head back to East Berlin in 1974, when the city was still under communist rule, to study at the Hanns Eisler Conservatory, as his father had. On his way to music lessons in those days, Michael would walk by the bombed-out shell of a massive, 19th-century theatre, still a partial ruin since the Second World War. That building would be refurbished in the mid-1980s as Konzerthaus. And there Michael was now, on its stage as a headline performer.
A series of warm-up dates had started on the Coast at St. Bartholomew’s Church in Gibsons on Sept. 6. Michael then left for Germany in late September with the band—drummer Buff Allen, bassist Kerry Galloway, who co-wrote three of the evening’s tunes, and the band Chilliwack’s lead guitarist Ed Henderson, who would perform his own stirring instrumental composition, Madrid, during the show. The group played SONGS OF HOPE in a few small venues before gathering for rehearsals with orchestra and choirs at Konzerthaus. There, they would be under the baton of maestro Jan Olberg, the man who dreamed up this whole idea in the first place.
Jan, 60, is artistic director of the Berliner Concert Choir, and several years ago he attended a concert by Michael, who tours Germany a few times a year. Jan became a fan. “He has great enthusiasm for my music,” Michael recalled. “I think my songs give him earworms.” In 2018, Jan proposed a special concert featuring Michael’s tunes. “Neither Jan nor I forgot about the idea,” said Michael.
Anyone who was there that October night won’t soon forget the experience, either. Among the audience were dozens of Michael’s friends and family from Germany and Canada, including a contingent from the Sunshine Coast, plus his wife and manager, Marilynne Friedman, their son, Jonathan, Michael’s brothers, Robert and David and some of their families. For Michael, the night was as much about them as the music.
“I knew it was going to go great with the choirs, the fantastic orchestra, and that force of nature, Jan Olberg,” Michael said the day after the concert. “What really blew me away was looking out into the audience and seeing people that I love from the bottom of my heart. Friends, old friends, fans, some people I haven’t seen in a long time. People from both sides of my life, Canada and Germany.”
Marilynne Friedman believes the Berlin event might just be the beginning. Why stop at just one concert of a lifetime? “Everybody loved it, and I think now we’ve got a precedent,” she said. “We have a form, we know how it can work.”
Jan Olberg might be thinking the same way. As he said his goodbyes following an after-concert party, Jan quipped with a smile: “Next time, we’ll do it in Gibsons!”
The concert was captured in a multi-camera video production for future release. A fundraising campaign has been set up at michaelfriedman.ca to help finance the project.
