A tapestry of sounds

Nuit d'étoiles, sous tes voiles, 

Sous ta brise et tes parfums, 

Triste lyre qui soupire, 

Je rêve aux amours défunts.

This is the first verse of a poem set to music by Claude Debussy and sung in an arrangement for three female voices at St. Joseph's Church on July 8th. It was the third item of a reflective programme presented by a group known as Tapestry, of four women from Boston (singers, one of them also a viola player) and two men (a young Russian pianist and a clarinetist). They have won prestigious awards, and have performed in Ottawa before. Their selection of music was called Beyond Borders: Songs of Hope and Peace and it had also been performed at the National Gallery in Washington, DC, on Armistice Day last year. It had a sort of anti-war theme, but did not include any music from Germany, which might have made it seem more complete in the context of their theme.

The concert began with a piano solo, an extract from Ravel's Le tombeau de Couperin, composed during the 1st world war, and with no pause a clarinet solo followed. We heard a variety of piano, viola, voice and clarinet pieces after that, including a Satie Gnossienne, an arrangement of Debussy's Noël des enfants qui n'ont plus de maison for vocal trio again, and some extracts from Bartok's Bagatelles for piano. John McCutcheon's composition Christmas in the Trenches was for singers in four parts, with the viola held and played like a guitar in accompaniment. An arrangement by Virgil Thomson of Psalm 23 was for all six musicians; then came another clarinet solo. Thus ended the first part of the concert.

Most likely, at my age, my hearing is deteriorating; I found it difficult to make out the singers' words in this concert, partly because of the acoustics of the church and also because the ensemble seems to specialise in soft singing. The soprano Christi Catt seems to have a thinner voice than the other two singers. These are minor quibbles; their musicianship was exemplary.

The second part began with a Pastorale by Poulenc, followed by a viola solo. leading to a medieval Agnus Dei from Spain with the clean, open harmonies of its time.

To contrast with that, a Dona Nobis Pacem by Vaughan Williams with his distinctive early 20th century harmonies and (a bigger contrast yet) a Duke Ellington number, Mood Indigo, sung, with piano and clarinet backing. The clarinetist came straight back in with solo improvisations by Charles Mingus, after which we heard the four women singing a Billie Holiday song from the 1940s in close-harmony, barbershop style.

Talk about variety! The pianist, from memory, then impressed everyone with No. 2 of the Etudes Tableaux by Rachmaninoff, and then we had two Samuel Barber pieces, the first (Sure on this Shining Night, 1938) with a Finzi-like accompaniment on the clarinet and viola. When the voices joined in the clarinet became the lowest voice. Barber's lovely Agnus Dei immediately followed and finally the ensemble gave us a soft arrangement (sung in three parts) of Somewhere from West Side Story, by Bernstein.

Concert-goers

It seems to me, sitting in the audience for a concert of classical music multiple times, that there are recognisable concert-going types. I'm not saying which type I am. 😉

