The Gazette from Montreal, Quebec, Canada • 20

FINAL EDITION D5 THE GAZETTE, MONTREAL, WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 7, 2005 I "Art, while constructed in the mind, can be interactive and need not be confined to the hallowed halls of a museum Richard Joly ARTS Richard Joly wants to remind the world that Yoko Ono already had an impressive body of work before she met John Lennon, and that her ever-flourishing creativity knows no bounds On I Homage to an artist CLASSICAL MUSIC REVIEW Local boy makes I -J' -i a 1 if ri I 'vnt v-1 1 5 I CONTINUED FROM D1 With comparable deftness, he explores the metaphoric might of John and Yoko's first encounter at the Yoko at Indica show in 1966 and John's symbolically charged bite of the proverbial Apple of Yoko's installation by the same name. Tree of knowledge? Fall from grace? Expulsion from the Garden of Eden? Before you know it, Joly is expounding on the contribution of Ono's art to world peace, and on Onochord, her most recent project. Only to turn you on your head with a tender examination of her hybrid personal history and value system that enabled her to introduce non-Western values to the Western art world in something as painstakingly beautiful as her brush painting on the 1961 album cover of Toshiro Mayuzu-mi's Nirvana Symphonie. Joly's love affair with Ono dates back to 1969, the year of the Montreal bed-in, which he revered simply because his parents did not. Imagine: An 11-year-old Quebecer learning English by tenaciously translating the lyrics of John and Yoko's first single: Give Peace a Chance, recorded in Canada.

Joly recalls "purchasing Yoko Ono's book Grapefruit in 1971 at the Miracle Mart in Place Versailles and spending his Grade 10 Latin class conceptualizing his own instruction books." Life was never the same again. That single and seminal Yoko Ono publication taught the young Joly that "art can change the world; that art, while constructed in the mind, can be interactive and need not be confined to the hallowed halls of a museum or gallery Or a canvas for that matter. Sometimes a simple text will do." Like Imagine Peace, Joly's favourite Yoko Ono project, with unsigned billboards posted around the globe to commemorate the first-year anniversary of the war in Iraq. He wears a button to mark the occasion. Grapefruit planted the seed of Joly's romance with avant garde music and conceptual art Most important, I come to understand why Joly says his "love for Yoko and her art is born of a Cartesian mind needing to venture outside the box." As interested in Ono's music as in her art, Joly cannot help but remind us that by the time she met John Lennon in 1966, she already had some 50 events under her belt, had experimented with radical computer- he first got hooked on Yoko Ono in 1969 during her and Lennon's IAN BARRETT THE GAZETTE bed-in for peace in Montreal.

good Montrealer Brott steps in musically ARTHUR KAPTAINIS GAZETTE MUSIC CRITIC Of all the rivals for subscription dollars the Montreal Symphony Orchestra has faced over the years, the McGill Chamber Orchestra has been the most persistent. But apparently there are no hard feelings. The MSO conductor in Place des Arts last night was none other than MCO artistic director Boris Brott. This native Montrealer is probably best known as a populist and audience-relations specialist. He proved equal also to the purely musical needs of a heterogenous Air Canada program of Mozart, opera and rhapsodies.

From the God-begotten we heard the Don Giovanni Overture, robustly done, and the Symphony No. 36 This was agile and nicely detailed in the outer movements and gracious in the interior. A sudden electronic noise from backstage nearly blew Brott off the stage during the repeat of the opening-movement exposition. The orchestra did not miss a beat. Nor a splash of ethnic colour in Enesco's Romanian Rhapsody No.

1 and Kodaly's Dances of Galata. These folk potpourris are too similar to occupy the same program, but with splendid sounds and infectious rhythms all around, why complain? Principal clarinet Robert Crowley had a big night, and Brott got the expressive surges and stretches just right. The vocal third of the program introduced us to Helene Guilmette, a prizewinning young Quebecer. High notes were satisfactory in Je veux vivre from Gounod's Romeo et Juliette and No Word From Tom from Stravinsky's the Rake's Progress. More distinctive was her human tone and heartfelt style in arias from Mozart's The Magic Flute and Bellini's I Ca-puleti ed i Montecchi.

The positive impression was confirmed by the tender encore, Puccini's 0 mio babbino caro. Behold another very good soprano in a world where they seem to grow on trees. fa fa fa McGill does not have a good orchestral training program. It has a great one, and a conductor to match in Alexis Hauser. This was apparent in the second of two weekend performances in Pollack Hall.

Liszt's Les Preludes started with spot-on pizzicato plucks and rose to stirring (not strident) heights. Great cymbal crashes. Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun cannot be made to sound faraway in a 500-seat facility, but Hauser (dropping his baton for the impressionistic occasion) did make it sound sensuous, at measured, hypnotic pace. Great harps. The big-ticket item after intermission was Rachmaninoff's Second Symphony, presented in its uncut 65-minute splendour.

Sections sounded rich on their own and richer in ensemble, as Hauser created a full romantic landscape. Violins were lovely at the start of the Adagio, and the horns were perfectly in tune. Indeed, technical standards were fully professional from start to finish and the big solos came off without a hitch. akaptainis thegazette.canwest.com the LP Some Time in New York City, censored under Franco, with the image of Nixon and Agnew dancing naked removed and the text converted into a nonsense alphabet. A refrigerator magnet billing Jean Yoon's Yoko Ono Project, an Ono-inspired piece about Asian women in Toronto.

A Christmas card from Ono. An invitation to the LennonOno Grant for Peace ceremony at the United Nations. A signed poster for the album Fly. An Onochord flashlight to beam I Love You in a reinvented Morse code. A Saint-Exupery Gertrude Stein-inspired A Rose Is a Rose Is a Rose text by Ono, affixed to the backside of an exquisite painting of an Asian woman amid a flourish of flowers, executed by Montreal painter Dominique Fortin.

