Festival of the Sound 2018 # 11: Made in Canada With Made in Canada

Okay, no surprise to my loyal and very patient readers, I fell behind.  Here's a report on a really unusual and interesting event which was held at the Festival on Thursday night last week.  I already wrote about the performance of the Chopin second piano concerto, but the major part of the programme was given over to another world premiere, the Mosaïque Project.  

This unique musical programme was commissioned by the Ensemble Made in Canada, with the aid of grants from a number of agencies, and -- in my humble opinion -- more than repaid the time, effort, and funds invested in it.

Other musical organizations participated in special projects to commemorate the Canada 150 year, but this one was certainly unique in my experience -- even if it did arrive a year after the fact.

For example, the Toronto Symphony joined with a consortium of other orchestras to commission a series of short works, collectively known as Sesquie, for the anniversary.  These pieces were to last a maximum of 2 minutes, and were performed as curtain-raisers at numerous concerts over the last two seasons.  I reviewed several of them in this blog.

Ensemble Made in Canada took a decidedly different tack.  Their plan was for a collection of 14 pieces, each to last a maximum of 5 minutes -- to be performed all together, in a single performance.  The resulting list of musical creators amounts to a roll-call, or a "Who's Who," of the newer generations of Canada's most distinguished composers.

(Many of the same composers who had contributed to the Sesquie project were involved here as well, and I could almost hear them heaving a collective sigh of relief at getting 2½ times as much breathing room for their compositions!)

After having performed at the Festival of the Sound on previous occasions, the Ensemble Made in Canada offered the Festival the opportunity to host the world premiere performance of the complete cycle of 14 new Canadian works.  I'm certainly glad that the Festival seized the opportunity!

In the completed cycle, each composer was asked to create a work inspired by, or in some way linked to, one of the 10 provinces, the 3 territories, or the St. Lawrence-Great Lakes waterway, thus making up the total of 14 compositions.

In performance, the works were presented in an artistically satisfying order, so that styles of music varied from one to the next, and the entire cycle ended with a rousing, folk-dance-inspired finale.

The fourteen works, the inspiring regions, and the composers, in the order performed were:

Red River Fantasy (Manitoba)

Andrew Downing

Petroglyphs (Ontario)

Richard Mascall

Splendor sine occasu (British Columbia)

Ana Sokolović

Jonny Pippy of Pouch Cove, on a Bicycle at Dawn (Newfoundland & Labrador)

Sarah Slean

Short Variations on Waves (Nova Scotia)

William Rowson

Shifting Landscapes (Alberta)

Vivian Fung

Ilôts  (Quebec)

Nicolas Gilbert

Great Bear River Blues (Northwest Territories)

David Braid

The Bessborough Hotel (Saskatchewan)

Nicole Lizée

Nbiidaasamishkaamin/We Come Paddling Here (St. Lawrence/Great Lakes)

Barbara Croall

Orpheus in Nunavut (Nunavut)

Samy Moussa

Race to the Midnight Sun (Yukon)

Kevin Lau

Blessed (New Brunswick)

Julie Doiron, arr. Andrew Creegan

Kensington Ceilidh (Prince Edward Island)

Darren Sigesmund

The titles alone will give some idea of the fascinating approaches taken by the different composers.

In performance, I found that the works readily sorted themselves into two main groups -- those which acknowledged rhythm as one of the prime factors of music, and those which assigned rhythm a lesser importance to tone colour.

The difference, simply put, is that the works concerned primarily with tone colour tended to produce a series of sounds, pleasingly consonant or harshly abrasive as the case might be, with little or no apparent reason why these sounds and no others should be linked together in a single unit.  Even though the composers provided programme notes to be shared with the audience, the notes sometimes seemed to bear but scant resemblance to what we heard.  (Note that, as is my usual practice, I did not read the programme notes at all until after the concert. )

In the other group of works, there was generally a much clearer sense that the music began somewhere, moved along its course, and finished its journey at a distinct point of arrival.  I realize that my thoughts on this subject make me hopelessly passé to the musical avant-garde, but I always feel music which lacks any of the key elements of rhythm, melody, harmony, and tone colour, has less staying power than music which at least touches on all four.  

Having said that, I did enjoy some of the colouristic experimentation of the more avant-garde group.  

My own purely personal sense was that the most gripping works of the evening were the opening Red River Fantasy for its highly rhythmic driving energy, Jonny Pippy of Pouch Cove, on a Bicycle at Dawn for its vivid pictorialism, The Bessborough Hotel for the creepy ghost music which definitely advanced far beyond Hollywood's idea of ghosts, and the Kensington Ceilidh for the lively, upbeat folk-dance which powered the piece.

However, I was intrigued by everything that the 14 composers had decided to share in their music, and pleased that the Ensemble Made in Canada had chosen Parry Sound as the proper location in which to present the premiere of this unique cycle of modern Canadian music, the Mosaïque Project.