• The latecomer: sidles in through the back door and stands at the back or the side, restrained by the ushers from trying to find a seat until the performers are acknowledging the general applause for Item 1 on the programme. If the latecomer is a cyclist, he may be damp with perspiration and still wearing a helmet, carrying a large water bottle. He will then squeeze past the people in the row he's chosen to sit in, whispering Sorry, thanks, sorry, excuse me, sorry, thanks! before lowering himself into the seat and downing his water in one draft. He is still packing his bottle away when Item 2 begins.
• The head wagger: often sitting near the front of the audience, can be spotted from a long way off, swaying to the music, oblivious to everything else. In his youth, as a prom-goer in prewar 1930s London, my dad was one of these. My mother, elsewhere among the prewar prommers, noticed him thus, years before she actually met him, postwar.
• The finger tapper: a discreet version of the head wagger, probably not quite so oblivious to others in the audience, but still very caught up in the music, with which he seems familiar. He wishes that his dream of being a conductor had come true.
• The foot tappers: everyone in the concert hall, if the piece is rhythmically irresistible! (Except for the introvert, see below.)
• The novice: bewildered by the whole experience, feels very embarrassed when he claps at the end of an in-between movement and nobody else joins in. The performers usually give a little smile when this happens, but do not bow in acknowledgement. Sad to say, a younger novice probably spends most of the concert thinking how grey-haired and uninspiring the rest of us look.
• The proud mother: sits on the front row with one or two very straight-backed children, smartly dressed and behaving themselves impeccably. She has great ambitions for them and will one day see them on the stage, too, doing something impressive.
• The inseparable couple: have their favourite seats in the concert hall and if one of them arrives first (s)he saves the other one's seat by plonking a programme or hat on it. They sit close together, arms and thighs touching, and clasp hands or give one another knowing grins at the big moments in the music. During the intermission they do the rounds of other audience members, introducing one another.
• The enthusiasts: whose favourite part of the evening is at the end, when they can leap to their feet shouting Bravo! (sometimes bringing the rest of the audience up with them) and who carry on applauding, hands in the air, after everyone else has stopped. These people may turn out to be close friends or relatives of the performers.
• The fidget: usually female, has trouble with her hair-do during the slow movements, or feels a draft and makes a fuss fishing out her shawl and putting it on, taking it off, and then putting it on again. Often she will go to the extent of moving from one seat to another, even while the artists are playing, to find a more comfortable spot. Heaven help the rest of us if the fidget has a brought a fan or a bag of cough sweets with her.
• The creeper-out: rather like the latecomer, makes his or her presence felt. She makes a dramatic exit, doubled up to make herself as small as she thinks possible, tiptoeing to the nearest exit with whatever hand luggage she needs to carry along, like a cartoon thief, whispering apologies to the people around her. The more experienced early leavers or urgent washroom visitors do not creep, and therefore get out of the hall more quickly.
• The chatterbox: has a friend along and keeps her engrossed in a long anecdote, standing up, until the performers have come on stage, have picked up their instruments and are at the very point of starting to play. Even after the chatterbox (usually female) has finally sat down in her seat, the anecdote sometimes continues in sotto voce whispers, interspersed with giggles, during the actual music or introduction to it.
• The solitary introvert: sits right at the back and / or the far side of the hall with as many empty seats around him as possible. He just hates it if there's a full house. He does not move from his spot during the intermission, which he also hates, but has brought a book along, that he will read undisturbed, so he hopes, until the performers return. The best moment for him is when the hush descends, just before they take up their instruments again. He likes the sad or solemn pieces best, not the jolly vivace ones, and especially not music for which the audience is expected to join in, clapping the rhythm or even (God forbid!) singing along.
• The erudite listener: may bring the score and a pencil with him, and can sometimes be seen taking notes during the performance. This may or may not be the music critic for the local paper or an ex music teacher or prof. After the performance, for anyone who'll listen, he will compare it in detail with other performances of that same work or the same musicians, or with other works by that composer. At moments when a performance doesn't agree with his ideas of how it should have been done, and especially if the performer makes a mistake, he may ostentatiously frown, wince, or shake his head. Some such people are jaded, musical snobs, who, after listening to a piece everyone else has found thoroughly entertaining, will say something along the lines of... "I feel that was a very slight work."* Other erudite people, though, are genuinely appreciative of what they have heard, far more profoundly so than the uneducated masses.

*  I overheard this dismaying remark once from an adult at a concert for children.

¡Asi es! --- I bite the buttons off my shirt!

I went to the Flamenco Rouge performance at the Music and Beyond Festival with expectations of being highly entertained. I didn't expect to get so much education at this event. It was an audio-visual production, called Corrientes, the Spanish word for currents, about the Power of the Sea and its symbolism in Spanish culture and social history, about ebb and flow in people's lives. On a screen behind the stage images were projected, photos of the sea and the vessels on it, of ports and harbours, of the Spanish people, reproductions of famous Spanish paintings and clips from poems in Spanish, several of these by Neruda or by Lorca (extracts from his Seawater Ballad for example, La balada del agua del mar). Some of the images seemed to fit the music and dance we were witnessing; others didn't --- I'll come to that later.

