Ludwig and Beyond Part II: The Diversity of Inspiration

The Cheng²Duo at last have been able, on Saturday night, to complete the premiere of their ambitious "Ludwig and Beyond" project with a recorded video performance of the remaining works in the programme.  Despite the heartbreaking delays and multiple cancellations imposed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, this splendid gift to the world of music for the Beethoven anniversary year of 2020 has finally reached its belated conclusion.

We heard the first instalment in September, with the Beethoven Cello Sonatas #s 1,4, and 5, and the world premiere of Paul Wiancko's Sonata # 1: Shifting Baselines.  If you wish, you can read my review of that concert at this link:  

Ludwig and Beyond Part I: Beethoven Meets a Stunning World Premiere

Now comes the second part of the project, comprising the Cello Sonatas #s 2 & 3, alongside two more commissioned works, from Canadian composers, inspired by those sonatas:  Samy Moussa's Ring and Dinuk Wijeratne's Portrait of the Imaginary Sibling. 

This performance, sponsored by the Ottawa Chamberfest, had to be recorded without an audience (due to pandemic restrictions) in Montreal, Quebec, in the Salle Bourgie of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, a venue in which I had heard the Cheng²Duo in a live concert of French music last fall.

In an age when so much music is assembled out of so many effects or episodic sounds presented in apparently random sequence, it's nothing less than startling to find a composer structuring an entire piece around the classical textbook procedure of the circle of fifths.  Yet that is what Moussa has done in Ring.

His point of inspiration was the firm sense of structural completeness which he sensed in Beethoven's Cello Sonata # 2.

Each section of the score is pervaded and supported by that critical harmonic process.  This is not to say that it's immediately apparent at the outset, but over the course of the work the listener can hear that this circle is indeed the organizing principle at work -- hence the title.

While Bryan Cheng stated in his pre-performance remarks that the complete work has ten sections, to this listener at least it came across as four distinct portions delineated by the moods of the music.  The opening struck the ear as a series of random, jagged notes or fragments scattered all over the cello's range.  But then, the piano took up an imitative development of the cello's opening while the cello outlined the harmonies in energetic tremolando, the circle of fifths declared itself, and the whole piece began to take shape.

A section of densely harmonized piano writing with sustained, striving melodic work in the cello then led into a quieter, slower passage with both instruments high in their registers. In the next portion, staccato and pizzicato writing pushed out to the extreme highs and lows of each instrument added variety to the texture, with the sound again gradually turning more melodic.

In the final pages, a ponderous, bass-heavy tread (suggestive of a march) propelled the music forward while the cello, and ultimately the piano as well, elaborated with truly furious passagework -- all leading to an abrupt yet timely ending on a staccato tonic chord as the circle was completed again.  Moussa's Ring is a splendid example of music that finds completely new ground to tread while working within more traditional frames of reference.  A rewarding piece indeed, in this world premiere performance.

Dinuk Wijeratne's Portrait of the Imaginary Sibling inhabited a rather different sound world, but again made excellent use of a traditional musical resource -- the ostinato.  Of all the commissioned works in Ludwig and Beyond, this was the one that made the most overt use of a direct quote from Beethoven -- the jagged off-beat rhythm of the scherzo in Sonata # 3, which functioned as a bass ostinato throughout much of the work's main body.

Wijeratne also gave more than a slight nod to the classical music traditions of the Indian subcontinent, with much writing for the cello and piano evoking the sounds of the Indian sarangi and tabla.  

The title refers to an imaginary sibling of the Chengs, but from the tone of the music I sensed not so much a kinship with Bryan and Silvie Cheng as the presence of an imaginary sibling of Beethoven himself.  

In the very opening pages, Wijeratne has the pianist do some direct strumming and thrumming on the strings of the instrument, while the cello plays a wandering line that, together with the piano part, immediately evokes the distinctive harmonies and sounds of Indian music.

But soon, the tempo accelerates, and the wandering explorations of the opening are pushed aside by a furiously energetic scherzo, in which the ostinato drawn from Beethoven's rhythm sets both the pace and the ruling force of the music.  Against that background, the abrupt eruptions and tart comments from both piano and cello fill in the portrait of a kindred soul to Beethoven, prone to sudden explosions of anger and fierce energy.

