Echo Chamber Toronto # 4: Zingara the Great!

With its fourth and, in some ways, greatest performance yet, Echo Chamber Toronto took its audience on a fantastic journey into the vivid and eclectic worlds of Eastern European music and modern dance.

The title of this spectacular performance, Zingara, and the associated cover graphic of a dancing gypsy woman, set up certain expectations -- but the matter is a good deal more complicated, even if "zingara" is the Italian word for a gypsy woman.

The entire region of Eastern Europe, especially the Balkans, has given birth to a fertile and sometimes wild cross-breeding of different musical and cultural traditions.  Slavic nationalism, the Romana music of the Roma people known in the English-speaking world as gypsies, the haunting strains of traditional Jewish and Arabic music, all got thrown into the melting pot at different periods.

The result is that the music in almost every country has its own distinctive national flavour, but with a strong dose of common elements found running across borders all over the region.  This is the region which Echo Chamber's artistic director, Aaron Schwebel, decided to visit in this performance.

It would be possible to try to choreograph dance to this music as a pastiche of dance from the same areas of the melting pot.  Possible, but hardly wise.  The choreographers for this show instead decided to let the music guide them, without overtly incorporating other cultural influences.

As in every Echo Chamber show, the results married music and dance more intimately and intensely than more conventional dance performances.  The performance was given in the Enoch Turner Schoolhouse, and the high-vaulted room added considerable resonance to the playing of the music, which was all written for strings.  The audience seating around three sides of the space gave viewers a maximum sense of involvement in the performance. 

The first half of the programme was choreographed by Brendan Saye, and danced by Hannah Galway, Donald Thom, and Naoya Ebe, all members of the National Ballet of Canada.  The lights came up and discovered a lone violinist seated at a table.  As Sheila Jaffé began playing the Red Violin Caprices by John Corigliano, Hannah Galway slowly entered behind her.  The two exchanged places, and the performance was under way.  It's these little moments of interaction between dancers and musicians that are the hallmark of the Echo Chamber Toronto programmes.

The Caprices were followed by a selection of traditional klezmer songs, a musical tradition rooted in the Ashkenazim Jewish communities of eastern Europe.  Jaffé was joined in these by violinist Aaron Schwebel and violist Catherine Gray.  This trio then continued into Kodály's Serenade for Two Violins and Viola, a work firmly rooted in the rich folk music tradition of Hungary.

Throughout the Caprices and the Serenade, the dancers performed in a style which, while not lacking energy, was highlighted by moments of stillness -- and the tension that such stillness can bring in a movement-centred art.  Brendan Saye's choreography used that tension to highlight the relationships among the three dancers.  One of the key points of stasis was achieved each of the several times that the dancers returned to sit at the table in the centre.

Partnered with the deep-rooted intensity of Corigliano and Kodály, the resulting dance was vigorous and gentle by turns, but with an overall grace of movement.  Saye's choreographic vision was filled with emotional possibilities, but in a totally open-ended fashion that left each viewer free to construct a personal interpretation.  This kind of artistic creation requires that an audience give their full concentration and let themselves be swept up and drawn in.  Those of us who went with the flow were richly rewarded.

After the intermission, more musicians and dancers joined the performance.  Violinists Emily Kruspe, Jamie Kruspe, and Csaba Koczó, and cellists Leana Rutt and Carmen Bruno joined forces with Schwebel, Jaffé, and Gray,  with Jaffé switching to viola.  Thus, we had the traditional string octet to perform the String Octet, Op. 7 by Enescu, another vividly-coloured, folk-inspired piece.

The choreography for two movements of this work was created by Hanna Kiel in collaboration with her three dancers: Hannah Galway, Kelly Shaw, and Ryan Lee. 

If Kiel's work apparently lacked the deep emotional subtext of the first half, it lacked for nothing in energy.  Bursts of high-speed movement alternated with more flowing passages, with frequent lifts a particular stylistic mark.  At two or three points, the hurtling dancers came close to creating total audience involvement with the front rows (another signature effect of Echo Chamber performances).

There were moments when I felt that the edgy character of the dance seemed a bit at odds with more reflective passages in the music, but the choreography was unfailingly musical in matching big movements to strong beats.  And there was no denying the sheer fun of watching these three dancers flinging themselves into their movement with such abandon.

Throughout the evening, the musicians drew out the maximum contrasts in style within and among the various works.  Despite the amplifying effect of the resonant hall, the music remained clear at all times, with crisp articulation in faster passages and beautifully-turned phrasing.  Special kudos to Sheila Jaffé for the intensity of her performance in the solo Red Violin Caprices.

Echo Chamber Toronto's Zingara repeats tonight, February 23, at 7:30 pm.

