The Vienna Piano Trio was back in town for our Music and Beyond festival, and the 8th and 9th times I made use of my festival pass this year were to hear them play Schubert. It is good not only to hear these three friends again but to see them again, too, so well do they co-operate on stage. On Monday, July 10th, Chris came with me to Dominion Chalmers United Church for the afternoon concert, because he had a day off work. The young man doing the introductions before the performers came on stage warned us that we'd "only hear one song" [sic] during this concert, which goes to show to what extent iTunes has infiltrated our culture. It was rather a long song, though: Schubert's Opus 100, the E-flat major trio in four movements, some 50 minutes long, so Chris felt he had got his money's worth from his entrance ticket. The allegro moderato movement at the end (not quite a sonata form movement and not quite a rondo) cleverly reprises the main theme from the second movement ...
which makes me realise by how far this composer was ahead of his time, and reminds me yet again how much I love this tune! Schubert himself must have loved it. It was among the last of his own compositions that he heard performed before his death, by the way.
The performers in the video clip above ARE the Vienna Piano Trio! I was thrilled to find this online, as a momento of our experience.
The following day, they performed in another afternoon concert at Dominion Chalmers, and once again it was An Afternoon of Schubert. Chris was stuck at work this time, so I went alone, making sure I had a seat where I could watch the facial expressions of Stefan Mendl, the ultra-musical pianist and leader / founder of the group, who feels every note intensely. I wonder if one of his ancestors centuries ago was also an ancestor of Mendelssohn, but maybe that's too far-fetched a thought. I noticed that he hardly ever looks up at his sheet music, only having it there for occasional reference, although he always employs a page turner.
There were three items on the programme this time, the first two being sonatas rather than trios, the first being the Arpeggione for cello and piano (D.821) followed by the Fantasy in C for violin and piano (D.934). Matthias Gredler is also worth watching in action, and as for the music, Schubert never ceases to awe me. "Genius = surprises and caprice," I noted in the margin, remembering how my music teacher at school (i.e. my dad) had once got me to write an essay on Humour in Music, and thinking how I could perhaps have used the Arpeggione as an example in it. There were Mozartian touches in the Adagio movement. The Fantasy, seven sections long, appealed to me too with its third section quoting one of Schubert's Lieder, Sei mir gegrüßt, developing it into exciting variations. David McCarroll from California, seems to have become thoroughly Viennese since he became the indispensible third member of the Vienna Piano Trio, replacing their former violinist.
After the intermission the whole trio returned to play Schubert's Piano Trio No. 1 in B-flat, op. 99. Here, Schubert composed yet another unforgettable second movement derived from a melody on the cello: 10 minutes of bliss, once more.
Such concerts have a physical effect on me, propelling me so easily along on my walk home afterwards that I feel as if I'm floating.
Music and Beyond's afternoon concert on Sunday, July 9th, was a special event that took place in the Sacred Space, the 9-sided assembly hall of the National Military Cemetery of Canada, at Beechwood Cemetery. The cemetery covers 160 acres of woodland, and, an hour before the music was due to start, the event began with a tour of the graves, but I have already been on such a tour, so waited in the gardens until we concert-goers were invited to take our seats.
During the introduction, with sunshine pouring through the dome at the centre of the hall, we were reminded that the Sacred Space offers "a welcome to Canadians of every religious background", which is good, because Canadians for every religious background have been honoured here. There's a large boulder, a Sacred Stone, so to speak, in the centre of the hall, around which a dozen people walked at its inauguration, each one representing a different faith; this must have been an extraordinary moment.
The exact same concert as the one we heard (A WWI Memorial in Song, also available as a CD or on iTunes) has done the rounds of North America, also performed at Carnegie Hall, at various national military memorials of the United States, etc. Interestingly, the programme chosen by the two young men (John Brancy and Peter Dugan) who have created it can hardly be interpreted as an apology for war, or a nostalgic look back at wartime, since much of it is angry music or the setting of angry words. Performed without a preface, the first song, Channel Firing by Gerald Finzi, was the 1949 setting of a prophetic poem written in 1914. "Good poem!" I had scribbled on my programme, before discovering that Thomas Hardy was the poet.
The singer and pianist thereafter took turns to come to the lectern and talk about the music they were about to perform. Each section of the programme was headed by the name of a different part of the world (England, Germany, France, North America) from which 1st World War soldiers had come.
