Festival of the Sound 2018 # 8: Youthful Hands Across the Water

For the first time in quite a few summers, the National Youth Orchestra of Canada is making one of its summer touring appearances at the Festival.

Although I may have missed one somewhere along the line (I always miss a few dates here every summer), the last time I remember the National Youth Orchestra appearing here was back in the days when evening concerts were held at the Parry Sound High School -- and that's many years ago now!

The NYOC is Canada's most comprehensive summer training institute for young orchestral players who show uncommon promise.  They work intensively under skilled mentors in a figurative "hothouse" environment, practising their skills in both chamber and orchestral work, before launching out on tour.

On this occasion, there were two concerts.  An afternoon free concert featured members of the orchestra in some of the chamber works they had been preparing.

A wind quintet gave a sprightly, light-hearted reading of Ibert's Trois pieces brèves.  Horn soloist Martin Mangrum, in Schumann's Adagio and Allegro, Op. 70, produced velvety tone in the adagio and tore through the gymnastics of the allegro with both spirit and precision.

After joining Mangrum in the Schumann, pianist Jonathan Mak then gave a powerhouse performance of the opening Maestoso-allegro con brio of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 32, Op. 111, one of the greatest and toughest products of Beethoven's later years.  Two movements of the same master's String Quartet No. 10, Op. 74 followed, played with warmth, energy, and broad dynamic range.

The concert concluded with a large-scale, dramatic reading of the first movement of Franck's Piano Quintet, with the players relishing the huge contrasts between the big dramatic gestures and the shapely contrasting theme of rising and falling thirds.

The main evening concert is where this blog post's title really comes in.  The programme consisted of two American masterpieces, followed by a major English work so uncommon on this side of the ocean that I had never before heard it played live -- even though I've known and loved it for nearly 50 years.  Once the entire orchestra was in place (all 95 players), Jim Campbell was able to state with complete assurance that this was the largest number of feet the Festival had ever placed on the stage.

The concert opened with Catfish Row by George Gershwin, a 5-movement suite of orchestral excerpts drawn by the composer from the score of Porgy and Bess.  For many years, this landmark work was judged to be a musical theatre piece, but more recently has been frequently considered a fully-fledged opera.  The suite is dramatic indeed, powerful and dissonant in some parts, yet infused by the composer's signature jazz rhythms elsewhere.  It's interesting for another reason, in that the score contains some passages which the composer had cut out of the complete opera.

Then followed one of the most purely delightful works in the entire American repertoire, the Suite from "Appalachian Spring" by Aaron Copland. Copland was amused no end when people said he had depicted the Appalachians in this work, because the title was a late addition when the score was all but complete. Until then, he just called it "ballet for Martha" (referring to Martha Graham) -- and she had simply asked him for a ballet score with an American theme.

None the less, this is vividly coloured, earthy music, and the orchestra captured all its contrasting moods and styles.  The key requirement here is the need to create a sense of country life in all its variety, in the age of the horse and buggy, the team plough and harvest scythe, the barn-raisings and the church picnics.  The performance certainly met the score's most sophisticated demands while still keeping the essentially folksy, down-home atmosphere.  

The major offering was the third of nine symphonies composed by Ralph Vaughan Williams, entitled simply A Pastoral Symphony.  There couldn't be a bigger contrast from Beethoven's work of similar title!  British musicologist Michael Kennedy, one of the foremost experts on this remarkable composer, affirmed his belief that the work was RVW's requiem for all  his friends and fellow artists who had died in combat in World War One (it was written in the years immediately after the war and first performed in 1922).

It's in four movements, and is predominantly quiet and slow-moving, but within that context are plenty of harmonically unsettling moments -- cleverly disguised by having colliding triads sounded by instruments with totally different sound qualities played in widely differing registers.  A cadenza in the second movement makes use of the natural harmonic series of the trumpet (and, later, the horn) with the flat seventh note that cannot be played on the equally tempered scale of the piano.  The lumbering scherzo has some tricky cross-rhythms, and a thistledown-light high-speed coda whose final notes have to drift across the ears at the lower end of audibility.  All in all, not a work to be taken lightly, nor one to readily yield its elusive magic to either performers or audiences.

From the very first notes, the music cast a spell on the audience.  The all-important string writing was given with beautiful legato tone.  Especially lovely was the frequently-reiterated string tag of a descending triplet, followed by a questioning figure from the oboe, in the first movement.  Solo parts for viola, violin, cor anglais, oboe, trumpet, and horn, all contributed to the unique atmosphere.

As I had expected, the finale opened not with the wordless soprano solo over a quiet drumroll but with the composer's sanctioned alternative of having that rapturous cadenza "sung" by a clarinet -- and it was beautifully done.  The main ascending theme of the movement was firmly and richly played by winds and brass before passing to the strings.  The fff climax of the movement, the unison rendition of the clarinet's solo line by all the violins and violas, was played with tremendous intensity and power.  As the music dwindled away, the clarinet returned with the cadenza, this time under a very quiet sustained high note, ppp, in the violins -- a note which faded away without precisely ending.  I think the composer would have approved.

Conductor Johnathan Darlington led the orchestra throughout the entire programme with great energy, and a strong sense of the line of the music at all times.  While I might have wished for a little bit more give and take in tempo in parts of the symphony, it was still a very fine performance.

Worth waiting half a century to hear?  Definitely.