The leaves drift lazily off the trees and fall around the opera singers. When their song ends, the handful of parents standing near the jungle gym in Georges St Pierre park break into huge smiles. They begin to clap loudly.

“You sing well together. I should have recorded that,” says one father.

The opera singers, Dominic Veilleux, a bass baritone and Agnes Menard, a soprano, are among 1,200 classically trained musicians who’ve been giving free concerts in neighbourhoods across Quebec as part of Mecenat Musica’s mini concerts santé series. 

The performances are supported by grants from The Foundation of Greater Montreal, The Lucie and Andre Chagnon Foundation, as well as private donors.

The classical music that’s been wafting through our streets, parks and alleyways since June is a gift intended to lift people’s spirits and foster better mental health during the pandemic. 

But the roaming musicians are also part of the profound shifts that are beginning to alter the art world. 

Veilleux and Menard, both 28-years-old, leave the play area and wander to the edge of the park. They pause in front of a couple seated at a beaten up picnic table. 

“Would you like a mini concert?” asks Veilleux. 

Alan Beraha looks uncertain. “I have to go,” he says, waving a weathered hand in the direction of the singers. Jenniave Johnson is sitting beside him. She throws a tennis ball to a small black and white coloured mutt. He runs to retrieve it and starts to chew it enthusiastically. 

“Sure. Okay. Go ahead,” Johnson says. She gives the singers a half-smile and shrugs her shoulders.  

As Veilleux and Menard break into Henry Purcell’s seventeenth century melody “Lost is my Quiet Forever” Behara and Johnson’s faces start to brighten. 

“Amazing!” says Beraha when the song ends. 

“Wow! You know what was so cool about it, he came up and gave me the ball. I can never get that ball. All of a sudden he hears opera and he gives me the ball!” exclaims Johnson, as her eyes dart excitedly between the opera singers, the dirty, chewed up tennis ball in her hand, and her dog, whose tail is wagging furiously. 

It might not be for nothing that Orpheus, the legendary Greek hero who charmed animals with his music, was Opera’s first protagonist.  

Opera was born during the Baroque period, an art historical era characterized by flourishes, ornamentation and distortions. Today, the musical genre is known for elaborate stage sets, ornate costumes, and dramatic lighting. 

Opera is about as far removed from a place like Georges St-Pierre park as a Medici palace. 

The park is a feature of the mostly Anglophone, working class neighbourhood of St Raymond’s. Located at the southern edge of NDG, sandwiched between the train tracks and the Saint Jacques escarpment, the Italian population who settled here after the Second World War is ageing out. The neighbourhood is now home to a high proportion of single parent families and new immigrants.  It has one of the lowest median incomes in the city.

Veilleux and Menard exit the park and begin to wander, like medieval minstrels, up and down the streets and alleyways of St Raymond’s in search of spectators. 

They walk past sparkly white gravel gardens filled with roses and statues of the Virgin Mary, and sloping red brick buildings with tumbling wooden porches and weedy lawns. 

“Everyone is outside, there are a lot of people on the balconies, so it’s really fun,” says Menard. 

The pandemic has been marked by balcony singing. First, in Spain and Italy, and later in Montreal during the early days of the lockdown. These alternative venues may have been our first glimpse of the dramatic changes that were about to beset the art world. 

Artists have been among the hardest hit by the pandemic. Not only have many lost their jobs as performers. A sword of Damocles now hangs over entire genres and styles of art. 

But artists and art lovers can take comfort in the history of art. The arts have always been able to adapt to upheaval. And artists have always been essential in times of crisis. They generate the new visions society uses to move forward whenever the world falls apart. 

The singer’s feet crunch down on the newly fallen leaves, which are scattered over the cracked pavement. 

Menard says the pandemic has been hard on musicians. 

“We lost the reason we do music. We do music because we want to share with people and right now, we are not really able to do it. So to be able to do it again, reminds us why we do it and why it is so much fun,” she says.

“It’s a bit scary,” says Veilleux, “It’s a time of enormous change for art. And in fact, taking this break has really let me reflect on what we want art to serve, in life. I don’t think we have all the answers yet, but there is a big revolution in the arts coming, for the better I hope.” 

“I agree with Dominic that art is re-establishing itself, starting over and re-creating things, but keeping its core values, the heart and the emotion and this face-to-face contact. Because yes, the screen saved us. It let us do things, but it’s not the same as being in front of people,” says Menard. 

The last performance of the day takes place in a back alley. Veilleux and Menard sing a beautiful, haunting song, meant to be performed in a grand theatre to people sitting in red velvet chairs. Their audience is a man lying in a scruffy hammock in his backyard. 

The man takes his headphones off and leans into the music.

Watching the scene, it’s hard not to feel that something new is already beginning to emerge from the ruins.