In time the music quietens a bit, and becomes more fragmentary for a time, until a brief and furious explosion of energy leads to an abrupt fortissimo conclusion.  This piece stands in a completely different sound world from Moussa's work, but proves equally intriguing and rewarding for repeated listening.

Throughout both pieces, the Chengs demonstrated considerable aplomb in meeting the unusual demands of the composers for unique sounds and rhythms, and for building structure in certain key passages out of the sketch-like, fragmentary writing.  

In the two Beethoven sonatas, the Chengs obviously gave a great deal of thought to the expressive possibilities in Beethoven's writing for both instruments, from the crisp, lightning-fast staccato and pizzicato  to the denser, fuller textures for piano, and the broader, more sweeping melodies for cello.  

In Sonata # 2, the work was bookended by the solemn, quasi-religious tone of the slow opening, and the smiling, playful account of the finale, bouncing joyfully along.

There was a truly symphonic breadth and sweep in the first movement of Sonata # 3, while the edgy syncopations of the scherzo remained light-hearted even at their crispest and most clear-cut.  The slow movement found the Chengs giving full measure to the composer's call for cantabile.  The allegro finale evoked for me nothing so much as Mendelssohn, with a lightness and sparkle so often found in that later composer's works and a spectacularly grand buildup to the final coda.

Plenty of musicians had the idea of presenting cycles of the master's work as part of the Beethoven anniversary year.  The Cheng²Duo have gone much further, enriching the cello-piano repertoire with three major new works, each one a great success on its own very different ground, and each one absolutely deserving frequent rehearing.  Kudos to Silvie and Bryan Cheng for their vision and imagination, for the truly rewarding results, and for the gripping and memorable performances of Beethoven, and of three contemporary composers of both skill and substance.

 

The Drama of the Four Seasons

The main offering in the Toronto Symphony Orchestra's latest on-demand concert is a stimulating, thoughtful, and -- above all -- intensely dramatic performance of Vivaldi's evergreen cycle of violin concertos, The Four Seasons.

The principal work is preceded by two equally energetic and stimulating contemporary compositions which fit in very well as present-day partners to Vivaldi's well-loved masterpiece.

The fast movements of the Vivaldi are famous for their near-frenetic energy, and the same characteristic appears in both of the modern pieces on this intriguing on-line program.

The concert was taped on the stage of Roy Thomson Hall some months ago, under the health requirements then in effect, with an ensemble of 20 strings plus harpsichord.  The concert was led throughout by concertmaster Jonathan Crow, who of course also played the principal solo part in the Vivaldi.

After a short spoken introduction from music director Gustavo Gimeno and concertmaster Jonathan Crow, the first work was introduced by composer Gabriela Lena Frank: Coqueteos from Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout.  The title approximately means "flirtations" (think of the cognate "coquetry" in English).  The piece is rooted in the native rhythms and guitar playing of Frank's ancestral land of Peru.  

It's a vivid, energetic dance for strings (originally for a string quartet), plainly rooted in the same rhythmic and melodic turf as the music of many Latin American lands and, indeed, of Spain itself.  A couple of short interruptions into slower, more meditative tempo do little or nothing to take the wind out of the music's sails until it explodes into an energetic finale.  

The second work, Canadian composer Dinuk Wijeratne's A letter from the After-life from Two Pop Songs on Antique Poems, was just as energetic as Frank's vivid dance, and like her piece was originally written for a string quartet.  That character is evident right at the outset with a pulsating violin rhythm overlying a chant-like melody on viola.  Both elements gradually spread out to the full orchestral body, and that pulsating ostinato becomes the motor energy driving the entire piece.  As the music grows in power, the quieter interruptions hardly slow the momentum.  Then the energy winds up to three powerful repetitions of the opening notes of Schubert's Death and the Maiden quartet, before a final fierce outburst ends the piece.

And so to the main event, and here was truly a performance of The Four Seasons like no other I have ever heard in a live concert.

With the rise of the authentic performance movement in the 1960s and 1970s, textures in virtually all Baroque music were fined down to more limited numbers such as might have been expected in a live performance in the 1970s.  With that came the adoption of the style of bows used by string players in Baroque times, and the use of playing techniques appropriate to the period in which the music was first written and played.

To put it in perspective, the last two complete Four Seasons which I've heard featured an ensemble of 4-6 strings, plus harpsichord for the continuo.

