This month I'm attending a music festival with a difference. I've embarked on a classical music travel package which includes 3 nights in Amsterdam, a 7-night Rhine cruise, and 2 nights in Zurich. Ten of the 12 days include concerts, some at shore venues, and some on the ship. The featured musicians on the cruise are James Campbell and Graham Campbell from the Festival of the Sound, and the Gryphon Trio from the Ottawa Chamberfest. Some of the onshore events feature European performers and ensembles.
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Amsterdam's Concertgebouw ("Concert Building") has long been renowned for the splendid acoustics of its Great Hall, considered one of the finest concert halls in the world. The much newer Muziekgebouw aan 't Ij ("Music Building on the Ij") opened in 2005, as part of a modern redevelopment of the eastern harbourfront. This hall is mainly geared to modern chamber music, and again has very fine acoustics to suit its purpose. On Saturday, I attended concerts in both buildings, and here's my review of these two performances.
On my first-ever independent trip to Amsterdam, way back in 1975, I had a chance to attend a concert at the Concertgebouw. I passed on the chance (lack of funds and time). This year, another dream on my musical bucket list finally came true as I took my seat in the Concertgebouw for the season opener concert of the Radio Filharmonisch Orkest, led by their brand-new Music Director, Karina Canellakis.
On my first-ever independent trip to Amsterdam, way back in 1975, I had a chance to attend a concert at the Concertgebouw. I passed on the chance (lack of funds and time). This year, another dream on my musical bucket list finally came true as I took my seat in the Concertgebouw for the season opener concert of the Radio Filharmonisch Orkest, led by their brand-new Music Director, Karina Canellakis.
The programme followed the classic overture-concerto-symphony pattern so familiar from my youth, but the choice of repertoire was definitely adventurous.
The concert opened with a repertoire staple -- the overture to Egmont by Beethoven. Canellakis led the orchestra in a brisk performance of the main allegro section of this work after a carefully shaped slow introduction. My one quibble in this piece was the lack of clarity in the final "Victory Symphony," as the repeated pairs of notes in the violins blurred into something closer to single notes. But this might be due to the Concertgebouw's famed warm acoustic and the fact that I was sitting in the "podium seating" (otherwise known as the choir loft), and behind the violin section. But still, a splendid opener to the concert with the final clearly articulated staccato chords giving a rousing finish.
There followed the Netherlands premiere of a violin concerto, Aether, written in 2017 by American composer Sebastian Currier. Oddly enough, I could find no mention of this four-movement work on the composer's own website.
My biggest problem with this piece is that so much of it is of the type of modern music where everything moves with glacial slowness. Silence slowly fades up into audibility. Here's a sound, then a long pause filled with background shimmerings; okay, here's another sound -- and more shimmerings. Wait, here's a sound you haven't heard before. And so forth. At the opening, the soloist, Baiba Skride, began by imitating in turn each of the little sound bites given forth by various other instruments. She used different techniques on the violin to try to evoke the sound quality of each of the instruments that she was copying, and did so with considerable skill.
Eventually her part evolved into a slow, somewhat lyrical melody which sounded interesting when I could hear it (which was not often) through the sudden blasts of brass, winds, percussion, or combinations thereof. There was a brief section in the second half when the soloist erupted into an intense cadenza of tone clusters, whereupon the music suddenly exploded to life with a vigorous rhythmic pattern and sense of movement, a quality lacking until then. This energetic impulse -- which you might describe as a scherzo -- exhausted itself after a couple of minutes, and the tedium of the opening returned -- in thankfully shortened form, leading to an ending where sound faded slowly into silence.
I could see no particular reason why Aether could not have said what it had to say in 5 or 6 minutes instead of something close to half an hour. Nor did it offer much opportunity for the audience to hear Baiba Skride on the violin, a serious flaw in a work that purports to be a violin concerto.
The concert concluded with a performance of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10 which was nothing short of hair-raising -- and not only for the loud, exciting parts of the score.
Canellakis absolutely had the measure of this large and complex score. From the quiet opening to the dramatic climaxes, the first movement quivered with energy held on a tight rein. The second-movement scherzo let all that energy rip at a sizzling pace. There was no doubt about the unanimity of the orchestral response, although the string parts lost something in clarity in rapid passagework due to the hall's acoustic environment. But the music demands this kind of frenetic speed, and the details are less important that the overall impression of a demonic ride to the abyss.
