Juxtapositions galore, yesterday. It was the free entry family day of the Music and Beyond festival, held at the university under the ubiquitous red and blue balloons. The organisers had even "planted" flowers in the gardens –– coloured sheet music turned into pinwheels.
Lois Siegel with a young audience
For five hours, musical things were happening both indoors and outdoors. Once the key to unlock the piano keyboard had been found after a 15 minute delay while the organisers hunted for it, I saw the Vienna Trio playing in the Tabaret Hall (see my previous blogpost). Next came four female singers of Tapestry on their third visit to Music and Beyond, each member of the a capella group standing in a corner of the hall to enhance the polyphony before they met together on the stage. They were singing in Latin: two extracts from a contemporary composition, The Nine Orders of the Angels by Patricia van Ness of Boston. Their middle song was an arrangement of a lullaby from Montenegro, Lyulyala, Lyulyala. In another room on the ground floor I found Lois Siegel of the Fiddle Chicks, entertaining visiting children with a performance on the spoons.
In the auditorium at Perez Hall across the road, I watched a series of displays of Russian dancing, to recorded music.
Between dances, a tall young lady in a long, Russian dress sang soulful, Russian art songs. In a lecture hall elsewhere in that building the versatile saxophone quartet "Sax Appeal" played arrangements of Bach, an Irish jig, The Pink Panther and Fly Me To The Moon. I liked their versatility, their trilbies and their sense of humour. Sitting beside me, a boy my grandson's age observed them with rapt attention and answered all their questions.
Families watching outdoor musicians
Outside, in the university grounds, the young audience was watching a gentleman playing a piece called "Old Joe Clark” on a banjo, with a lady dancing: these people were the Celtic Rathskallions. Some of the kids were later allowed to have a go on their banjo and harp. Seven members of the Nepean Panharmonic Steel band were playing outside the Perez Hall and another of the outdoor shows was a complete Balinese gamelan orchestra. Snacks and drinks were on sale, salespeople from a musical instrument shop were allowing children to try out their fiddles, trombones and such, and a van from Ottawa's Bookmobile library fleet was taking the opportunity to advertise its services too.
Celtic Rathskallions with fascinated toddlers watching
In the numerous rehearsal rooms of the Music faculty at the university, a variety of mini-recitals were taking place, which, with the doors open, made rather a cacophony. One was by a third year student of Paul Merleyn, Jaeyoung Chong, on the electric 'cello, playing an extraordinary piece called "Raindrops" that he had composed himself for this instrument, its voice electronically duplicated 18 times. I caught two of Frédéric Lacroix' students giving a performance of a Quilter's lovely song, Come Away Death, the singer a bearded baritone and Evelyn Greenberg accompanying a 'cellist playing Fauré's Après un rêve. This experience was making me decidedly nostalgic, for one reason or another. I heard another young 'cellist playing music my son used to play –– the Swan from Carnival of the Animals, and Squire's lively Tarantella.
On the third and fourth floors, they had more musicians than space, so that some had to play in the corridors or, like the young ensemble Musicalement Fleet (siblings), on violin, harp and 'cello, squeezed into a corner outside the elevator doors. A strings tutor was accompanying much younger children on his 'cello, the little girl wearing face paint but taking her turn very seriously. I was glad to see how well he had taught his pupils to hold their violins.
They were introduced at their first concert of the week, on Thursday, by the Austrian Ambassador to Canada who said, "Well, they're back!" and everyone present burst into enthusiastic applause. This group of musicians, the Vienna Trio (Wiener Klaviertrio), has been coming to play at Ottawa's chamber music festivals for the past two decades and is therefore known and loved here. David McCarroll, their recently recruited violinst from California, plays a Gagliano violin made in 1761.
Matthias Gredler (from München) plays a 1752 Guadagnini 'cello. Stefan Mendl, the pianist, is undoubtedly the boss of the trio, and a very fine job he makes of it, too.
