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.