This, however, was a performance which definitely chose to swim against the tide.  The lean and hungry sound of modern Baroque performance was plainly out of reach with a body of 20 strings, but instead there were other possibilities which opened up.  The contrast between the passages played by the full orchestra and those played by a smaller group immensely aided the dramatic context of the music -- for example, the huge dynamic variation between the quiet buzzing of insects and the loud rolls of thunder in the slow movement of Summer.  Similar dramatic shifts in the scale of tone abounded.

The use of a larger body certainly didn't mean that the sound became fuzzy or bloated.  Vivaldi's most rapid passagework was as clean and crisp as you could ask, and the clarity of the much quieter passages was enhanced by the full, rich sound.  

Crow's performance of the solo part made it abundantly clear that this was not, and was not meant to be, an "authentic" performance.  Sparingly, but effectively, he employed a generous Romantic rubato at key structural points in the music.  A big-boned, dramatic reading, guaranteed perhaps to make the strongest proponents of authentic style cringe, but truly engaging and involving for the more open-minded.  And why not, since the dramatic intentions behind the composer's pictorial approach are clearly visible?

Musical performance aside, this was still a Four Seasons like no other, because of the style of the presentation.  Vivaldi wrote these concertos inspired by the paintings of Marco Ricci.  These paintings were in the then-popular style in which the immense sublimity of nature overpowered the diminutive figures of people, animals, and buildings.  You can certainly hear that immensity built right into the music at many points.

Each concerto was also introduced in Vivaldi's score by a descriptive sonnet, and the scores were then sprinkled with brief written notations to show which sounds or events in the sonnet were reproduced in the music, and in which part.

It's become common in recent years to incorporate a reading of the sonnets into a live performance, but things went much further here.  The sonnets were spoken by four different members of the orchestra, in their respective birth languages of English, Japanese, Mandarin, and French (with on-screen English translations).  During each concerto, portions of the relevant Ricci painting were digitally superimposed on the video image above the players' heads (where you would otherwise see only the choir loft or balcony seating of the hall), and the written notations from the scores were reproduced in English translation at the top right corner of the screen.

The result was a rich, full-blooded performance of the Four Seasons, enhanced with multi-media extra touches to bring you right inside the spirit in which the composer created these pieces.

Even if you would prefer a sparer, leaner style of performance, this is a Four Seasons worth checking out if only for the impact of the total presentation.  For the listener with no such qualms, this entire concert will, I think, pull you in and delight you -- and that goes equally for the two contemporary works which open the programme, since they come far closer to the spirit of Vivaldi than many of the more arid and sterile contemporary works I've heard. 

This concert remains available from the Toronto Symphony Orchestra's website until April 15, and can be watched as many times as desired with one ticket.  The link to purchase tickets follows:

The Four Seasons

Sacred Music For a Sacred Space -- and Beyond

The Toronto Mendelssohn Choir has for many years now commemorated Good Friday with a concert entitled "Sacred Music For a Sacred Space," traditionally given at St. Anne's Anglican Church in Toronto.

While continuing to offer at least a partial version of such a programme in virtual form in this age of pandemic, the Choir once again demonstrated great imagination in launching out into a hybrid arts event which was plainly designed, from the ground up, for online presentation.

Indeed, the programme as we saw it on Good Friday evening simply could not be presented in the same way in a live venue.

In brief, the instrumentalists were recorded under all pandemic regulations then in effect in St. Anne's, the choir members each recorded themselves individually at home, and the whole programme was then assembled in a virtuoso feat of editing.

After a very brief spoken introduction, and a land acknowledgement, the programme opened with Schubert's sad yet mellow Stabat Mater in G Minor, D.175 (not to be confused with the longer F minor setting which he composed the following year).  The Latin sequence meditates on the Virgin Mary, as she stood at the foot of Christ's cross on Calvary.  Schubert set the first four verses in a smooth stream of music, varying his thematic material with no break in the flow.  

The fifty choristers who participated in this recording gave the music with clarity and beauty of tone while capturing the ritual feeling of the work, which was most likely written for liturgical use.  Pianist Gergely Szokolay provided a subtle, finely shaded account of the accompaniment, originally written for small string orchestra with trombones -- and, frankly, I didn't miss the orchestra at all (the young Schubert's orchestration was often blandly conventional to a fault).

