barczablog

Tonight we heard one of the three Toronto Symphony orchestra concerts titled “Best of Tchaikovsky” at Roy Thomson Hall.  While I’m not sure if I’d agree with the title (I can think of pieces I would prefer), if they’re playing Tchaikovsky? I’m there. And I will enjoy it, especially if they bring the level of commitment to the playing that we experienced tonight.

The evening was mostly Russian with a tiny bit of Canadian:

• The Talk of the Town (Andrew Ager)
• Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture (Tchaikovsky)
• Variations on a Rococo Theme (Tchaikovsky)
• Symphony #5 (Tchaikovsky)

The opening Sesqui by Andrew Ager was a fascinating two minutes of darkly foreboding unison in the lower strings, some impressionistic swirling in the upper strings, and the promise of more in the last thirty seconds, making me think: why must it end so soon?

Speaking of Russians, we grabbed a copy of principal cellist Joseph Johnson’s CD of Russian cello sonatas, with one each from Rachmaninoff & Shostakovich, having heard him as soloist tonight in the Rococo Variations.  It was a nice feeling even if it was bittersweet, with the record store scheduled to close later this month (go while you can!).  On the way home it was a pleasure to bask in that rich cello sound in the car.

Keri-Lynn Wilson leading the TSO (photo:: Nick Wons)

It was a happy collaborative experience, as the TSO, led by guest conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson, sounded oh so sensitive in dialogue with JJ’s cello.   This is the same conductor who led the Canadian Opera Company’s recent Tosca, a production where everyone seemed to be listening thoughtfully to one another, surely due to her solid leadership.  I have to think we’re now in an era when conductors are less and less the people telling an orchestra what to do, and more and more listening to what they can do. Wilson has a unique presence at the podium. She has a solid stance that’s well-nigh unshakeable, a very athletic approach with her baton & arms.  At the end of tonight’s concert there was no sign of anything resembling fatigue, her energy as inspiring at the end as when she began.

The Romeo and Juliet overture, with melodies that are so well known, did not contain any surprises. Indeed I thought Wilson was trying to avoid over-doing it, steering the orchestra in the direction of subtlety and unity rather than sentimentality and schmaltz.

But in contrast I felt she wore her heart on her sleeve in the big symphony.  The tempi overall tended to the brisk side– which I prefer—with every note in place, every entrance crisp and clean. At times she would observe a rubato, a phrase expanded for pure emotional value.  In the finale, especially the closing few minutes, the orchestra seemed to be enjoying themselves, like a horse given their head and allowed to run freely.

Tchaikovsky, Wilson & Johnson are back Thursday night.

That headline is the fanciful title for Tafelmusik’s latest concert.  While it may remind you of a certain British film, it’s a fair description of the evening’s program: one of such remarkable variety, as to constitute a veritable smorgasbord of delights. At times we had Tafelmusik playing, at times, they accompanied Tafelmusik choir, or soloists, sometimes just a few playing.

We were mostly in the French orbit, if you allow that in addition to Lully & Charpentier, English composer Henry Purcell bears the influence of the French style: and we also had Blow, Pachelbel & Handel.

Music Director Elisa Citterio, led at this moment by Choir Director Ivars Taurins (Photo: Jeff Higgins)

But it really did feel like several concerts combined into one.  Tafelmusik are at an interesting place in their history, continuing their remarkably collaborative approach to leadership.  As in the days of Jeanne Lamon (who is now gone) Elisa Citterio may be leading the band, but shares the mantle with choral specialist Ivars Taurins and Opera Atelier’s David Fallis (who is also a brilliant choral scholar btw).  No wonder Tafelmusik seem especially inspired, as they are unafraid to allow themselves to grow in all directions.

Tonight there was the electricity that comes with sharp changes of tone & focus.  Consider this program and how the different contexts demanded a different sensibility from the players:

• Ballet from Xerxes by Lully (the first of four pieces for a wedding), for the full orchestra
• Symphony and Airs from Ode From hardy climes” by Purcell (second wedding piece), played by a dozen players
• Coronation Anthem “God spake sometime in visions” by Blow
• Canon & Gigue by Pachelbel, so often played in our own century at weddings (I know I did on the organ a couple of years ago) played by keyboard, cello, theorbo and three violins
  (intermission)
• Requiem (the funeral piece) by Charpentier
• Overture & Chorus “S’accenda pur” for another wedding

I can’t recall a concert with so much variety, but also, with so many genuine shifts.  At the end of the first segment, I was in heaven simply from having the experience of new pieces by Lully, arguably the most important unknown composer in history.  You’re always going to do well if he’s programmed and Tafelmusik didn’t disappoint.  From the Lully with its remarkable variety of timbres, including plaintive winds, long melodic lines and even drums played by Ivars Taurins, we came to the Purcell, on a smaller scale yet every bit as vibrant.

