Monday 23 November 2020

Festival of the Sound 2020: Beethoven Live!

Once again, I have leaped at the chance to take in an actual live concert, under appropriate social distancing requirements, of course.  It's only the second chance I've had since the pandemic began.

As with virtually all live arts presenters, the Festival of the Sound found itself with its entire 2020 summer season cancelled due to Covid-19.  Like many of the others, the Festival decided to at least partially rescue the season -- and the planned anniversary tribute to Beethoven -- with an online concert series during the fall.

Much of the content of these online concerts has consisted of previously-recorded video performances, but last week the Festival brought together a group of artists and a small live audience in the Charles W. Stockey Centre to film a live performance for future video streaming.  Need I add that I was thrilled to be able to secure a ticket?

For our better protection, we were asked to remain at our seats for the entire performance.  This meant taking several minutes between pieces to watch the stage be reset, and to view the careful work of rearranging the microphones which were picking up the music for the video recording.

The concert opened with Beethoven's very first published string quartet -- Op. 18, # 3 in D Major.  Conventionally identified as "Quartet # 3" in the list because of the opus number, it was actually composed the year before its two stablemates in the Op. 18 publication.  

This work was treated to a spirited performance by the Rolston String Quartet -- a performance which never forgot that this was the voice of the student of Haydn.  While the work mainly inhabits the same Classical realm as Haydn's later compositions, there are foreshadowings of the mature Beethoven in a few of the unexpected harmonic turns.  The Rolstons brought equal measures of energy and charm to this early work, producing ravishing lyrical sounds in all four movements.

Next up was an even earlier work, the Clarinet Trio in B-flat Major, Op. 11.  Beethoven was here taking full advantage of the relative novelty of this instrument, although the score specified that a violin could be used instead, which would make it a conventional piano trio.  That's enough to make the cataloguists dizzy as they try to decide whether to include this equivocal work in the numbered list of piano trios or not.  More confusingly still, a bassoon may occasionally be used as a substitute for the cello.

This early three-movement work was played with ample energy by the same trio I heard performing it in Europe last fall -- clarinetist James Campbell, cellist Roman Borys, and pianist Jamie Parker.  While there was much to admire in their interpretation of all three movements, it was the variations of the finale that give each player the most distinctive and memorable moments. 

After a rather longer reset pause (which many of us used to good advantage to stand and stretch), the concert concluded with the first of the late string quartets, the Quartet in E-flat Major, Op. 127.  With this four-movement work, we had reached what could fairly be called the realm of the "symphonic" quartet, certainly as regards the playing time.  And to think that Beethoven originally planned two additional movements!  

The Penderecki Quartet gave a luminous reading of this work, with the centre of gravity placed right where it needs to be -- in the long, second, slow movement.  The opening section was played at a nicely judged tempo which flowed smoothly without ever ignoring the score's direction of adagio ma non troppo.  In the later third variation, headed adagio -- molto espressivo, the quartet certainly captured the expressive quality which the composer requested.  More striking still was the mysterious quality of the sound in the sotto voce fifth variation.

The other three movements grouped around this one also came in clear, well-thought-out readings which truly captured the almost exploratory sense of these later works.  More than once, I thought of how far some aspects of this quartet reached forward into the Romantic era of music which was just dawning as Beethoven's life drew to a close.

The performances of the Clarinet Trio, Op. 11 and the String Quartet, Op. 127 will be streamed in an online concert on Tuesday, December 15 at 7:15pm.  Tickets for this online event can be purchased at the Festival of the Sound's website.



Friday 13 November 2020

The Challenge of Remembrance

The Toronto Mendelssohn Choir has stirred the pot to thought-provoking effect in a remarkable Remembrance Day online concert entitled Notinikew (Going to War) – a Program of Remembrance.

This programme, guest-curated by Winnipeg-based indigenous composer Andrew Balfour, swept away Remembrance Day's more conventional expressions of heroism and sacrifice, and forced the audience to confront difficult truths that cut uncomfortably close to home.

In this respect, the concert followed the path blazed 58 years ago by Benjamin Britten's stunning War Requiem, a work which was "hostile to received notions of patriotism," as Eric Roseberry so tellingly wrote in a 1991 programme note.

Through immersion in Balfour's powerful compositions, and in the equally powerful poetry and commentaries of Elder Dr. Duke Redbird, the audience were brought face to face with the experiences of war as lived by indigenous soldiers and their communities.

