Thursday 24 July 2014

Festival of the Sound 2014 # 3: Performers or Musicians?

The Festival of the Sound has always been a good place to ponder the distinct difference between a musical performer and a musician.  And yes, they are birds of a very different feather.  A performer can take the most showy virtuoso fireworks and lay out all the notes perfectly.  But ask the same performer to try, say, a sonata by Mozart and it's a very different story -- the notes will be there but the spirit of the music will likely be missing-in-action.  Whereas, a true musician could probably coax something lovely out of the Grade 1 piano examination repertoire.

Okay, maybe that was a bit exaggerated.  But still, there's no denying that any live performance lifts right off the stage and into the audience's hearts when the participants are playing or singing the music, and not just the notes.

Prime example at this year's Festival was found in a group of concerts which featured the Cheng2Duo, the New Zealand String Quartet and Martin Roscoe.  The Cheng2Duo consists of a brother and sister team:  Bryan Cheng on cello, and Silvie Cheng on piano.  They are this season's Stockey Young Artists.  The New Zealand Quartet are making their tenth annual appearance at the Festival.  Martin Roscoe is a British pianist of considerable stature, and makes his third Festival appearance this year.  All of these fine performers are definitely also musicians.

On Wednesday night, Roscoe was giving a solo recital, but the Festival added on the Cheng2Duo,
 in what Silvie Cheng jokingly called being the "opening act" for Roscoe.  Since Roscoe's program was entirely made up of piano pieces entitled "Fantasy", the Duo obligingly played the three Fantaisiestücke for cello and piano by Robert Schumann.  These are tricky pieces, somewhat reminiscent of the Moments musicaux for piano by Schubert.  There are long singing lines for both players, a fair dose of energy, and the need for a very special kind of intuitive "feeling" that often seems to elude the great virtuoso.  What made the performance by the Cheng2Duo so delightful was their ability to relax into the music, to sense and communicate the natural ebb and flow of the rubato.

These characteristics also pervade the music making of Martin Roscoe, which is what makes the close comparison of these artists so fascinating.

His recital program started with a Fantasy by Wilhelm Stenhammer, a composer little known in North America but certainly well worth anyone's time.  He followed this with the remarkable Op. 49 Fantasie by Chopin.  I have to confess that I have never heard, or even heard of, this piece before, and I am at something of a loss to explain why.  It's on my music shopping list now!

After the intermission, Roscoe gave us Mozart's extraordinary Fantasy in D-, K.379.  This is certainly not a long piece, but its dramatic impact is huge.  Indeed, I choose to call it "extraordinary" because it sounds so unlike Mozart!  I've always found it truly Chopinesque, so much so that I wonder if Mozart was channeling the great Polish composer 40 or 50 years ahead of time!  Roscoe's performance was every bit as huge as the music demands, none of the gentle delicacy that some pianists deem appropriate for Mozart.  To conclude, he presented the massive Wanderer Fantasy of Schubert.  This towering masterpiece is certainly not for the faint of heart!  In his usual way, Roscoe brought every aspect of the music out into the open, without the kind of acceleration and over-pedalling that lesser lights might use (and do use) to cover up their weaknesses.  A performance of great strength and musicality -- typical of why I always look forward so much to this fine artist's appearances in Parry Sound.

On Thursday the Cheng2Duo gave their own recital.  They started with a major challenge, the late Cello Sonata # 4, Op. 102 by Beethoven.  Late-period Beethoven makes huge demands on any musician's resources of interpretation, especially the ability to dig ever deeper into the music, searching out more and more depth of meaning and feeling.  For a pair of young artists, the Cheng2Duo did a quite remarkable job of interpreting this work.  The same was true of Silvie Cheng's following performance of five of the pieces from the Op. 76 collection of Brahms.  These are miniature tone poems in all but name, sophisticated and complex in ways that tax the skills of the performer, but also requiring great interpretive insight and care.  Based on their work in Beethoven and Brahms today, I definitely look forward to seeing and hearing these two again as they progress (in years to come) to ever greater levels of artistic maturity.  I feel certain that they will.

Over ten seasons, the New Zealand String Quartet has established a firm reputation among Parry Sound concert-goers.  For me, they rank as the finest of the many string quartet ensembles I have heard over my 21 seasons at the Festival.  There's always an extra something special in their playing, and it's difficult to put a name to it:  an edge, extra power, special feeling, intensity, concentration, none of these terms are quite right although they're all accurate enough as far as the words go.  But I am very sure of the cause.  Except when paired with a pianist, they play standing up.  The cellist sits on a raised platform that places him at eye level with his standing colleagues.  I'm convinced that this lies at the root of their remarkably musical performances -- and the fact that the same ensemble has been playing together for 20 years with no change in personnel does them no harm either!

They opened Thursday night with a Haydn quartet (Op. 54 # 2) and a Mendelssohn quartet (Op. 12).  In the hands of the New Zealand Quartet, it became abundantly apparent that neither of these works was remotely close to being the kind of conventional note-spinning that some critics accuse both these fine composers of committing.  The Haydn, in particular, was filled with endless surprises in its structure.  A total delight all around.

After the intermission, the Quartet was joined by Martin Roscoe for the well-loved Piano Quintet, Op. 44 by Schumann.  This was played at the very first Festival concert I ever attended back in 1994, and I have heard it several times since then.  But I have never, ever heard the music given with such a wonderful feeling for contrast between its dramatic and meditative elements.

There really isn't any more I can say about this concert.  Although both the New Zealand Quartet and Martin Roscoe plainly leave nothing to chance in their preparations, the upshot is that the audience can absolutely take the resulting quality and involvement of the concert completely for granted.  And I'm sure the same will in just a few years also be true of the Cheng2Duo.

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