Taurins now assumed the conducting duties for the Blow as the choir came out, a piece full of wonderfully long phrases that were reflected in Taurins delightful sweeping gestures at the podium, building to a fervent Allelujah.  The contrast between Citterio & Taurins animated the performance, a visceral shift of gears.

Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra and Chamber Choir, with Music Director Elisa Citterio (far left), and dynamic Choir Director Ivars Taurins (Photo: Jeff Higgins)

And to close the first half came a piece we think we know, but presented with remarkable freshness. It’s that wedding warhorse, the Pachelbel Canon & the Gigue (although the Gigue is not so well known) , played by three solo violins. But for each entry they would ornament as if improvising, bringing a jazzy edge to the work that’s actually apt for a band purporting to offer something historically informed.  How wonderful to make this well-known piece—and the Gigue that follows—seem so new.

To begin the second half we were in an entirely different place emotionally and musically, namely Charpentier’s Messe des morts, a setting of the Requiem texts that we know so well via Mozart, Berlioz, Verdi and others. But Charpentier holds up a mirror, suggesting that those others are merely making music, merely creating entertainment.  For Charpentier it’s clear that these texts are real, that he was engaged in an act of piety, a work that stays devoted to its subject rather than spiraling off into decorative orchestration as we hear from the romantics (mentioned above).  At times Charpentier calls upon a soloist, but not as a virtuoso act –as we came to expect with those later composers I mentioned above—but rather to shift from something broad and public, fit for a large chorus, and to speak with the solitary voice of a soloist.  Echoing what I said about Lully, similarly, this too is a work deserving to be better known.

We closed with a Handel chorus including solos, a short celebratory piece for another wedding.  Taurins gets an entirely different sort of response from his chorus to finish, in a piece that isn’t as intense as the Charpentier.

The concert repeats Friday & Saturday night plus Sunday afternoon Dec 1, 2 & 3 at Jeanne Lamon Hall, Trinity-St Paul’s Centre.  For further information click here.

Tafelmusik have released their recording of the nine Beethoven Symphonies.

Before I start going into detail, getting philosophical, getting all mushy about Beethoven, let me say that if you’re looking for a gift for the music-lover in your life, this is likely the single most perfect gift you could give.

If they know Beethoven well, they get a fresh perspective on music that they likely know. Some people know a few of the symphonies, like those people who go to church only at Christmas or Easter, familiar with # 5 and #9.  For those who know every note, it’s even more exciting, a genuinely fresh approach to the symphonies, that only becomes clear to me now that I hear them as a set.  And even for that person who has never become acquainted with Beethoven, in this set they’ll get a brilliant introduction to some of the greatest music ever written.

Conductor Bruno Weil

There is something truly special in the interpretations of Bruno Weil, conducting Tafelmusik in the decade plus that this cycle was created.  I struggled with it for awhile, trying to identify what I experienced, whether I really was having a concrete experience or just failing to understand. It wasn’t like the Beethoven I knew, and at one time I felt frustrated. In the process, I’ve been moved to re-think the word “interpretation”.

I grew up listening to Toscanini & the NBC Orchestra first (a mono set my father purchased), then the von Karajan set with the Berlin Philharmonic from the 1960s.  Conductors took the music and shaped it, bringing out voices the way a piano player would emphasize a melodic line.  I was listening as a child in the ’60s, an era of the all-powerful conductor.  Imagine that the music is like a facial portrait, and those older recordings all had the hair slicked down, or parted on one side or piled high as though wearing a wig. Bruno Weil dares to let the hair be a bit messy, to let us see the face as it really is.  What if, I now dare ask myself, all that fancy hair (metaphorically speaking) is a distortion?

What I found myself doing was listening to every note, every line, every voice.  Weil does not suppress one part to help bring out another. What’s daring and new for me in these recordings is that I can hear every little part.  I can’t help thinking that this is what Beethoven must have sounded like in his first appearance: that is, in the performances before conductors started regularly “interpreting” symphonies in particular ways (aka distorting and changing the music).