Both conductor and orchestra found the right kind of almost dead tone for the long quiet passages of the slow movement. Then, in the tricky cross rhythms of the finale, the precision of the playing again paid dividends. Canellakis whipped the orchestra up to a high peak of fervour in the exultant closing pages. The ensuing standing ovation, for both conductor and players, was entirely merited.
The evening concert at the Muziekgebouw brought the Pavel Haas Quartet with an intriguing programme of 21st and 20th century string quartet music. The programme was arranged in reverse order, so to speak, beginning with the more recent music and working backwards to the older pieces.
Lubica Cekovská (b.1975) is one of the current generations of composers who aren't afraid of such old-fashioned elements as rhythm, melody, and a general sense of motion and pace in their music. Her A Midsummer Quartet of 2016 is a single movement work, written in a style which automatically induced a smile in at least this member of the audience.
After a brief slow introduction consisting of several drooping glissandi, the cellist launched into a pizzicato bass line which sounded for all the world like the rhythm line of a jazz bassist, and this cello part became the propulsive force of the work which followed. Without analyzing it too closely, I'd assume that the line was in predominantly major harmonies since it had a notably cheerful feeling to it. Above it the other three string parts came and went, sometimes in spicy dissonances, sometimes in repetitive ostinato figures which were clearly in major keys. A few moments found the plucked rhythmic part jumping briefly to each of the other instruments while the cellist took up the more melodic lines. The music contained ample variation of its materials to sustain interest, and wound up with that punctual feeling of having arrived at the right moment -- a relatively rare sensation in much contemporary music.
The Pavel Haas Quartet appeared to be enjoying themselves very much in this score, where artfully apparent simplicity concealed considerable complexity and sophistication.
The next work was the String Quartet No. 1 by Erwin Schulhoff. His idiom in this work, written in 1924, moved freely between expressionistic dissonance and strongly tonal, even modal, harmonies. The peculiar result reminded me of early Prokofiev one minute, and Vaughan Williams the next. It's not an entirely insupportable comparison, since both of those masters made free use of conventional harmony alongside fierce dissonances. The Pavel Haas Quartet pointed up the moments of maximum contrast between styles, a wise course as those sudden shifts provide much of the dramatic and musical interest in the score.
Bohuslav Martinu's String Quartet No. 2 of 1925 was the third offering. Considering that it was being written almost simultaneously with the Schulhoff quartet, and within a broadly similar musical environment, Martinu's work projected a startlingly different atmosphere. This work brought a more severe idiom, with less tonal writing and considerable quiet work in the high harmonics. The Haas Quartet managed to give these harmonics a cold, glittering sheen, creating a disquieting background for whichever instrument was currently occupying the spotlight. The Quartet rightly deemed that this kind of music calls for beauty of tone to take something of a backseat to more edgy attack and tension throughout the melodic lines. The wide leaps called for rapid string crossings, all very cleanly executed.
The major work of the concert, after the intermission, was the String Quartet No.2 "Intimate Letters," by Leoš Janácek. This quartet was commissioned in 1925, but not performed until 1928, a month after the composer had died.
This is a large work in four movements, but with each movement containing several subsections in contrasting tempi. It shares common features with many other works of Janácek's prolific last decade: lyrical melodies with wide melodic leaps, frequent ostinato figures repeated obsessively above, below, and around the melodies, and frequent clashes or quick switches between unrelated tonal chords. The music was described by Janácek as his "manifesto on love," and specifically on his long and unrequited love for Kamila Stösslová, a married woman 38 years younger than himself. The pair exchanged over 700 letters during the years of their friendship.
This biographical detail is important for 2 reasons in the finished work. One is the prominence of the viola part, intended by the composer to represent the voice of Kamila. He originally planned it as a part for a viola d'amore, but substituted the conventional viola when the viola d'amore didn't fit the texture in the way he had hoped.
The other important feature is the uniquely quiet, introspective tone of the slower sections in each movement which become -- at least for me -- the personification of Kamila's cooler letters to the composer, versus the more vehement and passionate utterance of the composer's voice in the louder, faster sections.