This music was accompanied by images of paintings from different centuries, images which in some cases overtly depicted the scene at Golgotha and in others invited us to think of suffering in a more human, contemporary context -- a very thoughtful visual counterpoint.

The major offering was Bach's early cantata, Christ lag in Todesbanden, BWV4.  It's a unique work in many ways, relating to form, musical style, word painting and more -- but most of all because this early cantata, with its seven choral or vocal movements  in succession, is written entirely in E minor.  

Instrumentalists and singers alike, under Simon Rivard's thoughtful direction, skilfully avoided any sense of sameness resulting from the use of the single key.  The Mendelssohn Choir's singers have become masters of the art of online recording, singing alone in their homes with more than a passing thought to the need for their performance to blend into a choral whole when the editing takes place.  The net result of their work is a performance as polished as you could ask in a live concert.

The truly remarkable aspect of the cantata was the incorporation of dance, choreographed and performed by Laurence Lemieux.  Abetted by Simon Rossiter's striking lighting design and Jeremy Mimnagh's superb videography, Lemieux created stunning images in motion of grief, loss, struggle, and acceptance, flowing smoothly in tandem with the music.

It was the kind of dance performance that, for me, demanded to be viewed several times.  On each viewing, I found that I was being drawn more and more to ponder the impact of Lemieux's powerful, evocative movements.  Reflection on the meanings and feelings which it aroused began with the startling choice of hard-soled, heeled shoes rather than traditional dance slippers.  As the piece progressed, those shoes became more and more an image of obstacles, of hindrances, of the thousand and one "buts" that we use to stop us from coming to grips with the tragedies of the world around us.

Laurence Lemieux's choreographic creation was most of all in my mind when I said that this concert could never have happened in a live performance venue.  We needed the close-up impact of a personal video screen to bring ourselves as close to her as possible, to be able to read her facial expressions and fully discern the complexities of her movements.  

The final number of the concert was the fourth movement of Ein Deutsches Requiem, Op. 45 by Johannes Brahms, sung in English translation as How Lovely Is Thy Dwelling Place.  The singers here caught the essential flowing nature of this music, the long arching phrases, the way that crescendo and diminuendo seem to grow organically out of the very nature of the piece.  Imposed "interpretation" would be disastrous in this music.  Gergely Szokolay on piano gave an uncommonly restrained accompaniment, gentle and pastoral in character, and entirely appropriate.

The visual accompaniment to this piece was a series of video clips and still photographs taken during a walk in the woods in autumn, with the fall colours all around.  It was an appropriate reminder that the true "sacred spaces" of the world are by no means confined to those built by human hands.

I was forcibly reminded of the memorable words of Catalan architect Antonio Gaudi:  "The forest is my cathedral."  It's a feeling I've often shared.

This beautiful and thought-provoking Good Friday concert remains available for free viewing on the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir's website.  Here's the link:

Music For a Sacred Space

Yes, A Real Live Orchestra!

For the first time since the pandemic shutdown over a year ago, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra has presented a concert live from the stage of Roy Thomson Hall.  Due to current lockdown conditions, of course, it has to be a much-reduced chamber-orchestra-sized body of players, all required health and distancing precautions must be observed, and there cannot be a live audience present in the hall -- but it is a live stream of a live performance all the same.

Sensibly, the chosen programme was an all-Mozart concert.  It's sensible not only because of the popularity of his music, but even more so because almost anything Mozart wrote for orchestra can readily be adapted to an ensemble of just 32 players as in this performance -- or even less.  His gigantic reputation in the world of music certainly didn't come about because he wrote pieces for gigantic numbers of artists!

The programme, led by Resident Conductor Simon Rivard, opened with the early overture to La finta giardiniera, K.196 ("The Pretend Garden Girl"), a very rarely-heard comic opera written when Mozart was 18.  It was his first commission for the operatic stage, and was supposed to be a dramma giocoso, although in the end it turned out to be more opera buffa with a few serious moments to leaven the fun.

That sense of zippy energy and brilliant high spirits certainly informed Rivard's reading of the sparkling, vivacious overture, which lasted for just 4 minutes and change. 