This is especially important when you factor in the use of Tafelmusik and their gentle sound.  Yes the opening of the Eroica is loud, as is the opening of the 5^th and 7^th and 8^th and even the  9^th(after a few bars).  And yet, this is a different sort of loud.  I hear every note, and it’s not harsh.  Weil lets us hear every part, without giving undue emphasis to the lines that Karajan or Toscanini (and a host of others) brought out, according to their doctrine of interpretation.  It means we experience the noise, the disorder, that must have presented itself to the listeners who encountered Beethoven early in the 19^th Century, when there was not yet any idea how to approach these works. This makes it edgy & new in the most fundamental way.  Moreover, maybe those ideas –of bringing out certain voices—is a wrong-headed approach.  Especially if you explore and discover these works at the piano keyboard via transcription –as some do—there is an automatic tendency to simplify and paraphrase: as a transcription is usually a paraphrase that must leave some of the music out to allow a single person to play it.  I can’t help thinking that conductors are simplifying, domesticating, pruning their Beethoven, by reducing the disorder and complexity, by rationalizing the music into something simpler than it should be.  They become like plastic surgeons, going about their mission to beautify that which is already beautiful.  Why am I suddenly thinking of poor Joan Rivers?

I have to ask this underlying question. Is the job of the conductor to tidy up the music, to be a kind of dramaturg, making a set of assumptions about what we should be hearing, and then editing the original via selective emphasis, to change the music into something different?  We don’t notice this process if there’s a decades long consensus, that leads conductors to tidy and rationalize, if conductors are always being unfaithful to the music.

I found it especially in the 9^th Symphony.  This is a performance like no other I’ve ever encountered, and not because they’re doing something so wild and radical. Instead, they’re singing more softly, playing more softly, and letting us hear what Beethoven wrote.

That first movement starts oh so softly, all the voices contributing to the cloud of mystery that builds, resolving in the first big statement of the theme.  It’s not overly loud, not all tidied up, but instead, rough around the edges: the way it was written.  Voices burble up from all sides, woodwinds and brass commenting softly but never entirely taking the focus, the strings solid but not the pristine clear sound one gets from modern strings.  This is a passionate sound, the bite of the bows grabbing you as surely as they grab the strings to make sound.  I’ve been playing this Ninth over and over the past few days (since last week).  The scherzo is perhaps an indication of how good the composition is: that it sounds like most other recordings of this movement, one that I always enjoy.  This one is as good, without the necessity of the colossal climaxes we sometimes get in recordings of this movement.  There is less of that sense of a conductor managing us and controlling us, as the piece simply flows to its climax.  The  third movement moves at a good pace, but again, exquisitely detailed, every inner voice heard, without treating any part as though it is the most important.

When we come to the last movement, Weil is making sense of this movement for me, for the first time. I have heard so many performances that capture choruses straining and sounding pained, stressed –rather than joyful—while competing with an orchestra that is just too loud.  Weil gives us something on a more human scale, which is hardly surprising when we remember what Tafelmusik and Opera Atelier usually accomplish.  The recitative for the lower strings makes so much sense, played very directly, until we get to the first statements of the melody.  I have yet to listen to the full tutti eruption of the main theme without either grinning like a kid on Christmas, crying like a baby, or both.  It’s probably because so much of this recording is done on a human scale, and suddenly we’re hearing a full eruption of passionate sound, that grew organically from the first tentative sounds of the strings in that recitative.

When bass-baritone Simon Tischler declares the famous opening lines of the movement, it’s the calmest and clearest I’ve ever heard.  I recall so many versions, the big loud sound of Walter Berry for example, on that 1960s era Karajan recording.  That orchestra is so loud, the singer so operatic, so over-the-top in his demand for our attention when he says “Oh Freunde”.  It’s a scary sound, actually. I wouldn’t talk to MY friends that way unless they need to be asked to leave, or I had a room that seats 3,000.  Tischler is much gentler, he really sounds like someone addressing his friends in an intimate way.  He articulates every note, and when he starts into the famous tune, it’s effortless and comforting, the way a good tune should be.  We’re not listening to a virtuoso vehicle –which is what Berry makes it feel like—but a simple folk tune.  And when the Tafelmusik chorus echo him, they sound joyful too, not pained the way so many choruses sound in this music.  The gentler quartet lines that follow are again joyful, effortless, and for once, musical. They are in tune.  Soprano Sigrid Plundrich floats up to the high notes rather than the usual struggle one gets.  I can’t help thinking that we’ve been doing it wrong for almost 200 years, when I hear such lovely sound, and so much less tension and pitch struggles.  I’ve never heard a soprano make it sound so easy. Is that because Plundrich is better than Gundula Janowitz (for example)? Or that all those other conductors turn it into a struggle, a titanic display of force comparable to D-Day, instead of letting the piece be calm & joyful.  The Tafelmusik sound is easier on the soloists.

