Sorry about the long absence, dear readers! The final weekend of the Festival of the Sound for 2012 was everything you could have wished (except for lack of sun) and more.
Friday was a typical Festival weekday with three concerts, but "typical" ended right there as the quality of these three performances was superlative even by Festival standards! At noon we got a supremely musical reading of the Sonata in G, D.894. I dearly love the Schubert Sonatas and wish we could hear more of them, more often. Janina Fialkowska was perhaps a shade too brisk for my liking in the finale, but otherwise her choices of tempo were ideal. With all four movements of this "symphony for the piano" containing marvellous Schubertian melodies, the need to make the piano sing is paramount. Many pianists have trouble doing this, but Fialkowska's playing had the singing quality in spades!
Also on hand were the Festival Winds, up to their usual standards in Mozart's Wind Serenade KV.388 -- lovely, relaxing Mozart, not highly dramatic, but very enjoyable indeed.
In the afternoon we heard Trio Hochelaga in two works. Rachmaninoff's Trio Elegiaque # 1 is certainly the work of an 18-year old prodigy, but just as certainly it works -- the passionate climax hits me right in the emotional gut every time I hear it. He may have been emulating his mentor Tchaikovsky's Piano Trio, but Rachmaninoff went one better in the heavy use of the low strings and the bottom half of the keyboard -- the dark, brooding sound of this music is unforgettable.
Trio Hochelaga then went on to a sunny, warm-hearted reading of Schubert's magnificent Piano Trio in B flat Major, D. 898. Every second of this delightful piece came beautifully to life in their able hands.
The evening concert featured the Elmer Iseler Singers, frequent visitors to the Festival, actor R. H. Thomson as narrator, and Gene di Novi and Dave Young in a jazz segment that ended the program. As always, when diNovi and Young are at hand, you know you're going to have fun. These two veteran jazz-meisters, with their infectious grins and schoolboy sense of fun, inevitably make an audience fall in love with them and with their music-making! The Iseler Singers were plainly having fun working with them too!
In the earlier part of the program, there were some striking modern works, but for me these faded into insignificance beside the ineffable beauty of Healey Willan's Our Lady Motets. These unaccompanied choral masterpieces are plainly of the 20th century, yet at the same time they have a timeless quality that places them firmly in the line of choral singing stretching clear back to Gregorian chant.
And finally, the opening work on the program was the rarest bird of all. It's not often that you get a chance to hear Vaughan Williams' Serenade to Music in its original form for 16 vocal soloists. The Iselers are one of the very few choirs in Canada that could dare this feat and pull it off, since the music demands nothing less than 16 professional singers of the highest ability (a perfect description of the group who sang the first performance in 1938). The Serenade has to be accounted one of the most perfect marriages of Shakespearean poetry with music, and to hear it this way -- with the sensitive piano accompaniment of director Lydia Adams adequately compensating for the missing orchestra -- was a beautiful privilege.
I'll have to continue later with the concerts of Saturday and Sunday -- this post is getting totally out of control!
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