This year, I heard them perform three times, twice at evening concerts and this morning, briefly, at the Music And Beyond Family Day at the University of Ottawa, when they were more casually attired ...
... reprising a movement from the Haydn trio (no. 44) which they had performed on Thursday and then the original version of a movement from one of this week's Brahms trios, as well. Apparently Brahms first wrote this one when he was 21 and in love with Clara Schumann. In his maturity he revised the music. At the Family Day they played us the earlier version.
Several of us had gone to the Thursday concert expecting to hear a different set of pieces, because the souvenir programme had printed their pages in the wrong order. In the event they played Haydn, Ravel, Bridge and Brahms (no. 3), the Ravel Piano Trio of 1914 being one of my all-time favourites, ever since I first came across it as the theme music for one of my favourite films, Un Coeur en Hiver. This is how the music begins:
(the men of the Vienna Trio took it at a slightly slower tempo in their performance) and from there it builds impressionistically to its impassioned finale (animé).
On the second night, at Southminster United Church, Chris sat in the audience with me to hear them play a CPE Bach sonata, Brahms' 2nd piano trio, and, after the intermission, Shostakovich's overwhelming Piano Trio no 2, written and first performed towards the end of the 2nd World War in the Soviet era when Stalin was in power. Chris comments that he has no idea how Shostakovich got it past the censors, because this music is visceral with frantic grief and fury, starting with an etherial lament on high harmonics, played on the 'cello at the top of its range. Right from the start you know you are being taken on a long journey. The violin creeps in at a lower pitch, making it a duet, and then the piano joins in too. What follows may have a passing resemblance to Russian / Jewish dance music in places, but any musician can tell that this is all intensely personal. It is not the sort of music during which an audience can nod off and dose. We were on the edge of our seats throughout. The performers were all over the place (we were close enough to see that the 'cellist's shirt was drenched with sweat by the end) and during the furious passages the pianist was bouncing up and down on his stool, which must have had good padding and suspension.
It took me a long while to calm down after that concert, even after we had walked the kilometre back* to our parked car and had driven home.
* Concurrently with this event, a big American football match was taking place at the nearby stadium, so the parking was a challenge. Fortunately we couldn't hear the roars of the football crowd during the concert, once the church doors were shut.
The third concert I went to on Wednesday, in the evening, one for which I had an excellent seat near the front, where I could see all the nuances of the performers' facial expressions, was a recital by the violinist Martin Chalifour of Canada and pianist Steven Vanhauwaert of Belgium ... who is interviewed in this video:
Both are based in LA. Mr. Chalifour plays a 1711 Kreisler Stradivarius; the piano Mr. Vanhauwaert was using was from Ottawa's Steinway shop. It could have been the one I played myself last month. What a thought!
Anyhow, this was a splendid concert of sonatas by Mozart (K301), Beethoven (Op 30, No.2) and Fauré (Op.13), introduced by Mr. Chalifour who said that he used to play the Beethoven sonata when he was young, so had fond memories of it. The Mozart sonata had two movements only. By the time Beethoven came along, the convention was to write four movements for a sonata. The Adagio Cantabile was lovely, and Beethoven's formidable drive was much in evidence in the finale (allegro) movement. The Fauré, played after the intermission was very French, in the late romantic style, the violinist swaying from foot to foot as he played. It had a fast running 3rd movement with pizzicato accents. As the Ottawa Citizen's review pointed out next day, both musicians were "perfectly chez eux" in the Fauré and earned their ovation at the end.
I was by no means the only one who also turned up early by bike next morning to hear this duet play again at the Thursday Coffee Concert, same venue, same seat! The two performers had coffee, croissant and muffins with the rest of us before this concert began, the refreshments provided by the managers of a local retirement residence who are no doubt looking for future clients. For many of us it won't be so long in the future, either. There's a general wish that more young people would attend this annual festival, but perhaps if they do give it a try they are put off by all the grey hair and think it's not for them, what a pity.