In effect, then, the single quartet has to become like two different quartets, playing in two very different styles that can speak with the voices of the two protagonists in the relationship. In every way, then, a work which challenges and stretches both players and audiences.
All four members of the Pavel Haas Quartet gave great weight to the bigger sections, while using a very spare, almost sparse sound in the quieter, slower pages. The all-important viola part was clearly heard but not unduly spotlighted by the other three. Crisp execution of the endless ostinato figures avoided any feeling of boredom or routine. The various sudden shifts in tempo, key, and volume were allowed to be sudden by these players -- which matters a great deal because those blunt changes are a central feature of Janácek's compositional style.
This intense and powerful performance of Intimate Letters made for a rewarding culmination to a particularly intriguing programme of lesser-known music from less well-known composers.
The concert opened with a repertoire staple -- the overture to Egmont by Beethoven. Canellakis led the orchestra in a brisk performance of the main allegro section of this work after a carefully shaped slow introduction. My one quibble in this piece was the lack of clarity in the final "Victory Symphony," as the repeated pairs of notes in the violins blurred into something closer to single notes. But this might be due to the Concertgebouw's famed warm acoustic and the fact that I was sitting in the "podium seating" (otherwise known as the choir loft), and behind the violin section. But still, a splendid opener to the concert with the final clearly articulated staccato chords giving a rousing finish.
There followed the Netherlands premiere of a violin concerto, Aether, written in 2017 by American composer Sebastian Currier. Oddly enough, I could find no mention of this four-movement work on the composer's own website.
My biggest problem with this piece is that so much of it is of the type of modern music where everything moves with glacial slowness. Silence slowly fades up into audibility. Here's a sound, then a long pause filled with background shimmerings; okay, here's another sound -- and more shimmerings. Wait, here's a sound you haven't heard before. And so forth. At the opening, the soloist, Baiba Skride, began by imitating in turn each of the little sound bites given forth by various other instruments. She used different techniques on the violin to try to evoke the sound quality of each of the instruments that she was copying, and did so with considerable skill.
Eventually her part evolved into a slow, somewhat lyrical melody which sounded interesting when I could hear it (which was not often) through the sudden blasts of brass, winds, percussion, or combinations thereof. There was a brief section in the second half when the soloist erupted into an intense cadenza of tone clusters, whereupon the music suddenly exploded to life with a vigorous rhythmic pattern and sense of movement, a quality lacking until then. This energetic impulse -- which you might describe as a scherzo -- exhausted itself after a couple of minutes, and the tedium of the opening returned -- in thankfully shortened form, leading to an ending where sound faded slowly into silence.
I could see no particular reason why Aether could not have said what it had to say in 5 or 6 minutes instead of something close to half an hour. Nor did it offer much opportunity for the audience to hear Baiba Skride on the violin, a serious flaw in a work that purports to be a violin concerto.
The concert concluded with a performance of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10 which was nothing short of hair-raising -- and not only for the loud, exciting parts of the score.
Canellakis absolutely had the measure of this large and complex score. From the quiet opening to the dramatic climaxes, the first movement quivered with energy held on a tight rein. The second-movement scherzo let all that energy rip at a sizzling pace. There was no doubt about the unanimity of the orchestral response, although the string parts lost something in clarity in rapid passagework due to the hall's acoustic environment. But the music demands this kind of frenetic speed, and the details are less important that the overall impression of a demonic ride to the abyss.
Both conductor and orchestra found the right kind of almost dead tone for the long quiet passages of the slow movement. Then, in the tricky cross rhythms of the finale, the precision of the playing again paid dividends. Canellakis whipped the orchestra up to a high peak of fervour in the exultant closing pages. The ensuing standing ovation, for both conductor and players, was entirely merited.
The evening concert at the Muziekgebouw brought the Pavel Haas Quartet with an intriguing programme of 21st and 20th century string quartet music. The programme was arranged in reverse order, so to speak, beginning with the more recent music and working backwards to the older pieces.