Festival of the Sound: The Whole is Greater

The Festival of the Sound launched its third annual pre-season series with a powerful performance of the final three Beethoven piano sonatas by pianist Leopoldo Erice.

Even among the many fine performances Erice has given at the Festival through the years, this concert in the small studio concert room at the Festival office stood out for its power, musicality, and for the sheer intensity of the experience.

The final sonatas, like so much of Beethoven's late-period music, are intense.  To perform all three in a single concert is gripping enough.  To play these works, as Erice did last night, in a single continuous flow of music with no discernible pause between them raises the intensity right through the roof.  In this concentrated format, the whole becomes far, far greater than just the sum of its parts.  In effect, Erice presented these three challenging and involving works as a single, continuous whole, a mighty symphony for the piano. 

This is not idle metaphor.  It's not just a question of a hot-shot virtuoso slapping the three pieces together in a row.  The entire performance was plainly the product of deep study and thought.  The magisterial quality of Erice's readings stemmed fully as much from his immersion in the music as from the near-superhuman technique needed to surmount these Olympian scores.

It's almost impossible to detach single moments as highlights in this continuous stream of music, but a few moments spring to mind.  The individual variations in the finales of the Sonata in E Major, Op. 109 and the Sonata in C Minor, Op. 111 were all vividly characterized without impairing the overall flow of the music.  The polyphonic lines in the fugue passage of the finale of Sonata in A-Flat Major, Op. 110, could be clearly distinguished -- as again in the inversion fugue which follows soon after.  The oft-repeated direction of espressivo showed itself in playing which foreshadowed the even more monumental sonatas by Schubert and Liszt that would arrive later in the nineteenth century.  

Above all, I was deeply moved by the restrained intensity filling the hymn-like coda at the culmination of Op. 111, the long, slow buildup to the thunderous climax a fitting completion to the entire massive "symphony."

I can best measure the extraordinary force of this performance by mentioning that, after Erice had taken his bows and left the stage, the room remained quiet as all of us in the audience needed some time to absorb what we had just lived through.

 My one complaint has nothing to do with the music, but rather with the venue.  The studio space is small, and has a high percentage of hard surfaces.  Played like this on a modern grand piano, the music can become uncomfortably congested in such a room.  

Leopoldo Erice is going to be repeating this concert in at least one other venue, as well as repeating the three sonatas (spread across two concerts) on the Festival mainstage this summer.  I hope to have another opportunity to hear this powerful, deeply-felt performance in a more musically advantageous, larger hall.

Toronto Symphony 2019-2020 # 4: The Symphony Goes Russian

Last week's concerts at the Toronto Symphony Orchestra featured a programme of almost-all-Russian music.  Under the leadership of a guest conductor of East Asian ancestry, Elim Chan, making her TSO debut.  With the orchestra itself consisting of players from a wealth of different ethnic backgrounds, I can only marvel at the changes that have come in my lifetime, to an orchestra which consisted predominantly of players from Europe when I was young.

The programme opened with a work by American composer Elizabeth Ogonek entitled as though birds.  It's not a typo; Ogonek is one of a number of modern composers drawn to titles which feature no capitals at all.

Listening to this work reminded me forcefully of the time, some years back, when the orchestra opened a concert with the Five Pieces for Orchestra of Anton Webern.  No, there's no stylistic resemblance between Ogonek's work and Webern's -- just the fact that, in each case, it took me longer to read the programme notes than to listen to the music.

Ogonek's piece took its inspiration from a tiny little three-line poem, and the work fell into three distinct sections (played continuously) which were meant to reflect in order the three lines.  Frankly, I could not discern any real connection between the music, intriguing though it was, and the poem.  The connection emerged only in the final few seconds of the work, when some unmistakable trilling birdsong figures emerged from the dense textures.

The remainder of the programme consisted of two of the most popular showpieces of the Russian romantic repertoire: the Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 18 by Rachmaninoff, and the symphonic suite Scheherazade, Op. 35, by Rimsky-Korsakov.

The concerto is one of the most-often-ridden of repertoire warhorses, but the many interpretations of the work can basically be divided into two camps, depending on whether the performers stress energy more than musicality, or vice versa.

English pianist Stephen Hough turned in a powerful performance which leaned more towards the energetic side, especially in the first and last movements.  It's certainly possible to play Rachmaninoff's endless cascades of huge chords musically, but in Hough's hands some of the bigger passages were disfigured by ugly, harsh tone.  He was at his best in the more lyrical sections of the outer movements, and in the singing tone with which he approached the slow movement. 