George Butterworth, a British Lieutenant killed in the Battle of the Somme, had been a promising composer, and is particularly well remembered for the Six Songs from A Shropshire Lad (Housman's poems) that he wrote before going off to war. Since I know these songs note-for-note, I was interested in their interpretation and impressed by the lovely soft start to Loveliest of Trees and Is My Team Ploughing? --- the first and last songs in the cycle. Mr. Brancy took the famous one about The Lads In Their Hundreds at a slow tempo that my husband would find challenging, because of the amount of breath required for each phrase. Brancy was very good at articulation, making the most of the consonants ("the horses trrrrample ...") and putting expressive crescendos / decrescendos on the long vowels (as in "easy" or "sweetheart").
Ivor Gurney
The next song, by Ivor Gurney, incapacitated by a gas attack, was actually written in the trenches: In Flanders expresses the poet's longing for the Cotswolds and Malvern Hills: "my hills." The other song by Gurney, By a Bierside turned out to be another emotional song, one line being: "It is most grand to die, most grand!" which is one of those terrible delusions of the 1st World War. A very British vocabulary and musical style.
To balance all this, the next four songs we heard, composed between 1919 and 1922, were by Carl Orff (1895-1982) who also served in World War I when young, on the other side; he was wounded when a trench collapsed on him. Der Gute Mensch was a bitterly ironic hymn describing a cruel officer in the German army; the following three songs were love songs, One was the setting of a poem by Nietzsche, another, "the confession of a tortured soul" as the singer described it to us. Orff was clearly influenced by the late-romantic early compositions of Schönberg.
France. Since reading Michel Bernard's novel, Les Forêts de Ravel, I knew that Maurice Ravel, in his 40s, had served as an ambulance driver on the battlefields of the 1st World War, and had composed Le Tombeau de Couperin at this time. We heard the Prélude and Toccata from this suite, each movement of which was composed in memory of a fallen friend, as well as Ravel's song Trois Beaux Oiseaux du Paradis, about imaginary birds carrying a last message to the loved ones of three men who have died in the trenches.
The performers tried to relieve our sombre state of mind by making a little joke about Ravel's Toccata: "That was a lot of notes for a small piano."
I had not known that the composer Francis Poulenc had also served in that war, in fact in both world wars. One of the songs we heard by him was the setting of a poem by Apollinaire, entitled Bleuet, meaning cornflower, which was a nickname for the French soldiers in their blue hats. The other song was aptly entitled Priez pour Paix. Here is John Brancy singing it in November 2014, with Peter Dugan accompanying:
Debussy did not directly take part in the war, being too old, but wrote a fast and angry song which was a setting of his own words, called Noel des enfants qui n'ont plus de maisons: Christmas for the children who no longer have homes.
The music of Charles Ives from the USA didn't lighten the audience's mood either with their rendition of three war songs by Charles Ives (1874-1954), written during the month America entered the 1st World War. One of them was a setting of McCrae's In Flanders Fields, the war poem best known to Canadians, that's recited here every November 11th.
The final section of the concert was a performance of four of the popular songs of those days, which the ordinary English-speaking soldiers would have known and sung along to: Keep the Home Fires Burning, My Buddy, God Be With Our Boys Tonight and Danny Boy. What was novel about this was that the pianist, Peter Dugan, had composed his own accompaniment for these songs, so that we heard echoes of pianistic gunfire in the background, evocative indeed. Like the rest of the songs on the programme, they were very well sung by John Brancy.
This was a concert that gave rise to many thoughts, so that I wanted to be by myself for a while at the end of it, and slipped away rather than stay for the refreshments. A day or so later, I read the Hardy poem to my mother, who appreciated it. She'll be 98 this month, conceived at the end of the 1st World War.
This year's Music and Beyond festival advertised five events at which exclusively Canadian music was performed, entitled 150 Years of Music in Canada, i.e. since 1867; I went to two of these.
On the afternoon of Saturday July 8th, the concert at the First Baptist Church began with four Canadian pieces sung by Hélene Brunet, the soprano who had made such a good impression on me last year (we'd also heard her sing most beautifully in Bach's St. Matthew Passion this year, on Good Friday), accompanied here by Valerie Dueck. The first was Le Jeu des Citations, miniatures of just a few bars duration, each a setting of a single phrase in French by Denis Gougeon of Quebec. There followed Alea by the same composer, sung in Latin! Then a setting of the translation of a 9th century Chinese poem about two souls Weaving Love-Knots, by Sarah Quartel. The fourth item was in Latin again: Amore by Jocelyn Morlock, the words meaning "There is nothing more tame ... nor wild ... than love!"