Lubica Cekovská (b.1975) is one of the current generations of composers who aren't afraid of such old-fashioned elements as rhythm, melody, and a general sense of motion and pace in their music. Her A Midsummer Quartet of 2016 is a single movement work, written in a style which automatically induced a smile in at least this member of the audience.
After a brief slow introduction consisting of several drooping glissandi, the cellist launched into a pizzicato bass line which sounded for all the world like the rhythm line of a jazz bassist, and this cello part became the propulsive force of the work which followed. Without analyzing it too closely, I'd assume that the line was in predominantly major harmonies since it had a notably cheerful feeling to it. Above it the other three string parts came and went, sometimes in spicy dissonances, sometimes in repetitive ostinato figures which were clearly in major keys. A few moments found the plucked rhythmic part jumping briefly to each of the other instruments while the cellist took up the more melodic lines. The music contained ample variation of its materials to sustain interest, and wound up with that punctual feeling of having arrived at the right moment -- a relatively rare sensation in much contemporary music.
The Pavel Haas Quartet appeared to be enjoying themselves very much in this score, where artfully apparent simplicity concealed considerable complexity and sophistication.
The next work was the String Quartet No. 1 by Erwin Schulhoff. His idiom in this work, written in 1924, moved freely between expressionistic dissonance and strongly tonal, even modal, harmonies. The peculiar result reminded me of early Prokofiev one minute, and Vaughan Williams the next. It's not an entirely insupportable comparison, since both of those masters made free use of conventional harmony alongside fierce dissonances. The Pavel Haas Quartet pointed up the moments of maximum contrast between styles, a wise course as those sudden shifts provide much of the dramatic and musical interest in the score.
Bohuslav Martinu's String Quartet No. 2 of 1925 was the third offering. Considering that it was being written almost simultaneously with the Schulhoff quartet, and within a broadly similar musical environment, Martinu's work projected a startlingly different atmosphere. This work brought a more severe idiom, with less tonal writing and considerable quiet work in the high harmonics. The Haas Quartet managed to give these harmonics a cold, glittering sheen, creating a disquieting background for whichever instrument was currently occupying the spotlight. The Quartet rightly deemed that this kind of music calls for beauty of tone to take something of a backseat to more edgy attack and tension throughout the melodic lines. The wide leaps called for rapid string crossings, all very cleanly executed.
The major work of the concert, after the intermission, was the String Quartet No.2 "Intimate Letters," by Leoš Janácek. This quartet was commissioned in 1925, but not performed until 1928, a month after the composer had died.
This is a large work in four movements, but with each movement containing several subsections in contrasting tempi. It shares common features with many other works of Janácek's prolific last decade: lyrical melodies with wide melodic leaps, frequent ostinato figures repeated obsessively above, below, and around the melodies, and frequent clashes or quick switches between unrelated tonal chords. The music was described by Janácek as his "manifesto on love," and specifically on his long and unrequited love for Kamila Stösslová, a married woman 38 years younger than himself. The pair exchanged over 700 letters during the years of their friendship.
This biographical detail is important for 2 reasons in the finished work. One is the prominence of the viola part, intended by the composer to represent the voice of Kamila. He originally planned it as a part for a viola d'amore, but substituted the conventional viola when the viola d'amore didn't fit the texture in the way he had hoped.
The other important feature is the uniquely quiet, introspective tone of the slower sections in each movement which become -- at least for me -- the personification of Kamila's cooler letters to the composer, versus the more vehement and passionate utterance of the composer's voice in the louder, faster sections.
In effect, then, the single quartet has to become like two different quartets, playing in two very different styles that can speak with the voices of the two protagonists in the relationship. In every way, then, a work which challenges and stretches both players and audiences.
All four members of the Pavel Haas Quartet gave great weight to the bigger sections, while using a very spare, almost sparse sound in the quieter, slower pages. The all-important viola part was clearly heard but not unduly spotlighted by the other three. Crisp execution of the endless ostinato figures avoided any feeling of boredom or routine. The various sudden shifts in tempo, key, and volume were allowed to be sudden by these players -- which matters a great deal because those blunt changes are a central feature of Janácek's compositional style.
This intense and powerful performance of Intimate Letters made for a rewarding culmination to a particularly intriguing programme of lesser-known music from less well-known composers.
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