The last movement of the concerto suffered from a severe attack of "anything you can play, I can play faster" and some passages of the frenetic piano writing grew sloppy under pressure.  Not for the first time, I couldn't help feeling that a reduction of speed by even five percent would yield huge dividends in musicality, without sacrificing any of the essential excitement that is, after all, built into the notes.  Hough then played a Chopin encore which came off as too cool and restrained for my liking.


After the intermission, the concert rounded off with Scheherazade.  It surprised me that, for the first how-many-years of my concert-going career, this evergreen repertoire staple never seemed to appear on the TSO's programmes.  The balance has been redressed during the last two decades, and I've now heard the orchestra perform this musical magnificence three times, as well as having acquired the live-concert recording on Chandos Records which came out of a fourth performance that I missed.

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov achieved a remarkable exemplar of orchestration in Scheherazade.  The array of diverse and remarkable tone colours which he conjured out of the orchestra is striking enough, but all the more so when you realize that -- unlike many of his contemporaries -- he didn't enlarge the orchestra with multiple extra instruments in the process.  The score calls for only double woodwind, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, percussion, harp, and strings.

There are few works which can be considered in the same league as this one as a testing ground for the orchestra.  Not only is the score littered with solo bits for many of the section leaders, but the endlessly shifting kaleidoscope of instrumental textures demands acute awareness of balance from the players as well as from the conductor.

No surprise, then, that the TSO now performs this work as if to the manner born.  The various solo parts, some of which can be played in free time, as if a concerto cadenza, are all shaped and phrased with both skill and affection.  This is particularly true of the nearly concerto-sized contribution of concertmaster Jonathan Crow.  His high harmonics in the slow closing pages were both secure and beautiful in tone.

The players as a team demonstrated consistent awareness of the needs of the moment, and there was no element of the musical argument which didn't emerge both clear and fresh, as if newly discovered.

Conductor Elim Chan showed particular sensitivity to the breathing space allotted to each solo part, and led the performance with well-chosen tempi.  If the last movement's Festival at Baghdad was a little on the hectic side, the orchestra pulled right along with Chan's tempo and maintained the clearest articulation of all the many repeated notes.  The storm at sea capped the performance with its mighty surging waves and the enormous crash of the tamtam as the ship smashed against the rock was breathtaking.

A most rewarding end to a striking concert.

Classical Adventure in Halifax

Nobody could accuse the guest conductor of Symphony Nova Scotia's concert this week of lacking a sense of adventure.  

Of the four works on the programme of this week's concert in Halifax, conducted by Alexander Prior, half of one work is extremely well known, another work hovers at the fringes of the common repertoire, and the remainder would likely be completely unfamiliar to most of the audience.

Even more striking is the presence on the programme of a commissioned work from one of the finest Canadian composers of our day, and one whose music I particularly enjoy hearing: Kelly-Marie Murphy.

Another point: the largest single work anchoring this concert was the Triple Concerto for piano, violin, and cello, by Beethoven -- by no means the master's best-known work, although I've always had a special spot in my heart for it.

Plainly, then, the layout of the concert as a whole got about as far as you could imagine away from the traditional overture-concerto-symphony formula of my younger days.  It's especially significant that, in dipping into Sibelius, the obvious and familiar (say, the Second Symphony) was avoided in favour of the little-known Scene with Cranes from Kuolema and the Pelleas et Melisande suite.

The concert opened with Murphy's Dragon, Unfolding.  This work was commissioned by Symphony Nova Scotia, originally performed in 2018, and here remounted.  This is a welcome change from the all-too-common pattern where commissioned works (music, theatre, or dance) appear, receive one performance, and then sink from sight forever.  Dragon, Unfolding, however, is a piece that definitely has the legs (or wings!) to enter the permanent repertoire.

Murphy cites Japanese sources in the art of origami (folding paper into sculptures) and in the traditional view of the dragon as a source of strength, wisdom, and success.

Modern composers tend to fight shy of classical descriptions for their music, but this piece is most definitely a scherzo -- energetic, propulsive, and riveting for its 10-minute length.  The brief slower episode at the midpoint even fulfils the classical model of the scherzo-and-trio.

Under Prior's vigorous direction, the orchestra firmly projected the rhythmic basis which makes the entire piece come to life, and the various emphatic attacks in different sections all emerged clearly from the teeming body of the music.

The eight-movement Pelleas et Melisande by Sibelius followed.  This music was very popular during the composer's lifetime but has since largely dropped off the radar in North America at least.  It was composed as incidental music for a 1905 staging of Maeterlinck's symbolist play, and the music as a whole displays a reticence appropriate to that role, as well as a spare style of orchestration which makes it plain that every note matters.

