Festival of the Sound 2019 # 1: A Gala Opening and a World Premiere

As my regular readers well know, several weeks of my summer each year are devoted to absorbing classical music at full intensity in Parry Sound, Ontario, home of the Festival of the Sound.  This is one of three major music festivals in Ontario celebrating significant anniversaries this year -- the Festival of the Sound and the Elora Festival at 40 years each, and the Ottawa Chamberfest at 25 years.  It's a bit sobering to realize that my "few" years of attending this splendid Festival now extend to over a quarter of a century.  Where did the time go?

I could easily write a book about all the incredible musical experiences and the lovely friendships which this Festival has brought into my life.  Maybe I will, but not here and now!

It's with something of the feeling of an annual family reunion that I walk on opening night into the Charles W. Stockey Centre, the Festival's home since 2003.  It would be hard to imagine a better acoustic environment for the chamber music which forms the Festival's backbone.  The performance hall is a singularly exciting space from a visual viewpoint as well as for its sterling acoustic qualities.

The time before the opening concert (and during the intermission) is a great opportunity to meet old friends again, and get into the festive mood.  It's also a moment to reflect, lovingly and gratefully, on the lives of other old Festival friends who are no longer with us.

The Gala Opening Concert definitely lived up to its billing, with the presence of the Elmer Iseler Singers, a nine-member instrumental ensemble, and a large-scale new work written for the occasion.

The Elmer Iseler Singers also celebrate their 40th anniversary this year.  During that time, their reputation has grown until they have become one of the pre-eminent musical institutions of Canada, a professional chamber choir of uncommon versatility, beauty of tone, precision, and depth of musicality.  All of those characteristics were present in ample quantities last night.

The opening number of the programme was a perfect example.  Talk about hitting the ground running at full speed; the concert began with a spectacular, full-throttle Cum Sancto Spiritu from the B Minor Mass of Bach.  Under director Lydia Adams, the choir hit the exact sweet spot between too slow and too fast -- the "right speed," at which all the complex fugal lines can be, and are, clearly and precisely enunciated with no blurring of the notes, while the music still has all the necessary lift and go to keep Bach's joyful inspiration dancing us lightly away.  Plainly, it's been too long since I've heard a complete B Minor Mass!

Equally spectacular in their very different styles were the opening O Fortuna from Orff's Carmina Burana, the hair-raising Dies Irae from Mozart's Requiem, Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, and the powerfully moving The Hour Has Come by Srul Irving Glick.  Since Carmina Burana is usually sung by a much larger chorus, singing in unison, this was actually the first time I had ever heard the ferocious discords sprinkled throughout the piano part in the third verse of the song.  Normally, those discords are submerged by the singers.

Lydia Adams made sure the audience had to work too.  We had not one but two sing-along numbers.  No bonus points are awarded for correctly guessing the names:  Beethoven's Ode to Joy and Handel's Hallelujah.  

Of course, it wouldn't be a Festival of the Sound Gala without some comedy, and this was amply provided when the men of the choir sang the opening chorus, We Sail The Ocean Blue from the G & S operetta H.M.S. Pinafore.  This was succeeded by the delightfully wacky personal appearance of Little Buttercup herself, in the person of Mary Lou Fallis -- making a most welcome return to the Festival.  Buttercup is usually sung by an alto voice, but Fallis tossed in a gratuitous high note at the end which I'm sure has never been heard from any previous exponent of the role.

A small personal footnote.  I first met Mary Lou Fallis "just a few years ago" when I joined the St. George's Youth Choir in Toronto at the age of 15.  That choir always presented a G & S operetta every spring, and Mary Lou was the stage director of the piece that year.  It was -- you guessed it -- H. M. S. Pinafore!

Fallis also gave me -- and, I'm sure, quite a few others in last night's audience -- a first introduction to a unique Canadian literary personality:  Sarah Binks.  The introduction came in the form of three numbers from A Sarah Binks Songbook by Canadian composer John Greer.  Greer, of course, was setting lyrics from Paul Hiebert's comic novel.  The three songs were gravely identified in the programme as Hi, Sooky, ho, Sooky (Valse serenata), The Song of the Chore (Canzone Rustica), and Square Dance (Hoe-Down).  From which titles it is apparent that Greer is as accomplished a leg-puller as Hiebert himself.

Listening to Fallis in these hilarious comical numbers, I was transported back in time to the very first time I heard her perform at the Festival, back in the 1990s, when she sang some popular songs from the turn of the last century.  Greer's music captures exactly that same olden-timesy air, and suits the poetry right down to the ground.  Incidentally, the audience were all given sheets with the lyrics of these songs to make sure we got the joke.  Fallis has such splendid diction that the sheets weren't really that necessary for most of us.

I've saved the best for the last.  The main course of this musical confection was a brand-new work, written especially for this occasion by Canadian composer Eric Robertson.  The Festival of the Sound and the Elmer Iseler Singers both have a long and honourable history of commissioning new work from Canadian and international composers, but this was a little different.  Robertson's piece, set to a text by Gary Michael Dault, was a gift from the composer to both choir and festival.  It's no exaggeration to say that it was also a gift to the audience, as the buzz in the lobby afterwards amply confirmed.

The Sound: A Musical Evocation of Georgian Bay is a substantial work in five extended movements, running (at a guess) not far shy of an hour in total.  It's scored for speaker, choir, piano, string quartet, double bass, flute, clarinet, and percussion.  The five movements are entitled Water Music, The Rock, The Trees, Clouds, and Air.

It's beyond my scope to try to analyze the character of this work on a single hearing.  The music is definitely evocative of its subject rather than pictorial.  The work is predominantly (but not entirely) diatonic, with long melodic lines that are often avoided by contemporary composers.  Overall, it remained pleasing to the ear, but that doesn't mean that the music avoided challenging the audience to remain attentive and involved.  Dault's text, partly delivered by the speaker and partly sung by the chorus, similarly demanded attention -- lest one might miss the beautifully turned phrase here, or the sly little insinuation of humour there.

Renowned Canadian actor Colin Fox delivered the speaker's role with splendid clarity, pointing up key words and thoughts with subtle insight.  Whether speaking alone or over the music, Fox maintained an ideally brisk but unhurried pace.

The choir at several points had to take up a phrase which Fox had just spoken and examine it in more detail, as it were -- another feature that highlighted key points in Dault's writing.

The instrumental ensemble had some sections which challenged them with bits of music interspersed with rests of varying lengths.

The real stature of the piece emerges when the hearer realizes that the varied styles used to musically depict different aspects of "the Sound" are all intertwined and related to each other in different ways, giving the work an overall unity that you might not suspect from this description.

The enthusiastic applause -- and the prolonged cheering for composer Robertson -- were entirely merited.  I'd be more than happy to sit down and listen to this work again.  I certainly hope that it will be taken up and widely performed in the future.