September 28, 2026
Tessa and Petr Balaz are known to many in the Sudbury music scene, either from their performances together as a duo or separately with their own projects. The local power duo has also curated their own series promoting other local artists, and past “Evening with Tessa & Petr” musicians and singers have included Mallory Johnson, Les Fauxils, and Trinity Thibault. Their next installment will be a truly unique affair, as it features, not pop or indie music, but Baroque music performed on period instruments (older versions of today’s modern orchestral instruments, for which certain Baroque music was originally written).
“Fixit Period” is the name of a new musical ensemble founded by Milas Hewson and Arianna Verbree, and which hopes to grow in membership over time. Their inaugural performance, titled “Manifesto”, will feature Petr Balaz and Josh Turnbull on guitar and percussion respectively.
Milas is a violinist living here in Sudbury. They studied at the Suzuki String School of Guelph under Paule Barselou and Witold Swoboda as a child, and then with Jerzy Kaplanek at Wilfrid Laurier University as a teen. Milas has since completed their ARCT in Violin Pedagogy from the Royal Conservatory of Music and teaches private lessons on the modern violin. Currently playing with the Sudbury Symphony Orchestra and the North Bay Symphony Orchestra as a season regular, they occasionally also play with the Timmins Symphony Orchestra and Whispering River Music in Parry Sound.
Arianna is a Double Bassist, Viola da Gamba player, multi-instrumentalist, and writer living in Sudbury, Ontario. After starting her musical life in punk rock bands in high school, she began to study music as a last-minute decision, and this choice has reverberated throughout her life. Arianna has been a visible feature stage right for the Sudbury Symphony and the North Bay Symphony, where she has been sitting as the Principal Bass for many years. Arianna has a Diploma in Music Performance from Cambrian College, a Bachelor’s Degree in music from the University of Ottawa, a Master’s Degree in Music Performance from the University of Akron, and an Artist’s Certificate in Performance of Early Music from the University of Toronto.
Arianna has performed in ensembles under the baton of Jean-Francois Rivest, Kent Nagano, Jeanne Lamon, and Ivars Taurins. In her free time, Arianna continues to play popular music, performing with the Hilltoppers Jazz Band throughout their 2024 fall-winter season, and recording solo indie music as Grayce Aromantic.
With their debut performance coming up soon, Fixit Period was generous to take some time with the Waxwing Sudbury to chat about period music, the chamber music scene in Sudbury, and what audience members can expect on October 4.
WW: First of all, thanks so much for giving some of your time to chat. It’s been a little while since The Waxwing has published a Story, but when we saw the first postings for the FIXIT: Manifesto show, we had to learn more! How did the connection with Tessa and Petr first come about? From the outside, it seems like an interesting pairing, and one that is bound to break down some silos between different scenes.
AV: It came about as a result of my work playing as a pit musician for Yes Theatre! Both Tessa and Petr hold positions in the organization, and I got to know them both over my time there. When the time came to start putting the wheels in motion for Fixit Period, one of my first calls was to Tessa Balaz because not only is she a friend, but she is also someone who works with artists nationwide, helping with grant applications and project consultations.
One of the big messages about this concert is that this music isn’t intimidating, and further, you should play it with your friends! So, when it came time to find other colleagues for the sonata by Francois Duval in particular, I knew that I wanted to include musicians I’d worked with in my time at Yes Theatre. Both Petr and our percussionist, Josh Turnbull, have been fantastic collaborators, and I’m so excited to have them in the concert.
WW: In the event description, there’s mention of “period instruments”, in particular the Baroque violin and viola da gamba. How do these instruments differ from their modern counterparts?
MH: The violins look very similar at a glance! The body is typically a little bit thinner on the Baroque violin, though not always. The Baroque violin lacks fine tuners and a chin rest, and wouldn’t have been played with anything but a piece of cloth for the shoulder. The neck is set lower, and the fingerboard is much shorter. The bridge also tends to be a little flatter, which means the strings are easier to play together – helpful, given how prevalent double stops are in Baroque violin music. (Double stops are the name for playing two or more notes at once over two or more strings). The bow is the more visually distinct piece; the frog is a lot lighter, the tip is elongated and pointed, and there is significantly less hair on it. The bow as a whole is also a lot shorter. Notably, the strings are made of gut, rather than steel. This produces a warmer, darker sound.
