Day 4 of the Festival promptly blew past the limits of the "routine" which I explained yesterday by including no less than four major events.
I: Janina Fialkowska Master Class
The day began at 10:30 am with a unique master class experience. In a true example of "passing the torch," the veteran Chopin pianist Janina Fialkowska led a master class with rising star Bruce Liu, the Canadian pianist who recently shot into prominence on the world's musical scene by winning first place in the 18th Chopin International Piano Competition in Warsaw.
The music under consideration was the chamber version of Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 2 in F Minor, Op. 21, with Quatuor Despax and double bass Joel Quarrington performing the string reduction of the orchestral parts.
Since Liu is preparing for performances with full orchestra in Europe, the time was certainly ripe for Fialkowska to assist him by sharing a lifetime of experience of the trouble spots which can arise in a performance with a conductor and full orchestra.
Helpful hints about how to cope with those tricky places formed a good portion of the wisdom passed along by Fialkowksa. She also offered a concept which I'd never heard articulated, the idea that there is too much sameness in always using the rubato prior to the first beat of the next bar. Fialkowka plainly stated the value of maintaining the element of surprise so the listener isn't always able to anticipate the next use of the rubato before the pianist gets to it.
She also praised Liu's lightness of tone, indicating that this is a rare quality indeed.
And who could forget that wonderful moment, as they worked through the mazurka finale, when she urged Liu that he had to "find your Polish soul."
The string players displayed considerable good humour on becoming the tail getting wagged by the dog for an hour, a role which the orchestra in any case has to maintain when playing Chopin's concertos. Fialkowska also raised a good laugh from the audience on warning Liu that the horn player will never play the little unaccompanied fanfare in the finale properly, but the pianist must never, ever laugh at the horn. Then the performance restarted, violist Maxime Despax promptly played the fanfare accurately and on cue, and Fialkowska jokingly added: "You will never hear the horn part played better than that!"
II: Canadian Pianofest # 2 -- David Jalbert in Recital
At 1:30 pm the second concert of the day was a piano recital by David Jalbert, an artist who was acclaimed by the CBC as one of the greatest Canadian pianists of all time. I'm sure that there are many fine artists whose names could fittingly appear on such a list, but there's no denying that Jalbert's recital was replete with power, skill, and subtlety -- if not precisely the most rewarding programme for my own personal taste.
The concert opened with Kelly-Marie Murphy's Smoke Darkened Sky, a work which she composed for Jalbert in 2021. It was inspired by descriptions and images of the terrible clouds of smoke over all the funeral fires in India during the first wave of the pandemic. A Canadian composer of high reputation, Murphy often composes music of brilliantly illustrative inventiveness. In this case, the visual image didn't register from the music, although the intensity, anger, and (in the final pages) the otherworldliness of the sounds was unmistakable.
Then followed the Piano Sonata No. 30 in E Major, Op. 109 by Beethoven. This is the first of the final three monumental sonatas, and a frequent choice of many pianists. Particularly attractive here was Jalbert's adoption of a lighter range of tone, showing that late Beethoven, for all its power, is still the work of the same man who admired Haydn and Mozart in his young years. My reaction was that this intense sonata developed a good deal more light and shade with this variety of tone, compared to the more portentous effect when a pianist leans right into the keys throughout.
Jalbert next played two of Debussy's Images (not to be confused with the entirely different Images pour orchestre!). The bell sounds in Cloches à travers les feuilles were not overt, but nonetheless clear enough to the ear amid the rustling of leaves. Poissons d'or contrasted nicely the fast and slow textures which alternated through the piece.
The grand finale was Prokofiev's fierce and percussive Sonata No. 7 in B-Flat Major, Op. 83, the second of his three "war sonatas." Wartime it unmistakably was in Jalbert's powerhouse performance, and there's no denying that the score absolutely cries out for such treatment. Jalbert worked up the finale to an incredibly fierce peroration that pulled the audience right out of their seats. All very impressive, even if this music itself impresses me less and less on every hearing.
III: Cameron's Choice
Cellist Cameron Crozman was invited back to the Festival this year as a Stockey Young Artist artistic director trainee, and was requested to curate a handful of concerts. His introductory remarks at the second afternoon concert explained succinctly the way that "choosing" a concert in this role is actually a process of contact and response, negotiation, offer and counter-offer, until finally you and your available artists get it all nailed down.