The Coffee Concert was a celebration of music by Fritz Kreisler, exclusively, unless you count his arrangement of Dvorak's famous Humoresque as the exception. This is light music, good fun, the audience all smiles throughout. The programme began with a "Menuet" in the style of Mozart (the first piece our Monsieur Chalifour had ever performed in public, apparently) although it didn't sound to me at all like Mozart. Schön Rosmarin was a well known, bouncy little number ("I want that one played at my funeral!" said a lady near me in the audience.) Then there was a Viennese march, a waltz, a caprice, and a Gitana with glissandos on the piano. Kreisler always wrote or played short pieces, because, like the TV producers of today, he reckoned that his target audience had a short attention span. We heard a short but rather grandiose Praeludium and Allegro that seemed to be a homage to JS Bach, the piano cleverly imitating the drone of an organ pipe at one point. A Tambourin Chinois turned out to be more Viennese than Chinese in spite of its repeated 5ths in the accompaniment.
The concert finished with Kreisler's Liebeslied (in the clip below he is playing it himself) and then his Liebesfreud, both famous.
Like Godowski, Kreisler had been a child prodigy who gave his first recital at the age of nine. He lived a long life, not a competitive one; in fact he was rather modest. In the earlier part of his career he performed what he claimed to be undiscovered music previously hidden away in monasteries and such, but by the 1930s he admitted to having composed it all himself.
While talking about music the other day, my husband said that what non-musicians want to hear is something with an "immediate appeal" before they graduate to a more profound experience. What that means is debatable, but by their smiles and body language you can see the immediate effect on an audience of some music, when they hear this, for instance:
That's the folksy Andante Cantabile movement from Tchaikovsky's first string quartet (in D major, Op. 11), a work that was performed in Ottawa on Wednesday afternoon by the Utrecht String Quartet, their 2nd performance in a series. The members of the quartet are not as Dutch as you might think: they come from Finnland, Australia, Russia and Germany, respectively. Their programme featured music by Beethoven (Op. 18, No. 4), Tchaikovsky (they also played a selection of pieces from his Album for the Young arranged for string quartet by a member of the Borodin Quartet) and Piazzolla's Las cuatro estaciones porteñas, arranged by the father of the Utrecht's viola player.
It's going to be difficult to catch up and keep up with my reports on the Music and Beyond festival. I have been to six more concerts / events since Tuesday, all blog-worthy.
At lunchtime in the Dominion-Chalmers Church on Wednesday there was a lecture-recital about the music of Leopold Godowski from the Swedish pianist, Carl Petersson, who also gave a recital at the National Gallery yesterday (which I'll describe later). He began by asking, "Who here has heard of Godowski?" and not many of us had. "I'm here to give a great man a small renaissance," Dr. Peterssen said (whose PhD was written on the composer), going on to describe the life and particularly turbulent childhood of this man.
He was born to a Jewish family in Lithuania; his father died when he was one year old and he was then brought up by his uncle, who sold musical instruments for a living. By the age of five, Leopold could play the Mendelssohn violin concerto, not just on the violin which he was forced to play because his uncle thought there were too many pianist prodigies in Europe, but the orchestral part on the piano, too. The boy didn't need to struggle to learn how to play and gave recitals from the age of 9 onwards; he said it was as natural to him as eating or breathing. When he was 12 he was taken on a tour of North America, but the uncle was no good at looking after him. Leopold found himself "ditched" in Vancouver and, without knowing English, had to make his own way back to New York (which he did). Back in Europe he found a better protector, a Mr. Saxe, whose daughter he eventually married. As a teenager he wanted Liszt to be his teacher, but by the time he had the opportunity, Liszt had died. He ended up in Paris as a sort of foster son of Saint-Saëns.