Throughout this often-quiet work, Prior inspired the orchestra to some of the quietest, yet still completely audible, playing I have ever heard an orchestra produce.  The string tone was particularly noteworthy in this respect, not least in sustaining and shaping a melodic line at such quiet dynamic levels.  This is not just a question of the players fading out on a long-held note, and the strings of Symphony Nova Scotia acquitted themselves magnificently.

So did Brian James in the all-important cor anglais part which holds the melodic centre in several of the movements.

The intensity and involvement of this performance can best be described by mentioning that as the final movement, depicting the death of Melisande, dwindled slowly into silence, the audience sat in completely rapt attention for a good fifteen seconds while Prior slowly lowered his hands.  Only when he dropped his shoulders and bowed slightly did the enthusiastic applause erupt.

After the intermission, the orchestra played two movements from Kuolema.  This is another suite of incidental theatre music for a play by the composer's brother in law; the title means "Death."  The first and far more famous movement, Valse triste, is an actual dance of death.  The second, Scene with Cranes, fuses together two movements of the original theatre music.  The Scene with Cranes was not performed in this form during the composer's lifetime, and was published only in 1973.

The orchestra played both of these moody and evocative pieces with similar intensity as in Pelleas et Melisande.  The Scene with Cranes in particular developed an air of improvisation entirely suited to the spare, searching writing which Sibelius brought to this tableau.  My one quibble was the way that Prior pushed and pulled the tempo of the Valse triste all over the map, making far too much of the composer's indications of tempo changes.  The unwelcome result was that the music went from lying down and dying one moment to shooting off like a rocket the next.  But the orchestral sound again created exactly the right atmosphere.

The concert then reached its climactic point with the Triple Concerto for Violin, Cello, and Piano in C Major, Op. 60, by Beethoven.  It amuses me that, although this was for many years the ugly stepsister of the five piano concertos and the violin concerto, this concert actually marked the third time in six years that I'd heard the triple concerto performed live.

Aside from the use of three soloists, the work is noteworthy in another way.  The soloists basically work together as a team, sharing themes and rhythmic ideas among themselves, rather than entering a contest to see who gives the orchestra the biggest run for its money.  Not for nothing has this work been described as a concerto for piano trio and orchestra, because the chamber music gene is strong indeed in this music.

On this occasion, the guest soloists were the Cheng²Duo, joined by the orchestra's associate concertmaster, Mark Lee.

This concerto comes from the midpoint of Beethoven's career, right before he composed the fourth symphony.  It's perhaps the last of his "crossover" works, still poised with one foot in the classical language of the eighteenth century, and with the more extrovert romantic language of the nineteenth century appearing here while still in its youth.  Interpreters have a wider variety of choice in how to approach the score because of this unique historical position.

This performance presented a mix of styles, with the more vigorous passages tending towards the mature Beethoven, while the sections played among and between the trio of soloists often had a grace and elegance that harked back to Mozart and Haydn.  This was particularly true of the first movement.

Certainly, the many cello leads from Bryan Cheng were played with an aristocratic flourish, and no less so the responses from Mark Lee's violin.  The pianist doesn't get so much in the way of melodic lines, instead being assigned the showy variations and decorations.  Silvie Cheng dispatched these many-noted passages with real flair married to an appropriately light touch.  The passages where all three joined together were an absolute delight, with impeccable balance and total unanimity of style.

The slow movement highlighted the gorgeous lyricism of Bryan Cheng's playing, in the long, lyrical solo which (for me) pointed the way forward to the long cello solos in the slow movements of the Brahms's second piano concerto and double concerto for violin and cello, as well as (more distantly related, perhaps) the similar cello solo in Tchaikovsky's second piano concerto.

Then, in the more robust rondo alla polacca finale, the soloists let loose with some of the most bouncy and impassioned playing of the night, energy and sparks flying in the more elaborate passages.  Both Bryan Cheng and Mark Lee here dug into the strings much more so than in some of the earlier pages of the concerto, and Silvie Cheng matched them with some more weighty, emphatic playing (but still well in keeping with mid-season Beethoven).  The central polonaise episode had never sounded to me quite so much like a direct forerunner of some of Chopin's polonaises for the piano.

Throughout the concerto, conductor Prior led the orchestra in a discreet accompaniment which allowed the soloists to shine.  The orchestra was so quiet that it became all-but-silent during some of the solo and trio passages in all three movements.  Indeed, there were a couple of spots where I was almost surprised when the orchestra suddenly came to life for a few bars.  Arguably, this extreme quietness, so appropriate in Sibelius, was a bit overdone for Beethoven, but it did help to maintain the chamber-music tone of the score until the time came for the rapid final pages, where the orchestra and soloists alike fired right up and brought the work, and the concert, to a rousing conclusion.