Reporting this 13 days later, I confess I find it hard to remember how this new music sounded, exactly, but have found a recording to share:
However, the next item, added to the programme, made a more lasting impression, partly because the composer was sitting a couple of rows in front of me with his family: a shy looking, extraordinarily gifted 17 year old, Philip Przybylo. He had composed an atonal piece for solo saxophone called Spectres Errants. Amazing! I wonder what his music teacher had made of it. The young man seemed pleased with our applause.
Then we had a Vocalise by Carole Portelance, which had the singer going O - ah -- ee -- oo and clapping intermittantly.
The saxophonist came back on stage to be joined by the Quatuor Despax siblings of Gatineau, plus an extra cellist, a guitar player, and Hélene Brunet once more. Together they performed Fly So Far From Me. The composer Roddy Elias was on stage; he was the guitarist. Hélene Brunet was then replaced by the versatile jazz singer Kellylee Evans, and the ensemble minus the string quartet gave us I've Been Where The Water Is Deeper And Darker. Both songs are from a jazzy "chamber opera for puppets" to be performed in its entirety next year, because this is a work in progress, telling the story of a homeless man and his interaction with the social workers. Read more about it here.
During the second half of the concert, the Quatuor Despax also performed a Fantaisie composed by their own father, Emmanuel Despax, in 2005. "He wrote it for our mum!" (and for them, of course). I very much like watching this proud and musical family in action. They are good role models besides; they have helped tutor the children of the Orkidstra.
The other two items on the programme were compositions by Marjan Mozetich, currently based in Newfoundland, who was also in the church to hear our applause, and who talked about his music. The first one was El Dorado, a piece written for string orchestra and adapted here for the quartet plus harp and double bass. The composer admitted that he wrote this "minimalist" piece under the influence of Philip Glass, so it had many repetitive motifs as in Glass' music. This style doesn't appeal to me very much, I'm afraid. The last item on the programme was more appealing, Mozetich coming to the microphone to announce "It's me again!" and to introduce his Angels In Flightfor flute, clarinet, harp and strings in three movements which he called a Tryptych --- "not movements, but panels", where the middle section, Song of the Eternal began with lovely arpeggios on the clarinet and viola with the cello playing in the background. And yes, Mozetich said it was inspired by Ravel's Introduction and Allegro for the same combination of instruments.
The Friday evening Music and Beyond concert that Chris and I attended on July 7th was one of the best in the festival. It was the Auryn Quartet's third appearance during their visit to Ottawa and the title of the concert was Hungary! La Hongrie! because there was a link to Hungary in all three of the quartets that they played.
In the case of the first one, Haydn's B minor quartet, Op. 33, No. 1, the link was somewhat tenuous, and not explained at the event, but if you look him up you'll find that for a long time (1766-90) Haydn was the chief musician in residence at the Esterháza Palace, which is in Hungary, near the Austrian border. It is satisfying music, during which you can follow the composer's serene train of thought, especially if you have access to a score:
A musical friend of ours once prophesied good things in life for our young son George (also musical) because "He's a Haydn man!"
After this, the second piece on the Auryn Quartet programme came as a shock: Béla Bartók's Quartet No. 2 in A minor. This composer was definitely Hungarian, and far less serene than Haydn. He was inspired to write this one during the 1st World War; it was angry, mournful and intense and not easy listening. My husband Chris was bowled over by it. As you can imagine, the musicians grew very warm, playing this, and must have needed large glasses of water to restore themselves after the standing ovation we gave them before the intermission.
For the remainder of the concert the quartet was joined by Kimball Sykes, first clarinet player in Canada's NACO, to perform Brahms' Clarinet Quintet. The Adagio movement incorporates Hungarian gypsy-style flourishes. I remember learning about that in my music lessons at school. No surprises during this music, because Chris and I know every note of it. We were sitting close enough to observe how Mr. Sykes fought to keep his clarinet in tune in the hot and humid atmosphere (he managed to do so).
Here's the Bennewitz Quartet (whom we were to admire in the second week of the Music and Beyond festival) playing the first movement with a 14 year-old Korean prodigy, seven years ago:
Having heard the Yukon singers in the morning of July 6th, as described in my previous post, I went to something very different in the afternoon, at the First Baptist Church, further west along Laurier Avenue, having munched at a homemade sandwich half way there, on a bench by the fountains outside Ottawa's City Hall.