While the army was eager to embrace the sharp-shooting skills of some of Canada's most skilled and experienced hunters, the country was certainly less eager to extend equal respect to them once the fighting had ended.  This duality of experience was searingly articulated through poetry, speech, and music.

The concert opened with Duke Redbird's poem,  A Dish With One Spoon, telling the indigenous perspective of how the land, its beauty, its riches, its waterways, is to be shared by all and with all.

Balfour's choral piece Ambe, a song of welcome, built appropriately on the feeling expressed by the poem, in a video of a 2019 live concert performance by the Mendelssohn Choir under conductor David Fallis.  This lively piece, almost in the character of a scherzo, showed off the agility of the choir in handling darting cross-rhythms.

The heart of the concert came next with four video excerpts from Balfour's choral drama, Notinikew.  This overtly anti-war work, premiered in 2019, takes us far beyond the factual boundaries of historic conflicts, becoming a drama of all indigenous warriors in all wars at all times -- with its central soldier figure becoming Everyman.

The first movement, Calling All Okicitawak (Warriors), and the last two, were taken from a public performance last year in Winnipeg by the Camerata Nova and their artistic director, Balfour, who appeared as the soldier-everyman figure, singing with heart-rending passion.

The rhythmically and harmonically intricate Anthem For a Doomed Youth, which came next, took up a poem by Wilfred Owen also used by Britten in the War Requiem, although here it was treated very differently -- the words divided up and chanted in overlapping phrases by the choristers.  The Toronto Mendelssohn Choir displayed again their mettle in a gripping virtual performance of a technically challenging piece.

The third movement, I went to war, returned us to the Winnipeg performance.

Between the movements, Balfour held brief dialogues with Elder Dr. Duke Redbird, seeking his view on the relation of the indigenous people to these conflicts that were rooted in centuries of European history.  It was after I went to war that Redbird turned overtly to the issue of the residential schools, raising the very valid question: was this the "freedom" that the indigenous soldiers had given their lives to establish?

That question,  hanging in the air, lent additional poignancy and point to the remainder of the concert, beginning with the fourth excerpt from Notinikew, which was entitled Kookum (Grandmother) -- Help me.  Here, the Winnipeg Boys Choir took a key role, the purity and clarity of children's voices linking the plea for help to the residential school survivors and the survivors of wars alike. 

Redbird's recitation of his poem, Stolen Child, reinforced the total disconnect between the aspiration of the majority population to protect "freedom" and the simultaneous denial of freedom to the families of soldiers who fought for that cause.

At this point, the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir returned with a virtual performance, How They So Softly Rest by Healey Willan, and a live concert taping of In paradisum by Fauré, with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.  The Fauré was accompanied by visuals of reflections on the meaning of Remembrance Day from members of the choir.  These two works, sharing a meditative air, thus became a pair of reminders of a belief in ultimate goodness and unity of all humanity.  

Both were performed with the beautiful legato and security of harmony for which this choir is renowned.

The programme then ended with a short, powerful video collage created by Brian Solomon, accompanied again by Balfour's Anthem For a Doomed Youth.  The images Solomon assembled together were both startling and disturbing, reminding the viewer forcefully of the way that wartime devastation of land, plant life, animal life, and innocent human life too, are all too easily lumped together and waved aside to focus on the bigger question of military "victory."

This remarkable Remembrance Day virtual concert was by turns disturbing, exciting, dramatic, meditative, saddening, and uplifting -- quite an emotional journey for a 1-hour event.

When it comes to creating virtual events designed for online viewing, the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir and its gifted members and leaders have become the absolute masters! 


Tuesday 3 November 2020

The Viola Revolution

Jokes about violas and viola players are legion in the musical world, as much so as jokes about altos, and for the same reasons -- perennially buried in the middle of the harmony under a wave of violins or sopranos, and frequently consigned to the third of the chord.  Rarely does a viola get a chance to shine as a leading or solo instrument.

But now comes a startling new recording, Mobili, from Georgina Isabel Rossi (viola) and Silvie Cheng (piano) which is guaranteed to make you sit up and listen with newly attentive ears.

It's not just the relative rarity of a recital CD featuring the viola at front and centre, but also the rarity (to North American ears) of the programme -- an anthology of music by 20th century and 21st century composers mainly from Chile.

None of these composers have previously come to my attention, nor -- I suspect -- to the attention of most music lovers outside of their Chilean homeland.  Apart from one piece, all the works on this album are receiving their debut recorded performances.  And that is -- on both counts -- definitely a situation due for redress.