At the start the performers processed in from the behind the audience, clapping rhythmically, then stamping. Flamenco Rouge is a group from Halifax, NS, including a newly recruited drummer who wore a black outfit and black shoes with long, pointed toes and bright red socks. The two guitarists wore scarlet shirts, the ladies wearing a variety of dresses, veils and shawls. They didn't carry fans, but large fans and extra shawls were spread out on boards in front of the stage. They took their seats in a row behind the dance platform, the drummer holding his vertical, lute shaped drum between his knees. He is one of the toque, the instrumentalists. The charismatic female leader of the troupe, Brenley Heaver, takes the cante part, singing soulfully (and very well) in each number, through a microphone, and the other three ladies are the bailarinas, the dancers. Ms. Heaver, who I'm surprised to learn is not Spanish after all, is married to the lead guitarist, Matt Martin, as she told us during this show, admitting that she sings one of these songs, the one called Allegrias, to their baby son as a lullaby. All the participants become palmeros at times, clapping a rhythm with their palmas (palms of their hands). Castanets occasionally come into it too, but not in every instance.

The troupe performs music and dances from both sides of the Atlantic, including some from South America, but mostly from Spain. This is a gypsy art form, apparently, now with UNESCO heritage status. Some old black and white photos on the screen showed scruffy people dancing or otherwise joining in with spontaneous outbursts of flamenco in the streets or at the docksides. It bears a resemblance to Portuguese fada, especially at its "dark, pensive moments", as Ms. Heaver put it, and in its Moorish ornamentation. We heard tarantas, that had elements of jazz or blues, with a set sequence of harmonies and soloists in those numbers. The music sets the mood, the dance holds the audience's attention. I confess I was rather taken aback by the age of the dancers who I was prejudicially expecting to be very young and slim (they aren't), but they do know how to move and what to do with their hands and feet. Their fingers waggle or flutter; their noisy heels stamp or kick the long trains of their dresses aside. Often, I was reminded of peacocks. Near the beginning, one of these ladies strutted in wearing a dramatic black veil and trailing a long dress with flounces in peacock blue. The train can be thrown over a dancer's arm too; it seems to me a miracle that she doesn't trip over it.

There are stories behind each song and dance, often, so we were told, with an undercurrent of rage or "torment in the heart". The dresses were in dramatic colours, black, bright pink or orange, bright red, dazzling white. I assume that some of the traditional singing and the words would have come from men, since one of the passionate lines Ms. Heaver spoke of means "I bite the buttons off my shirt!" I doubt if a woman would do that. As one lady dances to the music, the more passive members of the cast shout their approval, as is traditional, calling out ¡Eso es! or ¡Asi es! --- that's how it is, i.e. "I feel what you feel!" One song was a sort of howl to the moon, with fingers clicking and shouts of ¡Olé!

For the second half of the performance the ladies wore different clothes, their shawls more in evidence, especially in the fandango where the shawl, or mantón, was swirled around her head and body in order "to communicate feelings". La barca de mis amores gave us an example of "flamenco sauciness". In the lyrics, the lovers in the story tear at each other's hair in a fury. No understatement in this culture! The words of some of the songs are very poetic, perhaps especially in Allegrias, the quasi-lullaby mentioned above, that tells of the joy and sorrow of coming home or leaving home and starts on the guitar in a minor key. "Waves play with the shore like a dancing child." On the screen, a Lorca quotation was projected:

The sea smiles from far off 

Teeth of foam 

Lips of sky ...

It is a shame to end this blog post on a sour note, but I feel I must say that some of the images in the slide show seemed inappropriately distracting, in the context. These were the reproductions of Goya's absolutely horrific nightmare etchings and civil war paintings. I have seen them before. They are so awful that I could not bear to look up at times and they haunted and depressed me afterwards. To me they didn't seem to go with the finger clicking, hand slapping, heel kicking sauciness of the dancing, even though the artistic director may have felt that they befitted the darkness behind the songs. Maybe I'm wrong and maybe it is all connected. Food for thought.