The concert began with Beethoven's String Quartet No. 3 in D Major, Op. 18. Despite the slightly misleading title and opus number, this is actually the first quartet Beethoven completed. It lives fully in the received tradition if the Viennese classical period, of Haydn and Mozart, and is a thoroughly charming, high-spirited piece, bubbling over with good humour. Quatuor Despax, a unique string quartet made up entirely of members of the Despax family, gave a lively performance which fully captured the joviality of this youthful work.
Crozman himself followed with a work he had commissioned from highly respected Canadian composer Alexina Louie, giving Parry Sound the honour of hearing the world premiere performance. The piece was entitled "Quasi Cadenza" for Solo Cello, and for once the title describes the music perfectly. This lengthy cadenza was imaginative, inventive, technically challenging, and written at a high level of virtuosity, and Crozman surmounted all the challenges with bold attack and technical flair to burn.
The programme concluded with the Sonata for Cello (Violin) and Piano No. 1 in D Major, Op. 78 by Brahms. This arrangement was attributed to Klengel in the programme, but another source indicates that Brahms himself produced the cello arrangement in D Major from the G Major violin original, and that cellist Janos Starker had claimed that the arrangement Klengel produced was for viola and piano. The key point to note (pun intended) is the change in key from G Major to D Major when the work was arranged.
Crozman, with David Jalbert at the piano, produced a reading of considerable subtlety, an interpretation which looked forward to the sparer, more thoughtful style of the composer's late period. While there was no shortage of energy, and no lack of characterization, this duo presented the sonata in a manner which made clear exactly why the work has long been known (unofficially) as the Regensonate or "Rain Sonata." The colours of the music were definitely the monochrome shades and effects of a rainy day, and none the less rewarding for that.
IV: Canadian Pianofest # 3 -- Chopin and Dvořák
The evening concert presented two contrasted major works of the Romantic era.
The first was the String Quintet No. 2 in D Major, Op. 77 by Dvořák. Although I've loved the music of this Bohemian master all my life, this was my first encounter with this particular work. My feeling was that this work was less overtly "national" than many of Dvořák's compositions, although the hints of the usual dance rhythms and signature unusual modulations were still there.
The Rolston String Quartet, joined by double bass Joel Quarrington, gave this work a strong and powerful performance. The high energy of the first movement, allegro con fuoco, and the Scherzo: allegro vivace was well balanced by the lovely singing tone which these artists brought to the trio of the scherzo and to the succeeding Poco andante slow movement.
The final pages were then whipped up into a high-stakes reading of the final coda, a coda in which Dvořák contrives to keep returning with another afterthought each time you think he's ending. The players kept upping the stakes each time the music speeded up again, and the final pages rocketed right off the stage. The succeeding standing ovation was well merited indeed.
After a brief break to allow the stage to be reset, we then heard the Chopin Piano Concerto No. 2 in F Minor, Op. 21, with pianist Bruce Liu, Quatuor Despax, and Joel Quarrington. Like its companion, No. 1 in G Minor, this concerto (which was actually the first one written) was published as a concerto for piano and orchestra or piano and strings -- hence the artistic viability of such a reduced-scale performance.
Janina Fialkowska stepped up briefly beforehand to inform the audience that this was the first occasion on which Liu had ever played the concerto in public. Not that you would ever have guessed that from the actual performance. Unlike some artists I've heard playing this concerto with reduced forces, Liu truly scaled down the tone of his overall performance to remain in keeping with a chamber-sized "orchestra" in a chamber-sized hall.
That lightness of touch which Fialkowska had praised in Liu in the morning asserted its presence again and again, continually giving an air of fantasy, even whimsy, to a work which can often seem heavy-handed and overly showy in character with stronger treatment. For once, the concerto registered as music rather than coming across merely as a vehicle for pianistic acrobatics. This was particularly true of the finale, a Polish mazurka, where the music constantly lifted and danced along in the most delightful way.
The string quintet of Quatuor Despax and Quarrington were far from also-rans, giving us much pleasing detail in their parts. I don't think I've ever registered so much of the drama in the strings' lengthy tremolando passage at the heart of the slow movement.
In the final pages of the work, the ensemble and soloist alike built the music up to a powerful peroration in which, for the moment, the strings sounded so strongly that you could easily believe their numbers had been momentarily doubled.
This was, for my money, the finest chamber performance of this concerto I have ever heard. The audience seemed to share my opinion, to judge by the massive applause and cheering.
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