MUSIC
Punch & Judy has designed marketing materials for Stratford Summer Music for five seasons now. The flagship assignment each year is a poster that conveys some main season theme. That seasonal “brand” then appears on brochures, posters, print and digital ads, and house programmes. Click on any image to see it larger.
Punch & Judy has enjoyed a long association with Music Niagara, a summer festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. Season images have reflected the region’s excellent vineyards and fruit orchards. For Canada’s sesquicentennial year in 2017, Scott showed Sir John A. Macdonald — usually thought of as a dour and humorless Scots Presbyterian politician — playing fiddle tunes in a Niagara backyard.
The Canadian folk trio Trent Severn asked Punch & Judy to create a poster for an upcoming concert tour. Scott and Christina responded with a romantic “travel” concept: the three musicians — Emm Gryner, Dayna Manning and Lindsay Schindler — portaging a canoe. The band liked the idea so much that they named their next recording Portage. Punch & Judy designed the packaging for the CD using maps of Canadian waterways.
Punch & Judy designed compact disc packaging for Canadian pianist Sandra Mogensen’s three-volume recording project of Edvard Grieg. Each of the wraparound covers features a Norwegian landscape photograph contemporary with the music.
Punch & Judy has collaborated on many projects with bassoonist Nadina Mackie Jackson. An extraordinarily prolific concert and recording artist, Nadina performs works for bassoon by Vivaldi and Scarlatti; then records new concertos composed for her by Mathieu Lussier, Glenn Buhr, Michael Occhipinti or Michael Colgrass (17 new works for solo bassoon and orchestra were written for her in the past ten years); then she might be off on one of her “Folk to Baroque” concert tours with Canadian folk icon Valdy.
Scott happens to love 17th- and 18th-century music, so it was a pleasure for him to work with Grand River Baroque Festival in Ayr, Ontario. Concerts were performed in a 150-year-old barn overlooking stone farmhouses and rolling fields. To draw a connection with local rural agricultural traditions, Scott created a series of musical scarecrows dressed in tattered clothing contemporary with the period of the music. The series started in 2006 with a violinist. In 2007 Scott drew a female scarecrow playing a baroque flute, and for 2008 an operatic soprano. Nadina Mackie Jackson and Guy Few took over as artistic directors in 2009 so he featured portrait scarecrows of them. The opening performance for 2010 was Handel’s Music for the Royal Fireworks — so the scarecrow was King George II for whom it was written.