Golden Voices

Another of the strange names I encountered during the Music and Beyond Festival this year was Aureas Voces, the name of a versatile group of young singers encouraged and supported by the Early Music specialist and renowned Canadian countertenor, Daniel Taylor. It means Golden Voices. There were 15 musicians singing in the event I attended, with the addition of a violinist (who also joined the singers at one point) and of a baroque guitar / theorbo player. One of the tenors played a smaller kind of lute as well, and the director of the ensemble, Nick Veltmeyer, is adept at the keyboard (organ, piano, etc.) as well as being a compelling solo singer. Apparently the youngest member of Aureas Voces is only 18, but they are all professionals.

They had a clever insight while preparing for their performance, calling it An Ocean Apart: English and Nova Scotian Song, the point being that 17th century art songs by Purcell have something in common with traditional Nova Scotian folksongs. Perhaps they originated at about the same period; that wasn't made clear. They were certainly made to sound similar in this concert, where the folksongs were arranged (harmonised and ornamented) by Mr. Veltmeyer who comes from Nova Scotia himself and is obviously steeped in both genres. He had arranged some of the Purcell items too, Fairest Isle, for instance.

The programme went like this.
First hour:
Come all ye old comrades sung by the whole group as they processed in. It began with a striking soprano solo by their star ("featured") singer Janelle Lucyk, in total control of her voice throughout the show.

Fairest Isle

A fantasia by Telemann, violin solo.

If I were a blackbird, sung unaccompanied, a Nova Scotian duet for tenor and soprano.

Caprice de chaconne for the guitar by Corbetta, a 17th century Italian composer.

As I wandered by the brookside, a slow and tender tenor solo, with accompanying voices.

Passacaglia for three instruments and voices from Purcell's King Arthur (How happy the lover ...) describing "the pleasures of love"!

Jimmy and I will marry, a folksong.

Second hour:
"Welcome back for Round Two!" said the director, and they started with Purcell's For love ev'ry creature is born, mentioning the pleasures of love, again!

A duet for guitar and violin followed, then a solo folksong for the soprano with a verse for all the high voices. The acoustics in St. Joseph's church, where this was taking place, were very echoe-y, so words got lost in the high vaults from time to time. Another guitar piece and then the soprano, who began this sitting down, sang the tragic aria O let me forever weep from Purcell's The Fairy Queen which has a ground bass rather like the accompaniment to Dido's Lament. It is very beautiful, and demanding on the singer.

Ms. Lucyk rose to the occasion, the violin lamenting in counterpoint. The voice part requires a purity of tone and this is presumably how she was trained to sing, although she could manage a rougher, folksy style of voice as well for the Nova Scotian items.

Her male counterpart Mr. Veltmeyer followed this with his arrangement of As slowly I rode by the banks of the river, I spied a fair damsel ... about a suicidal girl sighing over the green grass that grew o'er her young lover's grave, etc.

A violin lament was followed by a recit and aria for the soprano again, with the chorus singing "If music be the food of love ..." (not the Shakespeare scene though) and the concert performance ended with Come all ye old comrades, once again, as lustily executed as when we first heard it. Shades of Purcell's Come away, fellow sailors from Dido & Aeneas?

The Orava

You get to hear strange names during Ottawa's Music and Beyond Festival, names you haven't heard before. One that will stick in my mind is Orava, the name of a string quartet of young men from Brisbane, Australia. Two of the four, Daniel and Karol Kowalik, are brothers of Polish heritage who like to showcase Polish music when they can. The last item in their concert here on 6th July was called Orava; it was a modern arrangement of music from the mountainous region of Poland (bordering Slovakia) also of that name: this is "the folk music of the mountain men who sing there in summer". The quartet took its name from this piece. The piece in question started with a repetitive phrase played by the two violins, with the lower instruments then joining in. It had a Bartok-like character, I thought.