As an adult he taught the piano, not liking pupils with "fast fingers and slow brains". Although he suffered permanently from stage fright, he also became a very successful performer in Berlin, for a while, liked living there, so when asked to move to Vienna he was reluctant. His wife advised him to demand exorbitant fees and for his sponsors to cover a phenomenal amount of expenses. The ploy didn't work: all their demands were accepted.
Dr. Peterssen called Godowsky a workaholic, a visionary and a philosopher. He was an idealist, inspired by other visionaries engaged in what he called the "vain fight against selfishness, ignorance and brutality." He believed that the human race should diffuse love, light, harmony, not be engaged in the crude commercialism which was "the curse of our age."
It seems we need him back to reiterate those thoughts now.
Why is Godowsky not better known? My illustrations to this blogpost give a clue –– his music was just too impossible to play! Even Horowitz commented that one needed six hands for it; his compositions don't sound particularly strange and modern, though, being in the old Viennese tradition. Dr. Peterssen claimed that this composer could have been remembered as the King of the Waltz rather than Strauss, had his waltzes been more playable. He (Godowsky) claimed that his contemporaries who composed experimentally, such as Alban Berg, were "dishonest snobs"! He didn't like Wozzeck at all. He knew all the famous early 20th century Viennese and wrote music for the left hand, for Paul Wittgenstein; but that was too hard to play as well. Godowsky's main breadwinning occupation was the transcription or arrangement of other composer's works for piano. He even had the effrontery to "arrange" 53 Chopin Études, complicating them beyond measure.
His adult life was fairly grim, his son committing suicide and his wife dying soon afterwards. He had a faithful daughter called Dagmar who looked after him until he died a joyless death of cancer in 1938.
The short examples of Godowsky's music we heard after the lecture didn't sound particularly complex or extraordinarily memorable, in my opinion. We heard an extract from the Java Suite, part of an attempt by the composer to pay tribute to the music of the world (he didn't get very far with it) ...
... , two songs sung by the soprano Hélène Brunet, so rarely heard they may never have been performed before, this side of the Atlantic, which sounded like early Schönberg or Mahler, as well as extracts from Godowsky's "Miniatures" and "Impressions" for piano, entitled Orientale and Valse Macabre.
The news of Brexit and the latest bomb attacks in the Middle East, plus the awfulness of American electioneering, and people's comments on Facebook, vindictive, snide or sadly analytical, have left many of us in a depressed state, this summer. Everyone needs a soothing antidote, and what I have discovered is that studying Chinese and Chinese culture gives me exactly that. It goes a long way to restoring my serenity. (For that matter, so does swimming and being out of doors.)
My little Chinese conversation group, presently consisting of Nancy (her Chinese name Jingnan Xue -- our young teacher), Erika, me, Lee and Victor, met at Lee's house yesterday evening to learn how to talk about our favourite pastimes in Chinese. Afterwards, we took a look at Lee's exotic plants in his garden, the beauty of which also helped to put the world in perspective. Gardening is yuan yi in Chinese (i.e. garden art). We learned that the Chinese / Japanese art we call bonsai is actually pénzai in Mandarin (simply, pot plant) and that they also have the word pénjing (pot landscape). Huapen is a flower pot. If you want to say, "I like growing vegetables in pots, too!" you'd say, wo ye xihuan zai hua pen li zhong cai. I also like in flower pot inside grow vegetable. Xihuan (their word for the verb to like) literally signifies happy pleasure.