* My sketch
This Music and Beyond concert was entitled 400 Years Of Opera and was repeated at an evening performance on that same date. Four young and professional opera singers took part, accompanied by Maxime Dubé-Malenfant at the piano and hosted by the animateur, the musicologist Pierre Vachon. They had all dressed up for the occasion, looking glamorous. I sat near the front and sketched them *, during the performance. They were all excellent singers, but I thought the baritone, Max van Wyck, had a particularly lovely voice.
Monsieur Vachon was francophone, but for the benefit of the Ottawa audience spoke mostly in English. He called opera "the ultimate art" and commented that the big "opera voice" was developed in the 16th and 17th centuries, when the singers had to make themselves heard in big halls unassisted by microphones. The introductory item was a rendition of Verdi's very familiar Libiamo quartet from La Traviata and indeed the four voices were so loudly resonant that perhaps I should have chosen a pew further back.
Then we started on a potted History of Opera. The first two examples, from the 17th century, were a baritone aria from Orfeo and a love duet from L'Incoronazione de Poppea by Monteverdi (1642). Thrilling music! The animateur said that the message of Orfeus, who lost his girl in the Underworld, was that "the way to overcome obstacles is to sing," a notion I heartily agree with. The Italians called opera musica favole (legends in music) and the castrati employed by the opera companies "were the Céline Dions of their day" --- adored pop stars.
Two 18th century arias followed, first a virtuoso performance of Vivaldi's florid Agitata da due venti from La Giselda (1735) sung by the mezzo-soprano, Marjorie Maltais, libretto by Boccaccio. Later in that century came Mozart (Gluck was mentioned as being the link composer between the Baroque and Classical style) and we heard as an example of his achievements one of Donna Anna's arias (sung by the soprano Myriam Leblanc) from Don Giovanni, where she pleads with the noble Don Ottavio to wait a while before they get wed, because she is still in mourning for her murdered father. When I hear this one, I always think that it's really because she has a subconscious yearning for the attractive murderer, Don Giovanni, but that's just my reading of it. Anyhow it is subtle music. We heard how Mozart's intention was to "bring real life into opera" and how subversive that was, in those days.
Some more Bel canto: we heard a Rossini aria from La Cenerentola (i.e. Cinderella), Rossini being the composer who brought a sense of fun into music (according to Pierre Vachon) followed by another Verdi quartet, this one from Rigoletto, so skillfully portraying the feelings of all four characters simultaneously. "Verdi wanted to be a musical psychologist." The facial expressions and gestures of the performers fitted their roles.
After this, a much needed Intermission. The performance continued with three further 19th century items, the first being Bizet's famous La fleur que tu m'avais jetée from Carmen, emotionally sung by the tenor, Danny Leclerc. The two female singers then gave us the equally famous duet, Belle nuit, o nuit d'amour by Offenbach: girls in a gondola on Venice's Grand Canal. By contrast, we then heard O du mein holder Abendstern, very well performed by the baritone, from Wagner's Tannhäuser (1845), a 13th century Germanic tale. We learned about Wagner's ambition to create Gesamtkunstwerke in his operas and about his use of the Leitmotiv. It seems Wagner included more than 100 Leitmotive in his works.
For the last section of the programme we had a series of lighter, 20th century music that stuck in my head for several days afterwards, so much did I enjoy it. Summertime from Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess is always easy on the ear, but M. Vachon made a mistake in telling us, to a sharp intake of breath from the audience, that Porgy and Bess was the more acceptable face of racism. He apologised immediately for this embarrassing slip. Myriam Leblanc made the most of her moment by wandering up and down the aisle during her Summertime and holding a beautiful high pp note at the end. (I have tried that myself, and admire singers who can do it.) Finally we heard the tenor singing Maria from Bernstein's West Side Story (1957), lyrics by Sondheim --- which, when you come to think of it, is a sort of opera --- and finally an adaptation of the full-company number, Tonight, Tonight, which comes at the climactic mid-point of the original show, by all four singers, together with their hard-working accompanist. Brilliantly composed music! I heard a lecture about it once, long ago, on BBC Radio 3. This also brought back memories of an ambitious performance that we once attended at the Croesyceiliog Comprehensive in Cwmbran, Wales, with my son as lead cellist in their orchestra and his school friends singing on stage, their music teacher Mr Appleby conducting. Full of nostalgia when I got home, I wasted time watching YouTube clips from West Side Story, and singing along.
At the Tabaret Hall on July 6th, singers from the Yukon were showing what they could do; the first three songs were sung unaccompanied by a ladies' choir calling themselves The Persephones. They were directed by a forceful woman called Barbara Chamberlin who had also arranged or composed some of the items. At the lectern, to educate us about the Whitehorse region and Yukon culture, she introduced the songs and announced the many deviations from the published programme.
