Saturday 18 July 2015

Festival of the Sound 2015 # 1: Off and Running!

It's that time of year again!  For the next two weeks (minus a day or two) I am "in residence" in a forest-shrouded hotel at Parry Sound, and wallowing in hours and hours of beautiful classical music at the annual Festival of the Sound -- for the 22nd season in a row.


For those not familiar, the Festival is now 36 years old.  It runs for three and a half weeks every summer from mid-July to mid August.  The main venue is the beautiful concert hall of the Charles W. Stockey Centre on the Parry Sound waterfront.  The hall has absolutely splendid acoustics, as I can attest, having sat in seats in every part of the space in the past.  Outside, a broad patio with plenty of tables and chairs gives a grandstand view of the sailing school and the comings and goings of the Island Queen and Chippewa cruise boats during the daytime, and spectacular Georgian Bay sunsets in the evening.


Not only that, but the entire hall can be quickly and easily cleared and brought to a flat-floor configuration for banquets and other events, as will be seen below.


It's all a far cry from the early days in the 1980s when concerts took place in the sweltering heat of the high school's small gym, with train horns at the nearby level crossings intruding with absolutely awful regularity and bad timing whenever there was an especially quiet passage in the music!


Every year the Festival throws a couple of special parties as fund-raisers.  This year, the main dinner party also served as the launch event for the Festival.  The entire event, a three course dinner interleaved with three short concerts, took place on the main floor of the hall last night.  By tonight, the hall will be back to its standard raked configuration with upholstered seating and all in place, and the stage ready to go for the standard Gala Opening Concert.  All of the performers were old favourites of the Festival's audiences.  And all of them donated their services for the evening, which says much for their affection for Parry Sound and the Festival.


The event began with a meet-and-greet in the lobby, with cheese and fruit trays, and a cash bar.  At 6:30 we moved into the hall, found our reserved tables and immediately set to work on the first course, a chilled soup with heirloom tomato and buffalo mozzarella salad alongside.


The first concert was the wonderful Gryphon Trio, in their only Festival appearance this year.  Beethoven's Piano Trio in C Minor, Op. 1 No. 3 made an apt beginning to the Festival, as Jamie Parker (pianist) pointed out, since it was in the first group of works Beethoven chose to publish.  No question about it, Beethoven definitely began as he meant to go on.  The dramatic and energetic fireworks in the first and last movements frame a slow movement theme and variations of apparently artless simplicity, and a scherzo whose main theme runs to the peculiar length of 13 bars of music -- an odd feature in a time when symmetry was a highly valued quality in all compositions!  The Gryphons delivered a crisp, sparkling reading full of the youthful high spirits demanded by this score.  That lovely slow movement was played with a gentle touch that really highlighted the contrast to the dramatic opening.  If the finale got a big blurry in spots, especially in the piano part, well, that's what happens when Beethoven puts several dozen notes into each bar and then marks the music prestissimo (perhaps best translated as "play it like a bat out of hell!") 


The main course of dinner followed, a pan-seared sea bass with baby bok choy, beans and carrots, and polenta.  Then came the second concert.  The duo pianists Anagnoson and Kinton took the stage with a group of pieces for piano duo (that is 4 hands at 1 piano).  First came Schubert's famous Marche Militaire, which -- in spite of its imposing name -- actually works best when played with a light touch and a spring in its step.  This we certainly heard!  Then came two Hungarian Dances by Brahms, and finally two of Dvorak's Slavonic Dances.  Anagnoson and Kinton are well-known for their ability to play lightly and cleanly, yet with plenty of energy, and the moments of crescendo and emphasis in their performances were carefully judged and beautifully executed.  Since I have played many of these pieces with my sister Kathie, it's always a special delight and lesson in style to hear such consummate artists perform the same works.  This segment ended with Carolyn Maule and Guy Few joining in an arrangement of Sarasate's famous violin piece Zigeunerweisen for trumpet and piano.  Great fun, and a wonderful showpiece for Few's skill -- but I really prefer the original which makes the violin sound like a human voice singing.


The dessert was a sinfully rich -- well, the menu said crème brulee but it actually was mousse brulee, a swirl of white and dark chocolate mousses with the brulee crust and garnished with fresh fruit.  To crown an evening like that, you'd better arrange something spectacular and that was what we got when internationally-renowned baritone Russell Braun took the stage with wife Carolyn Maule (a Parry Sound hometowner) as accompanist.  He sang Ford's revenge aria from Falstaff by Verdi, and followed that with the spectacular fireworks of Figaro's Largo al factotum from The Barber of Seville by Rossini.  Braun sang magnificently in both arias, but certainly couldn't (and shouldn't) restrain his urge to do some comic business involving members of the audience during the Rossini!  Great music making and great fun in equal measure!  He then sang a romantic Noel Coward ballad, with a trumpet obbligato by Guy Few.  That left it to Carolyn and Guy to close the evening with one of Coward's showstopper comic patter songs.  Since Guy Few is also a splendid singer (albeit with a lighter voice) and a first-rate stand-up comedian, this ending perfectly wrapped up the evening with a bang and a flash and lots of great big laughs.  However, Few and Maule did add one final footnote, with the gentle poetry of Leroy Anderson's Trumpeter's Lullaby to wind everything back down again for a quiet conclusion.


I'm going to be back on here at regular intervals for the next two weeks, updating my faithful readers about all the incredible music to be heard here, and all for a fraction of the cost of concert-going in most major cities.

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