AV: There isn’t quite a modern comparison to the Viola da Gamba! It’s a bit of a platypus in some ways, where it feels like it was assembled from traits of other instruments, but it has an extremely rich tradition in Western classical music. It’s a bowed cousin of the lute and guitar family. It has six (or seven) strings, like a guitar, and has frets like a lute, tied around its neck. It’s tuned much like a lute often was, which for readers at home is very close to the modern guitar. But, as I said, you also bow it much like one would a cello (the way you hold the bow is different), and you hold it between your legs like a cello. That’s where it gets its name – “da Gamba” means “of the legs”, because it’s a viol that you play between your legs!
WW: The instruments you are using are on loan from Wilfrid Laurier University. Are they replicas of period instruments, or are you actually playing on instruments that are 400 years old?
MH: The violin that I have on loan from WLU is a replica. It was donated to their collection by a member of Tafelmusik some years ago upon her retirement. Instruments that old are around, but they were often altered as standards changed, so it’s more common that period players will use replicas based on illustrations, descriptions, altered vintage instruments, and the few that have remained unaltered.
Growing up, my mother played the violin in a Baroque ensemble called Nota Bene; her instrument is actually from the 1700s, though her bow is a replica. I asked to borrow it, but any musician will tell you that being asked to part with your instrument is like being asked to part with a limb; I’m grateful to her for putting me in touch with Dan Cabena at WLU to help me find an alternative, and especially grateful to Dan for his generosity and trust with instruments from that collection. He also loaned us our first viola da gamba, and is currently loaning us a viola for use in our March concert.
AV: The cello is actually a modern one as well. I inherited it from a friend when he and his wife were moving for work some years ago and couldn’t justify the space it took up in the car for a cross-country drive. I remain grateful to Ryan Macleod for the use of it. Additionally, the Viola da Gamba I am using comes from a local collection. It is a modern replica formerly owned by Peter Schneider and now in the hands of Dr. Charlotte Leonard.
WW: There are some conventional pairings in chamber music: piano and voice, guitar and voice, piano and violin, violin with violin. Is violin and double-bass (or viola de gamba) a pairing that happens often? Is the music being performed explicitly for the instruments you are playing, or are there adaptations that need to happen?
AV: I’m so well-known in town for being a bassist (which, I will admit, makes me proud!), but for this concert I’m not playing a double bass at all! While I could talk for literal hours about the history of the double bass – ask my friends, and I’m sure they’ll groan – suffice it to say that the only two of our composers who would have seen a Double Bass similar enough to what we recognize today are Corelli, who came from Italy, the birthplace of the Double Bass, and Duval, who would likely have been in Paris around the time when the Double Bass joined the Paris Opera for the first time. There were other contrabass instruments that Telemann and Jones would have known, but we don’t play them outside of historical ensembles anymore. Things like the Theorbo, the Archlute, and the Violone (the largest member of the Viol family).
For this concert I am playing three instruments – the Violoncello, the Viola da Gamba, and the Electric Bass. As I have said elsewhere, this concert is founded on the idea that this music should be accessible, and that we should use what we have – the musicians of the 17th and 18th century certainly did! They often demanded new instruments of their instrument-makers, seeking to fill a niche, or expand the range of an instrument. So in that spirit, we have looked at the instruments we have assembled, and looked at what the average amateur musician can actually get their hands on and used that as inspiration to play the Corelli sonata entirely on electric violin and electric bass.
WW: Why are the two of you attracted to period music? What does the experience of listening to and performing on period instruments give to you?
MH: I learned the violin using the Suzuki method as a little kid, which leans pretty heavily on Baroque repertoire – but doesn’t particularly care about a period style. Then, when I started doing RCM exams as a preteen, I had to do some unaccompanied Bach every year.