The enthusiasm of the young Australians came across. They gave us a Haydn quartet first (Op. 33 No.1 in B minor), some of which I confess I missed because I was late, having gone to the wrong venue first. That's by the way. Then came the piece I'd been particularly keen to hear, Shostakovich's Quartet No. 8 in C minor.  I have heard it before; I recognised it. It is a very intense experience, listening to this. It was written in a mere four days in the heat of emotion and its five sections are played without a break. It is a sort of Jewish (although the composer was not Jewish) lament or sad dance, written in 1960 in response to the horrors of the 2nd World War and the bombing of Dresden. the results of which the composer had just witnessed. Officially he dedicated the work "to the victims of war" but privately he told his daughter that this was actually a Requiem to himself, since he never knew who might come knocking at the door to arrest him for subversion and thought he might not survive. Apparently Shostakovich slept close to the door in those days so that, if this were to happen, his family would not be disturbed by his arrest! The music has "an arch-like structure", with a melancholic start and finish, quoting the notes D-S-C-H (his musical signature) and climaxing with a frantic sort of "dance" in the middle, unforgettable.

At one point a lovely high melody was played by 1st violin and cello at the same pitch, creating an unusual effect.

The other work on the programme, played after the intermission was Mendelssohn's String Quartet in F minor, which was also performed with restless drive. I did like the way they played.

Bach's violin sonatas

These were pioneering works in their day, so we learned. Adrian Butterfield from London---with Luc Beauséjour from Montreal playing the obbligato harpsichord part---introduced and played all six of them, during two concerts at Dominion Chalmers. I was at both concerts.

Bach himself knew how to play both instruments and was one of the most talented keyboard players of all time, said Mr. Butterfield. In these works, the harpsichord and violin have equal prominence; this was new. In effect, they are trios, with the violinist playing the first part and the two hands of the pianist taking the other two parts. Some of the slow movements are more like duets, the left hand of the piano merely providing a continuo bass accompaniment.

Handel also wrote sonatas of this kind, but of a different character. Handel gives us human drama, whereas Bach "takes us out of this world."

In the B minor Sonata, the violin enters very softly on a sustained note. Its 3rd movement gives the violin part the brilliance of the trumpet obbligato in The Trumpet Shall Sound from Handel's Messiah (my opinion).

The first movement of the A major Sonata is an "ethereal" piece of music. The 3rd movement is a canon, except that the harpsichordist cannot sustain his long notes, so they become trills, instead of dying away quickly. The fourth movement of this one is fast.

Sonata number 3 in E major has very different parts for the two instruments. I thought its first movement reminiscent of Bach's accompaniments to the slow, religious arias for solo voice. The violinist called the 2nd movement "lively and uplifting" and the C-sharp minor slow movement "expressive". I could have listened to it for longer, but was jerked out of that state of mind by the last movement with its very fast tempo, in 2s and 3s.

*****

Once again bringing his Baroque bow with him for the second recital, Mr. Butterfield pointed out that the sound of the first movement from the C minor Sonata, with its alternating slow and fast movements, is very similar to the violin obbligato line for the aria Erbarme Dich in the St. Matthew Passion. In the second of the slow movements, the violin itself seems to take the alto part with its chorale like accompaniment to the triplets played on the harpsichord. I noticed that the string player avoided vibrato for the most part, which is like a piano player avoiding the sustaining pedal for Bach, in keeping with  the period sound.

The F minor Sonata also starts with a slow movement, the violin part "singing" in a remarkably low register after the keyboard introduction. In the second movement, the voices of the two instruments imitate one another. Then follows music where the violin plays chords (double stopping), the harpsichord line moving around them. The final movement for this sonata is a passe-pied minuet with the violinist playing off the beat. "Surprisingly humorous," he called it, "for F-minor". I listened out for the humour but didn't quite catch it.

Mr. Butterfield mentioned that a member of the audience had lent him her instrument for this performance and that Luc had learned the harpsichord part at short notice, which was "quite a feat" --- I'd say so!

