Sunday 31 July 2016

Festival of the Sound 2016 # 10: The Difference Between Good and Great

At the end of my Festival experience for this year, I encountered a perfect pair of performances that highlighted the distinction between a "good" performance and a "great" performance.  It's an idea I was ready to explore after my recent top 25 of 200 post!

The contrasting performances were perfect for the purpose because both works are very familiar and popular, and I've heard both of them played live at least four times.

Don't get me wrong; I am not using the word "good" in a patronizing way.  In any professional performing arts venue, "good" is a standard the audience has every right to expect.  Flaws, if any, must be smoothly worked out and not obvious.  Mastery of the material should be a given.

The distinctions between good and great lie in the way performers set about interpreting the material, and this is where a really familiar piece is a huge handicap.  Most of the audience will conceivably be familiar enough to have clear ideas of how it "ought" to go!  Inevitably, as surely as one person finds a performance to be truly great, another will be disappointed.

The first of the two works was the famous Trout Quintet by Schubert.  It's one of the greatest audience favourites at the Festival, and with good reason.  There are few pieces in the entire repertoire as bright and sunshiny in mood as this one, and that fits perfectly with the ideal of good summer weather that so many of us share.  It was played with a good deal of vigour, and at the end many of the audience were on their feet.

Yet, for me, this was a good performance, but not a great one.  I found the playing, apart from the third (scherzo) and fourth (variation) movements, a bit pedestrian.  I know, that's  purely subjective judgement.  However, there was one significant flaw in the first movement and it coloured my appreciation of the entire performance.  Pianist Stephan Sylvestre was going out of his way to keep his sound well blended with his four string colleagues, but at least two of them didn't return the favour.  There were several passages in which the strings completely drowned out the pianist, and it was largely because some of the string players were playing this light-hearted Schubert inspiration as if it were a huge dramatic passage in the operas of Wagner or the symphonies of Mahler.  So while it was fun to welcome back an old familiar friend such as the Trout, the playing was for me rather disappointing.

No such qualms about the next night and the Tchaikovsky Piano Trio in A Minor, Op. 50.  This has been a favourite of mine also for many years, but I have never heard it played as it was on Thursday night and I doubt I ever will hear it like that again.  It's a powerful memorial work, but on this night it developed extra depth and dimension as a result of the particular occasion.

Canadian pianist Charles Richard-Hamelin won the silver medal at the last Chopin International Piano Competition, and as a result his solo piano career has gone up like a rocket.  It's for this reason that he made a totally understandable decision to end his participation in the Montreal ensemble Trio Hochelaga.  Friday night's concert began with Richard-Hamelin playing three Chopin selections, and those were incredible enough.  But it was when the Trio took the stage for Tchaikovsky, that founder Anne Robert (violin) explained that this was his final appearance with the Trio.  From her words, and the embraces the players shared a moment later, it was obvious that this was an emotional moment for them -- and that emotion certainly translated into Tchaikovsky's funereal masterpiece.

The result was a performance that showed an extra desire to really give their all to the music.  From the opening notes of the first movement, we clearly sensed that we were embarking on a memorable journey.  This became crystal clear when the first theme returned for the recapitulation, daringly played at a much slower pace than the original tempo.  The air of nostalgia and remembrance was unmistakable, as it was again in the slow coda.

In the second movement variations, it seemed that each one got pushed just a little farther than usual in its own way.  Faster, slower, lighter, more playful, darker, more of a dance-like lift, and so on.  For the entire length of the movement, there was no sense of slackening of interest or attention to the music.  The long final variation stormed across the stage in a wild celebration that was raucous and yet controlled at the same time.  Never has that sudden awful swerve back into A minor come with such power and immediacy, such an overwhelming sense of a tragedy unfolding.  The power of the long coda exceeded all that we had heard before and the long diminuendo to the end was paced at an achingly slow speed, the final notes from the piano as gentle as they could possibly be while remaining audible.  There followed a long silence before the storm of applause and cheers erupted.  I suspect most of the audience would agree that this was a once-in-a-lifetime event.

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