I have just re-read Mark Frutkin's poetic novel A Message For The Emperor –– which has a similarly soothing effect on me. Mark lives in Ottawa, but has surely visited Hangzhou (as we did in 2011) in order to write this book so evocatively. Most of his research, though, must have consisted in a personal and thorough immersion in Buddhism, because his writing seems so true to the spirit of his subject. He describes the journey of a fictional landscape artist with a contemplative soul, whose destiny is to become a Buddhist monk (that is what I read into the conclusion of the book) and it seems to me that, as the narrator, he thinks monk-like thoughts himself. The story is set in Song Dynasty (12th century) southern China; it describes scenery that is of course still there, if not quite so remote and untouched, these days. It's a Rahmenerzählung, as the Germans would call it, constructed within the framework of an art museum's curator studying ancient Chinese scroll paintings by the artist, Li Wen, and imagining what inspired them. Wen is the hero of the novel. He is ordered to undertake a year's journey on foot to the Emperor's court at Lin'an (nowadays Hangzhou) to deliver a message and to present four landscapes that he has painted himself, in ink, depicting the four seasons. Here is the passage that describes how he starts to work on his Autumn scene:
As he prepared [to paint], he heard birds calling in the distance, and noticed the patterns of their cries. He felt a gentle movement of the breeze pass through the spruce forest, curl around a stone promontory and drift lazily past him. He smelled the evergreen resin that perfumed the air. Rolling out the blank paper sheet, he placed eight small stones to hold it down. As Wen reached out for the brush of silk strands, everything around him slowed further. The silences between bird cries grew vast, the breeze seemed to hold for a moment, the world spacious and still. Light and shadow spattered the trunks of the oaks and maples, drifting along the boles with each subtle murmur of breeze. [...] Picking up the brush -- its weight almost imperceptible -- he raised it to the heavens, horizontal above his gaze. He then bowed to the heavens as well as the blank page as he held the brush over it. He paused, drinking in the radiance and freshness of the blank sheet. It would never be so perfect again. It saddened him that he felt this need to sully its purity. He paused, the brush hovering over the page. He waited until the empty space within him gave birth to mountains.
It's good to have access to such beneficial things as this book.
This lunchtime, as a festival pass holder for this year's Music and Beyond concerts in Ottawa, I was at a performance of Alexander Mosolov's String Quartet No. 1. Written in 1926, it's a serious, some would say difficult, piece of music in four movements, that deserves attention.
It was being performed today, very impressively, by the Utrecht String Quartet. They played in the National Gallery auditorium against the backdrop of a screen showing blurry extracts from contemporaneous (silent) black and white Russian films: documentaries by Dziga Vertov, and the tragic feature film, Mat (Mother), by Pudovkin. Some images were scenic, but those scenes portraying the early 20th century Russian underclasses were disturbing, to say the least.
Sebastian Koloski, the quartet's 'cellist, introduced the concert. He explained that the sequence of film clips selected to accompany the 25 minutes of music was compiled from 4 hours of footage in the Dutch Film Institute's archives, a challenging task. It created a "tricky" timing challenge for the instrumentalists themselves, as well.
Inevitably, so conditioned am I to the bombardment of images with subliminal sound tracks, I was almost completely distracted from the progress of the music by what was being shown on the screen and am now listening to it again in the YouTube recording linked above.
Mr. Koloski said that the intention was to give Mosolov's music "an extra dimension." However, I'm not so sure. Does the combining of music with visual images really does add to its impact? I have seen / heard it attempted before and thought the same then. What is wrong with leaving added images to an audience's imagination? is what I'd like to know. I can't help feeling that such experiments are no more than a gimmick and actually detract from the music.
Vice versa, I feel the same about attempts to add the "extra dimension" of music to a display of the visual arts, although I do see the point of wordless sound as a mood intensifier for emotional scenes in films. The background music for the battle scenes in Branagh's film of Henry V by Shakespeare is a good example.
The other day Chris and I listened to a radio interview with a New Zealander called Paul Cameron, the CEO of a company called Booktrack, which has added music and sound effects to e-books (novels and children's stories mostly) that you can hear as you read; apparently the app. adjusts to your reading speed. It would be hopeless for someone like me because I have the habit of hopping back and forth all the time while reading a book and the sound effects would never keep up. Anyhow, Booktrack's website advertises "a synchronised movie-style sound track" to enhance whatever you buy to read. Here's an example.