Bach's 6th and final violin sonata, in G major, was unexpectedly in five movements. The middle one is a harpsichord solo, reminding me of his 2-part Inventions. The violinist felt that the fourth movement was "incredibly" ahead of its time, reminiscent of moments from Beethoven's late quartets. This was a lovely, minor section of the work. The merry Gigue with which this sonata ended broke the sombre spell.

The Bennewitz is back!

We heard the Bennewitz String Quartet from Prague play music by JS Bach, Mendelssohn and Beethoven, this afternoon. There was a linking theme in that Mendelssohn had promoted and revived Bach's music for audiences of his (Mendelssohn's) day, having discovered in his gifted youth how great it was. He had also admired and tried to imitate Beethoven's compositions, so the 2nd violinist (Štěpán Ježek) told us in his well thought out introduction. All four string quartet members were recognised by the Ottawa audience, having appeared in town before. Last time Chris and I had heard them play, at the hall in Landsdowne Park, they were competing with noisy air conditioners, but the Dominion-Chalmers' "Event Space" (as this large, decomissioned church is now called) had much better acoustics, not to mention effective air-conditioning on this very hot day, so they seemed more relaxed.

An extract from Bach's Art of Fugue came first, the theme appearing in three different tempi (although I couldn't follow this very well) and in a mirror image.

Mendelssohn's Quartet in A minor, Opus 13, was itself full of fugues or "fragments of fugalisation" as the 2nd violinist told us, giving us a thorough music appreciation lesson from on stage. Also fragmentary were the references at the start and end of the quartet of a song Mendelssohn had once written to a girl he'd loved.

Beethoven's "Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit", the long third movement (Molto adagio) in the Op.132 Quartet was particularly fine. I thought of my mother who deeply loved this music and used to tell me in her old age that she followed the composer's train of thought while listening to it. Our lecturer-violinist told us today that the Beethoven quartets mark a "watershed" in the history of music. In its day, Beethoven's music was unfashionably personal, subjective, a different kind of sound from what people were used to, this probably being a result of his deafness and consequent isolation. However, Beethoven explicitly did not care if he was liked or understood or not. He was rudely told, "No one wants to listen to your music!" The instrumentalists didn't even want to play it. A cellist once famously threw a new manuscript by Beethoven on the floor and stamped on it. But the composer retorted that he was not writing for his contemporaries but for future generations. Some of his actual pronouncements have survived because, being deaf, he was obliged to read what other people were asking and write everything down in reply. Many of these Conversation Books have been preserved.

*****

Added later ...

Hans Krása

I also attended the second concert in this year's series featuring the Bennewitz Quartet, at which they played music by Czech composers Suk, Krása, Janácek and Dvorak. Suk was a patriotic composer, Dvorak's pupil and eventually son-in-law. Krása was a Jewish composer who organised cultural events in the Theresienstadt ghetto, including the creation of an opera for children. He died at Ausschwitz in 1944. The Theme and Variations for String Quartet that we heard here in Ottawa had been premièred in the ghetto.

Leos Janácek's famous Quartet no. 1, known as the Kreuzer Sonata Quartet is his comment on tragedy of a more personal kind. "For some people" said the 2nd violinist who introduced everything again, "this [music] comes too close"; it is a depiction of male, sexual jealousy. The music (which I have described before, in a blogpost from 2008) was inspired by Tolstoy's novella by the same name in which a jealous husband catches his wife playing the piano for a young violinist as they practise Beethoven's Kreuzer Sonata together. The intimacy he sees there is too much for him and he murders her. As in Schönberg's Verklärte Nacht, inspired by a poem about lovers by Richard Dehmel, you have to use your imagination to follow the programme of emotions in the work. In fact the Janacek quartet is very similar in its painful intensity and dislocation at its worst moments, so to speak, the players scratching at their strings in a deliberate, symbolic disruption of the lyricism, but unlike the Schönberg, this one does not have a happy ending. The Bennewitz Quartet violinist said that Janacek was interested in "difficult stories" and in the arguments, common in Tolstoy's day, about whether a husband should have "a right" to murder his wife if she is perceived to be misbehaving. He pointed out that the music seems to end "with a question".