Wednesday at the Festival brought an intense round of three concerts, each of which featured the piano either totally, or in a fair degree. As a friend of mine who is not a pianist dryly observed, "By the end of the day, I will be all pianoed out." For those of us who are piano enthusiasts, it was a spectacular day.
I: Canadian Pianofest # 8: The Bergmann Piano Duo in Recital
Piano duo ensembles are definitely exotic fish in the musical world. To
play a piece well, either on two pianos or four hands on one piano,
requires a degree of mutual trust verging on insanity, combined with a
willingness to take hair-raising chances and hope like mad that your
duet partner agrees -- and picks up on -- with that little accelerando that you suddenly felt was appropriate. An added hazard in four-hand playing: colliding fingers and fingernails are de rigeur. Voice of experience.
Seriously, though, I can't think of any other form of music making that forces two musicians into such close physical proximity, nor of any other form in which mutual give and take between the musicians becomes so critical to the success of the performance.
An amusing side note: when playing on two pianos, the Bergmanns use the "married position" which, ironically for the name, places the two players a piano's length apart and facing each other by fitting the two instruments as closely together as possible, with the curved cases wrapping around each other.
The Bergmanns have been playing together as a married couple for many years, and like to assemble one of their typical programmes out of a very eclectic repertoire of original works and arrangements, ranging from the Baroque period right up into the twentieth century.
This recital began with an arrangement of a Bach aria from the cantata Vergnügte Ruh. It's one of the master's lovely, lyrical melodies, but the arrangement for 2 pianos inevitably involved doubling and extra voices, leading to a much more congested sound -- somewhat reminiscent of Stokowski's Wagnerian Bach transcriptions for full orchestra.
The centrepiece of the recital consisted of movements 2-3-4 from Rachmaninoff's Suite No.1 in G Minor, Op. 5, "Fantaisie-Tableaux." It was a little difficult to enjoy this wonderful music as the Bergmanns were treating each dynamic indication as specific to their personal instrument, leading to a loud, clangorous sound which was hard on the ears. The intense energy of the performance was admirable, to be sure, but more restraint would give much better results. Many interpreters will treat the dynamic marks as relating to the music as a whole. Such an approach would yield far more sense of fantasy in La nuit... l'amour and Les larmes, as well as allowing a much greater contrast when the pianists appropriately cut loose in the final Pâques with its endless cascades of bell sounds.
Far more rewarding were the selections from Astor Piazzolla, Chick Corea, Pat Metheny, and Egberto Gismonti, which wrapped up the recital. Much as I hate to keep sounding negative, surely there must be other worthwhile and interesting pieces from Piazzolla than the ubiquitous (and now tedious) Oblivion and Libertango. I've heard so many arrangements of those two pieces from so many performers that I'm beginning to think of Piazzolla as a two-hit wonder, and I'm sure that's an unfair assessment.
II: Originals
A second programme curated by Cameron Crozman consisted entirely of works composed by Festival artists. In all, four composers were represented, and the diversity of their efforts yielded fascinating results.
The first work was a two-movement piano quintet by Graham Campbell, the two movements being respectively entitled Between Breaths and Snow Rider. In fact, it was entirely possible to enjoy this melodious, mellifluous music without knowing the titles. Unusually among contemporary composers, Campbell doesn't shrink in holy horror from either clear rhythmic patterns or identifiable melodic lines, and his music is all the stronger for that than works from the Momentary Effects School of composition.
I was especially intrigued by the number of times that this or that harmonic progression took me for a few seconds back to the France of Debussy and Fauré
Marcel Bergmann contributed three works in all: Run Around, with violinist Karl Stobbe, Blue Autumn with cellist Cameron Crozman, and two movements from Urban Pulse with spouse and duet partner Elizabeth Bergmann. All three works featured ever denser keyboard writing, while still allowing the string soloists to be heard. In Urban Pulse, the densely dissonant writing for two pianos turned into a mass of sound from which only occasional melodic fragments emerged briefly.
