Creating Community Around The Music of Franz Schubert in Calgary

What, where, and when?

We invite Calgary classical musicians to perform at Calgary’s first annual Schubertiade, to be held January 31, 2026, at St. David’s United Church 3303 Capitol Hill Crescent NW, Calgary, AB

Modelled after the Schubertiade that ran successfully in Chicago’s PianoForte Studios from 2005 to 2018, and was the most widely attended event PianoForte ever hosted, this Schubertiade will be more than just a group recital.

It will feature two rooms with performances happening in parallel, similarly to an academic conference, so the audience can move between the rooms to hear performances that interest them — or mingle with performers and fellow listeners at the coffee table in between. 

Think of it as a Schubert music fan convention, with the intimacy of a house jam.

How will it work?

The afternoon will be divided into half-hour performance slots, of which actual music may be approximately twenty minutes, and ten minutes for the audience to change rooms, have refreshments, and mingle. 

Performers tackling an extra-long piece can take multiple performance slots, e.g. if someone wants to do the entire Winterreise, they take three slots; the Trout Quintet would get two. A half-hour slot can be multiple piano students of one teacher taking turns, or a soprano, a tenor, and a pianist doing each a couple of solo Lieder and a duet.

So basically, it’s not a multi-hour recital with a trapped audience, but an opportunity for lovers of Schubert’s music to mingle and form community. 

No adjudications, no grades, but an excellent opportunity for musicians to test-run repertoire before the spring festival season or exams.

Admission and participation will be free, with donations encouraged to cover space and refreshment costs.

What do I play?

The great thing is that Schubert wrote such a large number of pieces that some are accessible to almost all levels of musical ability. Don’t feel you have to do a hard piece to match your RCM grade level, when it may be more fun to perform an easy piece you love! E.g. For vocalists, “Gretchen am Spinnrade” and “Erlkönig” are ARCT-level pieces, but for flutists, flutetunes.com rates them “easy,” and they are great melodies on any instrument.

If you have a short piece or two in mind, but don’t feel up to filling twenty minutes, sign up anyway, and we will put you in a slot with other people in the same situation.

We ask for signups by October 1, 2025. We will set up a Facebook group and a Discord server for potential performers to meet each other and discuss collaboration, so vocalists or violinists can match up with advanced students from a piano studio who are interested in collaborative piano — or come up with a novel arrangement of Schubert music on instruments he could not have imagined!

Any music by Schubert or related to Schubert is welcome, and it doesn’t matter if someone else would also be playing the same piece.

– A world premiere of a composition inspired by a theme from the Unfinished Symphony?

– The Trout Quintet on piano and four saxophones?

– Tap dance to “Der Wanderer”, or mime to “Auf dem Wasser zu singen”?

– A musicology grad student talk on an aspect of Schubert’s role in history?

We want to hear your ideas!

Email your ideas, questions, and concerns to schubertiadeyyc [at] gmail [dot] com. Subscribe below at the link at the bottom of the page, and you will receive a link to Facebook group and Discord server. We promise not to sell your data to anyone, and you can unsubscribe at any time, no hard feelings.

Why?

Because I, Tamara Vardomskaya, found Schubertiade Chicago incredibly fun when I did graduate school in Chicago, and want something like that in Calgary.

In the words of Thomas Zoells, founder of the Chicago Schubertiade and the PianoForte Foundation in Chicago (quoted with permission and thanks):

”Why Schubert, you may ask, and not Chopin or Brahms or Beethoven? It’s not that we love Schubert more or Chopin less, but Schubert is unique in that not only does he bring the so-called heavenly length to his music, but after you’ve listened to a long piece of Schubert’s music, you actually want to enjoy another long piece of Schubert’s music. The variety, melodic invention, joy and sadness all in one and separately, and his spirit makes his music easy to take in for hours on end. Try this with other composers and you’ll be pining for something different after a while.

“The Schubertiade also brings something else that is dear to my heart and fits so perfectly with the mission of the PianoForte Foundation: the spirit of friendship that Schubert was known to cherish. This friendship is given time to flourish between audience members and musicians as they spend the day together and help to create a musical community.“

While other genres of music have gatherings that are just for playing together for fun and enjoying music together — jazz jams, bluegrass jams, Irish traditional music sessions — classical music culture tends to be isolated and competitive.

Students from different classical music studios only see each other when competing against each other at festivals. Classical piano students can make it all the way to ARCT level without once playing with another person. And then they graduate high school and quit music entirely for more lucrative careers, because it was all about the exams and grades and competitive placements, and never about joy and friendship.

And I don’t believe that is healthy or beneficial in the long run. All music, whether classical or jazz or traditional or pop, has to be about the spirit of enjoyment and friendship and community to make it a lifelong practice.

The Schubertiade is my effort to restore this to classical music.

Schubertiade YYC is a registered nonprofit community association in Calgary, Alberta.

Schubertiade, by Morris von Schwind (1868). Gowns and tailcoats not required at Schubertiade YYC, but if ya got ’em, flaunt ’em.

Subscribing below lets you receive approximately-monthly updates and lets us send you a link to the Discord server. It does NOT commit you to performing or attending.