The actual order of items was as follows:
1. A part song entitled The Northern Lights.
2. Hudson Bay Boys, a cheeky 4-part number supposedly sung by the 1st Nation women to the gold diggers, who used to look forward to their arrival. "Where's the Hudson Bay boys?" went the chorus. "I'm getting older for you!" Or at least, I think that was what they sang.
3. Then came a song about a badly behaved husky: Dog of Shame. I think Ms. Chamberlin wrote the words as well as the music, which incorporated dog noises. She told us that in Whitehorse, there are more (sled) dogs than people. Anyway, "...they had to muzzle him."
For the remainder of the programme, three men came on stage, plus a few extra women, to join (or replace some of) The Persephones. This was the 8-part Whitehorse Chamber Choir, a more experienced group of 14 singers; with their arrival the standard of performance went up.
4. Gabi Gabi, a South African song.
5. Song For A Winter's Night, pianissimo, in close harmony, ending with humming in all the parts.
6. Cold Snap, a song with eccentric words, such as "I want to be a winter person..."
7. After the Gold Rush, a setting for choir of a Neil Young song.
8. Ms. Chamberlin introduced the 8th item by telling us, "Summer in the Yukon isn't very long, only about twelve days" so the next item was a spoof version of The Twelve Days of Christmas: The Twelve Days of Summer. The choir themselves had helped to compose the words, so (as well as I could make out) we had
12 Yukon drummers
11 moose a-rutting
10 Can-Can dancers
9 wolves a-howling
8 broken windshields (?!)
7 salmon swimming
6 ravens (doing something I couldn't catch)
5 gold claims
4 mosquito bites
3 blackflies
2 cariboo
and a bearcub in a pine tree
9. Baba Yetu, another South African song
10. An arrangement of the the late Leonard Cohen's ubiquitous Hallelujah, that people praise so highly. I shall now make myself extremely unpopular by adding that I don't like this song very much, neither the words nor the music, sorry.
11. High Wind. This was a song with piano accompaniment expressing Yukoners' longing for the north wind and "the midnight sky on fire" whenever they're away from the Yukon.
12. The last item was Ned's Lament composed and sung in gospel style, the story of a paddlewheeler that ran aground on the River Yukon. Ned was its Captain. Here's a recording of the performance I watched:
I wrote in the margin of my programme that concerts* allow you to stare at people without seeming rude. On the front row for this one, I'd been able to stare to my heart's content.
* The same applies in cinemas and at the theatre, of course.
As a Festival Pass holder at this year's Music and Beyond in Ottawa, I have 15 concerts to report! It feels like a long time since the first one I attended at midday on July 5th, a concert of music by the Russian composer Arensky, who died in 1906. "Tragic death," I scribbled on the programme, but forgot why. (According to the Wikipedia Arensky died of TB at the age of 44, in Finland.)
Each of the two pieces was written in memory of another musician, the first, a quartet for violin, viola and (unusually) two cellos, in three movements (Op. 35, No.2), composed as a tribute to Tchaikovsky. The music being balanced towards a low pitch made it sound funereal in places, the first movement like a sacred chant. "Deep Russian sonority," I noted. The middle movement was a series of variations on a theme by Tchaikovsky, Russian folksy in style, and the Finale began in a low register again, on all four instruments, andante sostenuto, leading to a fugue.
The second piece, Arensky's first piano trio in four movements, Op. 32, written in memory of a cellist friend, was somewhat lighter by comparison, with a romantic, Dvorak-like opening movement with a fast, bouncy Scherzo and a muted Elegia following.
I jumped on a bus and went straight from that concert to the 2pm concert at Southminster United: the Auryn Quartet playing Beethoven and Schubert, not to be missed! They played Beethoven's C-sharp minor Opus 131, with no breaks between the movements. I'm not sure whether the Ottawa audience is quite ready for Beethoven's Late Quartets -- some of the audience seemed to find it a hard slog -- but knowing what to expect, I was swept along with this monumental music. After the intermission, the German group performed Schubert's G major quartet D. 887, and that was Beethovenesque too, with its sudden major-minor changes, and delighted me with a long and lovely melody on the cello in the slow movement. The Auryn Quartet is adept at pianissimo playing: that's what distinguishes the professionals from the amateurs. These men have been playing together for more than 30 years, still the original members of the quartet, like a marriage. They are currently based in Detmold, Germany.
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