If you look up the most famous Baroque repertoire, you get very modern recordings. And that’s not a bad thing! I think that whatever choices people are making about how to perform this music, as long as it’s intentional, that’s great, that’s art. But I also don’t think it’s always necessarily an informed choice – most modern players will at most use a Baroque bow to play without looking any further into how this music might have been played originally. There is a lot of nuance to this music and to these choices – the year, the place, all change how you would approach the style.
I’m lucky in that I grew up with a period player in my house – not that I appreciated it the way I should have as a kid haha. My mom always made sure I used a little Baroque technique in my Bach, even if that clashed sometimes with what teachers wanted, and it didn’t include ornamentation practices because it wasn’t the expected thing by people grading the exams. So I wasn’t starting from nothing. But when I went to get my teaching certification, I needed an unaccompanied Baroque piece, and I returned to the first Telemann Fantasia – which I’ll be performing in our season finale in May – and was sort of surprised by how much I enjoyed the intricacy and nuance of it, because this had always been my least favourite Classical ‘genre’ growing up. But coming back to this music with the historical lens really opened up a new world of music for me – I was learning new things, exploring making different kinds of musical choices, and really thinking each thing through, rather than leaning on the decades of engrained habits I had accumulated. Period music really felt like doing something fresh and new.
AV: I became familiar with Historical Performance as I went to post-secondary for classical music, and while originally I tried to focus on modern playing and performance, listening to period-informed recordings of music was like someone turned the lights on for the first time. After my Masters, my then-teacher Sue Yelanjian encouraged me to continue studying, and a year later I was beginning to work with Joëlle Morton in Toronto. It’s informed my playing ever since, and it’s taken a long time to get here, but I’m finally able to start a period project of my own.
WW: Both of you have worked with the City of Lakes Society, which aims to promote chamber music to Sudbury, and this upcoming concert is a great step to do just that. Looking forward a little farther, what would you love to see in Sudbury that is not currently here?
MH: Obviously there isn’t currently a period music ensemble in Sudbury – and I don’t believe there ever has been. It’s a pretty niche genre, even in bigger cities! I think part of that is that this music is seen as exclusive or intimidating, even by Classical musicians. But I really want to see this as a bridge between genres. You mentioned earlier that our partnership with Tessa and Petr Balaz is potentially silo-breaking, and that’s really what Fixit is all about. We want this to be fun, we want it to feel accessible, we want it to feel open to everyone.
We want to see Fixit grow in membership, to feature more musicians – ones like Petr and Josh, who are totally new to any ‘Classical’ genre, and ones who might already play Classical music but haven’t explored period performance. We want to explore the ways period music connects to modern music of many genres, and the ways we perform, then and now. At the end of the day, more than anything else, we want to see this as a community endeavour, celebrating the musicians who live and work here.
AV: I absolutely agree with Milas. Sudbury’s art scene has more silos than the Flour Mill, but we hope that we’re able to keep finding amazing artists to work with – I have a killer idea for a baroque/bluegrass crossover concert if we are able to keep this project going.
WW: To close, here’s a little fun imagination exercise. You only have one album that you can listen to for the next 12 months. What’s it going to be?
MH: Oooh, this is tough. I feel like I should be answering this on theme with a cool experimental modern classical music album, or a period performance or something, but my gut reaction is High Noon Over Camelot by the Mechanisms, and I think I stand by that. It’s a fun sci fi space opera western sort of thing, it’s very long, and I think it would be fun to see if I have it memorized by the end of the year. We love a good train heist.
AV: Oh gosh this is tough for me too! I can be very musically omnivorous, and I also think it’s my responsibility as a musician and an educator to keep up with the way that music grows and changes. I’d love to shout out something released in 2026, but I think I have to pick 2023’s “Expert In a Dying Field” by The Beths, out of New Zealand. Elizabeth Stokes’ lyrics resonate with me in a way that few do.
Fixit Period’s inaugural show, Manifesto, will take place at Steve’s Encore Lounge on October 4, at 2:00 PM. It will feature music by Duval, Telemann, Jones, and Corelli. Tickets are available HERE.