Cameron Crozman presented his first composition, a cello solo called Falling Forward. The fragmentary nature of this music somewhat concealed the technical challenges of trying to wring many different kinds of melodic sound out of a cello without resorting to the "standard" full bow on the string technique. This piece intrigued mainly as a survey of those technical possibilities.
Finally, Ryan Davis gave three works in solo viola performances. The first was simply Davis and the viola. In the other two, he made use of the live looping technique to lay down multiple instrumental, percussion, even vocal tracks, before getting into his main live performance of the piece in question.
Unlike the performance last week by FreePlay, Davis had all his technical equipment right on stage with him so we could watch him creating each track as he went along, drumming on a percussion pad, creating special sounds on his instrument, and so on. From a technical viewpoint, it was fascinating to get such a behind-the-scenes view of the artist at work. Musically, I enjoyed the strong rhythmic sense that pervaded Davis' music, even at moments when a percussion track wasn't playing. I also appreciated the odd and yet somehow intriguing sound combinations that he created.
III: Canadian Pianofest # 9: Charles Richard-Hamelin in Recital
For the third time in the Festivaal, we sat down to a performance by a pianist who truly ranks as one of Canada's greatest exponents of the instrument today.
Charles Richard-Hamelin emerged from obscurity to win the second prize at the Chopin International Competition in Warsaw in 2018, and his career since then on the world's stages has gone from strength to strength.
For this recital, Richard-Hamelin explained to the audience that, since each work led naturally into the next, he requested that applause be held until the end of each half of the programme.
The first half consisted of Two Nocturnes by Chopin, Op. 27 No. 1 in C sharp minor and Op. 27 No. 2 in D flat major -- a fascinating contrast of two impossibly near yet distant keys.
From the D flat piece, Richard-Hamelin moved smoothly onwards into the opening movement of the Piano Sonata No. 2 in B flat minor, Op. 35. His performance, which included the full exposition repeat, was notable for finding more light and shade in this movement than many artists.
The scherzo was both fiery and precise in staccato, with maximum contrast as a result in the sweeping lyrical line of the trio. The final short-cut reminiscence of the trio at the end was a quiet moment of nostalgic reflection.
The massive chords of the famous funeral march were beautifully shaped to avoid mere thunderous noise, and allow inner voices to emerge. The pastoral contrasting section in the midst of the march emerged as a moment of peaceful freedom from turmoil.
Speaking of turmoil, the extraordinarily athematic and almost atonal finale flew by in a whirlwind of excited disconnection, a most remarkable anticipation of the musical world a century later.
In the second half of the recital, Richard-Hamelin turned to Maurice Ravel. He opened with the famous Pavane pour une infante defunte, followed by a brief Prelude which was among the composer's first attempts at writing music.
These two pieces led in the most natural way into the six-movement suite, Le tombeau de Couperin. The name signifies perhaps a tomb, although in this context it would be better to call it a "memorial." The tradition of the tombeau or memorial commemorative piece stretches as far back in French music as François Couperin himself.
The six movements were separately dedicated to six friends of Ravel who were killed in the First World War. If you didn't know that fact, you would never guess that association by listening to the music which is filled with light, life, and energy, all expressed with airy neoclassical clarity.
For those familiar only with Ravel's later orchestrated version, the original piano work takes the movements in a different order and includes two movements (Fugue and Toccata) which he omitted from the orchestration because they are so quintessentially pianistic in style.
Richard-Hamelin brought his signature lightness of touch on the keys to a piece which, more than any other, absolutely demands such skill. Right from the opening notes of the Prelude, it was clear that a master was at work here. The lovely dance rhythms and melodies of the Forlane, Rigaudon, and Menuet were an especial delight, while the rapid technical passagework of the Fugue and Toccata for once sounded like something much more than mere note-spinning.
A truly remarkable conclusion to a rewarding and involving recital.
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