Random Access

Music truly is the international language and perhaps that’s why it’s so much fun talking to its practitioners.
I get to interview musicians periodically and I find they are the most tolerant of people. Many of them have truly eclectic tastes and enjoy a range of sounds that is stunning in its contrast.
After emailing Cynthia Steljes and Peter DeSotto, the Mississauga couple who founded Quartetto Gelato several years ago, I finally got to talk to them in a phone interview from Worland, Wyoming last week.
I must confess, I was totally ignorant of their work, which you could describe in its most accessible form as crossover classical. The beauty of the modern world is that you can hop onto the group’s website at www.quartetogelato.ca, hear samples of their stirring and somewhat quixotic music, read about their backgrounds and catch up on their reviews, which are uniformly excellent.
Quartetto Gelato is performing a special concert at the House that Mel Built (the Toronto Centre for the Performing Arts in North York) tomorrow night.
With the preliminaries out of the way, Peter and I got down to real business: finding common ground in our record collections.
“These are our books,” said Peter, an accomplished violinist who formed Quartetto Gelato with Cynthia largely to indulge his passion for singing opera, which he does extremely well, according to the critics.
He has some 1,500 LPs he spins on an old turntable when he gets a chance. He prefers older artists and his collection includes people you would expect, such as violinists Jasha Haifetz and David Oistrakh, Stephane Grapelli and Jean-Luc Ponty.
But, he has a huge collection of Cuban music and loves the work of Carlos Gardel, who invented the tango song before dying prematurely in a plane crash in 1935.
He loves Frank, Sarah (“She could have been an opera singer”), Ella (“What rhythm and her voice is a bell”) Mel Tormé (“He tailors his vibrato in the perfect spot”) and Judy Garland and Edith Piaf, who both had, “a haunting quality that just grabs you.”
DeSotto also enjoys Hank Williams and the bluegrass group, Riders in the Sky, to round out his rougher side.
His first musical love...wait for it: Frank Zappa. Yes, that Frank Zappa, the ’60s counter-cultural long-haired freak who penned Duke of Prunes, Call Any Vegetable and the immortal Brown Shoes Don’t Make It.
“When I was just 9 or 10 I knew the lyrics to every Frank Zappa record,” said DeSotto.
I guess our parents were wrong, the Mothers’ music didn’t wreck your brain, it just opened you up to more possibilities.