The album opens with two works by Rafael Díaz (b. 1962).  The first, ¿Habrá alguien en sus manos sostenga este caer? ("Will there be someone whose hands can sustain this falling?"), composed in 2009, is a visionary, almost otherworldly rhapsody for solo amplified viola.  That quasi-extra-terrestrial atmosphere belies the traditional prayer music of the Pewenche aboriginal peoples of the Andes, which (together with birdsong figures) lies at the root of this intriguing composition.

The second work from Díaz, equally remarkable, is Al fondo de mi lejanía se asoma tu casa ("In the Depths of My Distance Your House Emerges"), written in 2013, which evokes a remote Chilean landscape through which the composer walked to school as a child.  The music captures the haunting, impersonal air of the vast open spaces, and the piano now joins the viola in gentle trills which again evoke birdsong.

Next up is an early Fantasía, op. 15 (1962) for viola and piano by Carlos Botto Vallarino (1923-2004).  Botto's music was influenced by the European modernism of the mid-twentieth century, in particular the work of Luigi Dallapiccola, with whom he studied.  In this work, the slower sections often conceal the harmonic disjunction between viola and piano by resorting to different registers which place the sounds of the two instruments on different planes.  The faster passages emphasize the jagged contours of the viola part against quiet but firm piano chords.

Federico Heinlein (1912-1999) contributes a Dúo, Op. 15, for viola and piano, written in 1985.  The title page of the work refers to Dylan Thomas with the quotation, "Do not go gentle."  This music evinces nothing of rage against the dying of the light, but there is disquiet in plenty with the strange twists and turns of harmony, combining quiet dynamics with the most vigorous harmonic disruption.  The work ends with an incomplete phrase like a quizzical question mark.

With the Tololo of David Cortés (written in 2011), we arrive in perhaps my least-favourite corner of contemporary composition -- the neighbourhood where a composer must produce detailed, even pedantic programme notes, to make clear what he or she was doing and how it ought to be received and appreciated by the listener.  I have long believed that the more a creative artist must explain in words what is being done, the less successful the created piece is in its own terms.  This, for me, is a principle which applies equally whether we speak of music, of dance, of theatre, or of the visual arts.  Call me old-fashioned, and perhaps I am, but I regard copious programme notes as -- at best -- a crutch.

The work which Cortés (b. 1985) has produced here consists of numerous piquant gestures, lacking a firm structural basis to hold them together.  The composer himself, by the way, has referred to his musical elements as "gestural."  The sounds are intriguing, to be sure, but here was the one place where I felt that the composer had worn out his welcome before the composition ended.

The anchor work of the entire programme, Mobili, Op. 63 by Juan Orrego-Salas (1919-2019), was composed in 1967.  It's an 18-minute suite of four movements, which bear the evocative titles Flessibile, Discontinuo, Ricorrente, and PerpetuoFlessibile often uses the viola and piano independently, with each instrument taking its turn to present the material.  Discontinuo presents a kind of scherzo with piano and viola darting hither and yon, with occasional tart explosions from one or the other highlighting the essentially quiet textures.  Ricorrente presents a slow, meditative, even ponderous duet for the two instruments which suggest an examination of issues larger than mere worldly concerns.  The final Perpetuo, as its title indicates, is a fast-moving stream of continuous melody, with numerous lightning-fast shifts of metre adding considerable rhythmic complexity.  The movement, and the suite, end on three emphatic chords.

The album ends with a bonus track which is something of a cuckoo in the nest: an arrangement of El Sampredrino (1968) by Argentinian composer Carlos Guastavino (1912-2000).  In contrast with the rest of the music, this is a setting of a lyrical melody.  Guastavino was renowned above all as a composer of songs, and his output fuses nineteenth-centuy romanticism with a strong Latin-American sensibility.  This song exemplifies his style.

Throughout this hour-long recital, violist Rossi and pianist Cheng present the most intriguing and sensitive textures, especially in repertoire which is predominantly quiet rather than loud and emphatic.  Rossi plays with clear, unforced tone across the entire dynamic and tonal range of her instrument, creating fascinating variety of sound in a programme which might -- in other hands -- end up being too much of the same thing.  Cheng creates a diverse, subtly varied array of sounds and textures on the piano, again avoiding any suspicion of routine.  

This partnership of artists serves the music very well indeed, drawing us into the different sound worlds of these diverse composers and presenting a fascinating cross-section of contemporary compositon in Chile.  While it's challenging listening, this album is also rewarding and has many moments that will well repay the listener's attention.

The album, catalogue # fcr268,  is available online from New Focus Recordings.