A book by Lennon's long-lost sister. A crystal snowball with a flurry of Ono poetry within. I am both transfixed and transformed. Equally so by worst thing that ever happened to Ono, as a growing body of critical opinion seems to suggest? Clearly we're talking apples and oranges here. Better still, apples and grapefruit.

Joly says he's convinced that John Lennon's fame "obscured Yoko's creative genius, largely because the media and the public were ill equipped to adequately assess the merits of a bold body of work that transcended the borders and boundaries of genre, gender and geography." That being the case, Onoweb fans work feverishly to remind us that the woman who created transparent homes, imaginary music and underwear to make you high had already created an impressive corpus of work before the Beatles. We break for tea and cookies and rummage through countless pieces of obscure memorabilia, Ono-specific and otherwise: The Spanish edition of lacked Lennon home peace and love Richard Joly was just a boy when generated music and had performed solo at Carnegie Recital Hall. Who can forget her second-ever live performance, in Montreal, of Grapefruit in the World of Park: A Piece for Strawberries and Violin, at the Festival de Musique Contemporaine de Montreal on Aug. 6, 1961, organized by music pioneer Pierre Mercure, where she was billed alongside such musical giants as John Cage? So how is it, I ask Joly, that the world's most famous unknown artist remains in relative obscurity in the mainstream mindset, even if art experts like Matthew Teitelbaum, director of the Art Gallery of Ontario, acknowledge Ono as one of the most original and inspirational visual artists of our time? How is it that most of us, when we think Ono, think long hair and screaming, despite her current cropped hair some 150 recordings later? Is it true that John Lennon was the in the late 1960s. Much of her private experience differed sharply from the image Lennon enjoyed publicly as a campaigner for love and world peace.

"I always believed that idols have feet of clay," Cynthia Lennon, 66, said. "I thought it was important for the fans and the people who really believed in John (to remember that) he was human. He was no saint and he was no sinner. But he had a special talent that touched everybody's hearts." A gunman shot and killed Lennon on Dec. 8, 1980, as he walked with his second wife, Yoko Ono, outside their Manhattan residence.

He would have celebrated his 65th birthday on Oct. 9. Cynthia Lennon published a best-selling book, John, in October to commemorate his life but also, as she said, to "balance the scales" between the myth and reality The first half of the book focuses on the couple's romance in art school during the late 1950s, Lennon's early musical career and the skyrocketing Joly's review of Ono's Rising -a veritable treatise on growing up in wartime Japan counter-pointed by a contemplation of the AIDS pandemic. I've been to London and I've been to Rome. But I had to come home to Montreal to meet Richard Joly and better understand Yoko Ono.

And it's only fitting that Joly should be the linguistic conduit of Ono's text On Canada, yet to be released by the Canadian media. The French translation by Joly and friends is now on Onoweb. On Canada incarnates Yoko's historical affinity for our country and serves as a reminder of our place in the world on the peace train. Thank you, Richard. Thank you, Yoko.

Onoweb is at www.jeclique. comonoweb Deborah Cheifetz-Pira is a freelance writer from Montreal. deborah.piraaastroem.se was wearing Cynthia's bathrobe. Rather than talk to her directly, he announced his divorce plans to her through the media, she said. Julian Lennon, their son, was subjected to repeated violent outbursts and mocking criticism by his father, she said.

John Lennon once so severely criticized the boy's manner of laughing that, to this day, Julian rarely laughs, Cynthia Lennon said. In the foreword to her book, Julian Lennon, 40, describes John Lennon as "the father I loved and who let me down in so many ways. (He) was a remarkable man who stood for peace and love in the world. But at the same time, he found it very hard to show any peace and love to his first family my mother and me." Although Cynthia Lennon used words such as "cowardly," and "brutal" to describe her former husband, her overall impression of him remains a positive one. "He was hysterical, he was historical.

He was fun. He was so multitalented. When he was good, he was really, really good," she said. "And when he was bad, he was horrid." John's first wife, Cynthia, recalls husband as a troubled and sometimes cruel genius rrrr rn rj 'I A. Hi r.

Ml a. --v TOD ROBBERSON DALLAS MORNING NEWS London She had a ticket to ride with one of the greatest rock bands of all time. But if Cynthia Lennon had known the emotional pain that would accompany her decade-long journey with John, Paul, George and Ringo, she says, she would have walked away in a heartbeat In an interview nearly 25 years after the death of Beatles founder John Lennon, Cynthia Lennon recalled her former husband as both a genius and hugely flawed man whose insecurities drove him to commit acts of cowardice, cruelty and betrayal against the people closest to him. He was mean, she suggested. He beat her (once) and kept her apart from the things she loved most notably, him She said he abandoned their son, Julian, for years, and his behaviour became more irrational and withdrawn as he experimented with drugs such as LSD and heroin ASSOCIATED PRESS John and Cynthia Lennon in 1966.

They divorced in 1968. ly attacked Cynthia in 1959 after he learned that she had danced with his best friend, Stuart Sutcliffe, at a party Conversely, she includes the text of letters he wrote to her throughout their marriage vowing his eternal love and devotion. Cynthia Lennon said she had received no warning in 1968 that her marriage to Lennon was oven She arrived home one day to find him sitting on the floor of their bedroom next to Ono, who fame of the Beatles from the early 1960s onward. The second half chronicles the Beatles' experimentation with drugs and transcendental meditation, Lennon's growing distance from his wife and colleagues and, subsequently, the couple's divorce that followed his extramarital affair with Ono in 1968. Her book gives detailed accounts of Lennon's intense jealousy and fear in adulthood of being abandoned.

He physical FROM GAZETTE FILES Boris Brott conducted the MSO last night..