Saturday 15 October 2016

How It Works

Last night, I attended a very interesting event at the Toronto Symphony.  The orchestra has been presenting conductor Rob Kapilow's What Makes It Great? series for a number of years now, but this is the first time I have ever attended one of these unusual concerts.  I have to admit that the incentive came from hearing a former colleague talk about taking a class of students to hear such a concert, and the impact it had on them.  That's why I selected this particular event when I had a subscription ticket that I needed to exchange.

Of course it didn't do any harm that I particularly enjoy the musical work under consideration!

The format of Kapilow's concerts is organized in two parts.  In the first part, he walks the audience through the structure, thematic material, orchestration, and the like, with the players of the orchestra providing live musical examples as they go.  After the intermission, the work is played complete.  If this sounds a bit too much like Classical Music for Beginners, I can only assure you that you are wrong -- and that, even for an old codger like me who thought he knew the score very well, Kapilow managed to cast surprising new illumination on the structure of an old warhorse.

So, tonight was Ravel's famous orchestration of Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition.  The original work was written in 1874 for solo piano, and is one of the great monuments of the 19th-century piano repertoire.  Ravel's version was created in 1922 when he was himself at the height of his powers as a composer and master orchestrator.  Although many other composers have created their own orchestral versions of the Pictures, none has ever seized the public's fancy -- or the eyes of the professional musicians -- as much as this one.

So it was particularly intriguing to me that Kapilow, in the first half, actually had the orchestra play several excerpts from the hands of other arrangers to highlight the differences in procedure in Ravel's version.  In saying that, I'm not forgetting that the orchestra -- under its previous Music Director, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, recorded the complete work in a version which selected from the orchestrations of Leo Funtek and Sergei Gortchakov.

Since Kapilow also played some sections of Mussorgsky's original piano score on an electronic keyboard during the first half, he gave the audience a good collection of insights into the music and Ravel's approach to recasting it for full orchestra.  All of this explaining and illustrating was done with tremendous energy and plenty of good laugh lines.  After all, who ever said or believed that classical music ought to be boring?

Perhaps the biggest insight was Kapilow's observation that the pictures, at least those that have survived (they were reproduced in the programme) are, frankly speaking, not very good.  Hartmann, the artist, wasn't nearly as memorable as the music might have us think.  Really, Mussorgsky was composing a musical tribute to his recently-deceased friend, and in the process was creating stories in music inspired by the prosaic pictures.

For me, the most startling results come in two of the movements, starting with Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle.  These were actually two separate portraits drawn by Hartmann.  It was Mussorgsky's genius that forever linked them together and memorably created a scene which Hartmann never painted -- a scene with the rich and poor Jews arguing with each other.

The other extraordinary amplification comes in Baba Yaga.  Hartmann's picture depicts a perfectly ordinary folk-styled wall clock in the shape of Baba Yaga's hut.  It was Mussorgsky who ditched the clock and instead created a full-throttle exciting witch's ride for Baba Yaga, with a chilling creepy portrait of the magical hut on chicken's claws dwelling in the centre of the music as the hut lay hidden in the forest.

The predictable result of all this explaining and demonstrating came after the intermission.  I imagine the rest of the audience shared my feeling of hearing the Pictures at an Exhibition with fresh ears and a whole new point of view.

The performance itself was powerful, certainly.  Dynamic ranges were wide without being overwhelming.  A couple of the more rapid passages showed a tendency to start pulling apart for a moment or two, but on the whole we got a good -- if not great -- reading of the Pictures.  Highlights for me were the dwindling quiet ending of Bydlo, the sustained mystical feeling of Con mortuis, and the hair-raising witch's ride.

After the concert ends, there's a question and answer period.  Kapilow took perhaps a dozen questions from different audience members.  I was particularly happy that somebody asked Patricia Krueger about all the different instruments she had to play (tamtam, ratchet, slapstick, triangle, and celesta!).  She simply said, laughingly, that it was fun to be able to do so.  It was Rob Kapilow who pointed out that he had never seen another orchestra in which the chief keyboard player joined in so readily on the percussion as well.  That brought a big wave of applause, from audience and players, for one of the orchestra's senior members!

Take it all in all, it was certainly a fun evening -- informative and entertaining in equal measures.  

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