Next up was the third of Mozart's five Violin Concertos (the G major concerto, K.216), all of them written during that same year when he turned 18.  A busy young man indeed!  This concerto wears its mantle lightly, the moments of virtuoso display neatly hidden under the prevailing lyrical, almost pastoral mood.

The soloist was the Orchestra's Associate Concertmaster, Zeyu Victor Li, here making his TSO concerto debut.  I made mention of the work's lyrical, pastoral mood because that was the dominant quality permeating almost all of Li's reading of the solo part.

Indeed, lyricism turned almost to reticence during the first movement, a sunny stroll in the country fully the equal of Beethoven's symphony.  Li's tone throughout almost all of the first movement remained somewhat restrained, classically poised, where other artists might choose a more flamboyant approach.  The difference was noteworthy when he suddenly found himself working within a much broader scale of tone in the cadenza -- and then continued to work within that wider tonal palette until the end of the concerto.  That's not a criticism, by the way -- the soloist's relative restraint worked well to emphasize the restful, pastoral character of the first movement's themes.  

The second movement brought gently pulsating accompaniment from the orchestra, with Li giving the themes a smoothly phrased presentation.  

The finale bounced along delightfully, the main rondo theme striking delicious contrasts from the contrasting episodes, and particularly from the two apparently extraneous sections which crop up out of nowhere, say their say, and then vanish.  In all this diverse material, Li characterized the violin part with finesse, finding plenty of tone colours without seeming to strive after them.  In fact, his performance of the entire work could well be characterized as sounding completely natural, indeed almost inevitable, as if the music could sound no other way (although we know it can).

The concert ended with the famous Symphony No. 40 in G Minor, K.550, one of the final group of three symphonies -- and certainly the darkest, most incisive of the three.  It was the first work of Mozart's which I grew to love as a teenager, and has remained a firm favourite of mine ever since.

One key feature of this symphony certainly pointed the way towards the more dramatic future symphonies of the Romantic era: Mozart avoided the usual lightweight, serio-comic rondo for a finale in favour of a sonata form movement which is every bit the equal in weight and complexity of the first movement.  The centre of gravity of the symphony was forever tilted away from the first movement as a result, and it's almost impossible to imagine the grandeur and drama of the finales in Beethoven's Choral Symphony, Schubert's Great C Major, or Brahms' First and Third without Mozart having pointed the way in this work and its successor, the so-called "Jupiter" Symphony (#41).

This symphony also was unusual, and remained unusual, in being dominated by minor keys throughout the first and fourth movements, and the minuet of the third movement.  

Rivard led the orchestra in a brisk, well-pointed reading which never sacrificed clarity or weight to the speed of the action.  This was especially important with the repeated viola notes in the main theme of the first movement, or with the rapid figures in all the strings in the finale.  

The wind section produced strongly-accented chords in the first movement, and limpid tone in their solo lines in the slow movement.  

The minuet in the third movement, while remaining brisk, saw the orchestra pull out a heavier, more emphatic style which equally pointed the way forward to the more heavyweight symphonic scherzos to come in the next century.  

The whole dramatic arc of the symphony led up to the fierce reading of the finale, a performance which accentuated (not over much, but strongly) the sudden, blunt key shifts and lightning-quick dynamic contrasts.  Rivard kept the drama in hand, never forgetting that this was still Mozart, but within his self-appointed limits he scored strongly in such moments as the chain of five key shifts leading into the development, or the unsettling horn fortissimos which puncture the argument soon after.

Throughout the entire performance, the orchestra members played with suitable style and joyful energy.  The energy was undoubtedly helped by having all the players (except the cellos) stand throughout the concert.  

On the technical front, I was truly impressed by the way the broadcast engineers overcame the hassles of widely dispersed players, plexiglass shields, and multiple microphones to create a most believable sound picture, in which all instruments came through clearly, none dominated unduly, and none were sold short.

I was also delighted by the diverse range of camera angles used, allowing us to see the players and conductor from almost every conceivable angle (except, perhaps, directly overhead).

For everyone who purchased a digital ticket for this concert, the archived performance remains available on the TSO website for repeat viewing for one week.  I certainly plan to watch and listen again!

For those who didn't take it in, you can rest assured that the whole evening was technologically excellent, musically beautiful, and came across the internet with a very definite live-concert vibe.  The TSO plans to present one or more such concerts during the balance of the season, and you should sign up for their email communications to be informed of the dates.