A Canadian selection (continued)

This was the fourth of the 150 Years of Music in Canada series in the Music and Beyond festival. I came along that day (July 13th) because Paul Marleyn and Frédéric Lecroix were going to play, and I like those two U of O musicians.

For the first half of the concert, though, Elaine Keillor was on stage, a lady now in her late seventies who has been a pianist all her life, researching and specialising in Canadian music, and who has been awarded the Order of Canada for her work at the university and elsewhere. She played a series of derivative, light classical pieces by 19th century and early 20th century Canadian composers, some of which reminded me of the music my uncle Frank (1915-2010) used to compose. He used to be a good pianist, too!

Each piece was a dance. The first one, called Yvonne, was a waltz written in 1903 by Alexis Contant. Ms. Keillor spoke to us about the composers and mentioned that that Contant was a student of the man who'd composed Canada's National Anthem, Calixa Lavallée. (O Canada was originally written to be sung in French on Quebec's Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day, you know.) Then came the Chanticleer March & Two Step (1910) by a woman, Jeanne Delmar, of the Delmar music publishers' family. The next composer featured on the programme, Wesley Octavius Forsyth (d. 1937), used to preface his pieces with a poem he'd written. This one was entitled In the Vale of Shadowland --- I'm afraid I don't remember anything about it, but can recall the following piece, by a friend of Forsyth's, Clarence Lucas, born on the Six Nations Reserve managed by his Methodist father. Lucas junior composed no fewer than 300 works, said Ms. Keillor, and this one was a Chopin-like Mazurka (No. 2, 1890). Goodness knows what the natives would have thought of it, sounding nothing like their own music. Finally we heard a lively gavotte, Conversazione, composed by Joseph Vézina (d. 1924), leader of the Quebec Symphony Orchestra, again composed in the popular style of those days.

With the appearance of Paul Marleyn, who (I think) looks remarkably like the British singer Ian Bostridge, the mood and style of the concert changed, and my interest perked up. Now we were into more serious compositions by contemporary composers, first a piece for solo cello by Chan Ka Nin, called Soulmate (1995) dedicated to the composer's wife who, said Mr. Merlyn, is also a composer. "Good music!" I noted. There was fire and intensity in this. For the next item the cellist was accompanied by his friend Mr. Lacroix to play Still Time (1987) by John Burge, a tribute to his wife. Again, an intense piece, abstract and atonal, but I can't find a reference to it on his website. They then played an extra piece, not listed on the programme, by a female composer whose name I didn't catch. Anyway this one, by contrast, was "extremely tonal" and Mr. Marleyn apologised for this!

The final item in this noon hour concert was for Frédéric Lacroix alone, a piano suite he had composed himself. The same age as my daughter, he studied at the University of Montreal, and this composition stems from those days. He wrote it in a light-hearted way in response to the pigeons who had so much disturbed his post-graduate studies of Couperin on the 8th floor of the music faculty by their coo-ing (roucoulement, he said, unable to think of the English word for it!) that he tried had to recreate this sound on the piano. Apart from the trills, there were many references to Couperin's music in the five sections of Lacroix' Le Club du Jardin (1999), each headed by the name of a different creature: Le blaireau ... La castor ... le lievre ...le pigeon ... l'écureuil. Therefore it was most enjoyable to listen to and we applauded with enthusiasm at the end.