When tenor Colin Balzer sings his solo “Froh, Froh, wie seine Sonnen fliegen…” we get a similar breath of fresh air.  This should sound like a happy tune, right? And it does. Balzer makes you smile immediately, with his beauty of tone, his easy flexibility, a colour perfectly suited to this music.

There is comparable magic in every symphony of the set.  For awhile I thought the Eroica was my favourite, particularly the epic first two movements.   But then I got stuck for awhile on #4, especially the pulsing Adagio with its alternation between powerful brass and subtler woodwind voices.  And then I disappeared into #5 and 6, back and forth between the two for a couple of days.

This recording encouraged me to think about hearing, about the music a deaf composer writes and how it might have sounded to him inside his head as he wrote it.  There are places where I swear Beethoven seemed to be playing with sound, as though he were testing our ability to hear.  The music can be especially clear on a digital recording yet as one phrase dies out and mixes with the next do we really hear it properly?  In some symphonies, thinking especially of #8, I wonder.  Is he testing our hearing, with those sudden loud passages followed by softness?  In a hall with any kind of reverb, we lose detail, if a loud chord is fading with soft notes following, as we get in the 8^th.  And in those carefully rhetorical constructions such as the opening of the Eroica finale, was he telling his audience about his infirmity?  There is something so plaintively mechanical in those first notes, I wonder, was he signalling? Telling us that even this bare bones structure was beyond his ability to hear?

The CDs are beautifully organized, on three pairs of CDs:

• 1 & 2, then  3
• 4 & 5 then 6
• 7 & 8 then 9

I am going to keep listening to these CDs for the next little Weil… I mean while.  They’re quite marvelous, and I can’t recommend them highly enough.

For further information see this.

Tonight’s Toronto Symphony concert led by guest conductor Donald Runnicles was an affirmation of the value of live music.

There are things you do in person that you simply can’t capture on video let alone on CDs.  Tonight we heard Mahler’s 6th symphony.

Conductor Donald Runnicles leading the Toronto Symphony (photo: Jag Gundu)

Mahler was an opera conductor, a theatre animal.  It sounds odd to say but it struck me, this composer who was capable of keeping audiences sitting spellbound for symphonies that often exceeded an hour in length.

How? Several of his symphonies are as arresting visually as they are musically.

• In his 2nd Symphony we hear something like the trumpets of Judgment Day, calling the dead to arise, another small pack of brass sounding like ghosts marching in formation, and then an unaccompanied chorus announcing and affirming The Resurrection.
• In his 3rd we hear a mysterious offstage serenade from what could be a heavenly instrument.

Tonight’s concert featured Mahler’s 6th Symphony, one of his most theatrical and arresting works. At times we hear

• bells as though from afar
• cow bells
• a powerful hammer stroke on a drum

The theatrical visuals include the sudden exodus as players tippy-toe off the stage to work their magic in the wings. Or we watch a percussionist do his best Thor impersonation, lifting an improbable looking mallet.  Of course the real Thor takes no orders from a conductor, so the analogy fails in this case.

And Mahler fills this symphony with exquisite solo writing. At this point late in the tenure of Peter Oundjian one can’t help wondering whether each new guest at the podium might also be a suitor romancing this talented young orchestra.  That the TSO responded so well is certainly a good sign.

To begin, Runnicles led the TSO in Abigail Richardson-Schulte’s Step Up¸ another in the ongoing series of Sesquis, the 2 minute fanfares in celebration of Canada’s 150th Anniversary.  I’d call Step Up a friendly & whimsical creation, one that sidles up to us rather than blaring loudly, a fascinating series of textures that emerge in short order, making a lovely impression, leaving me wishing it could have gone on longer than its prescribed two minute length (but that’s the nature of the Sesqui commissions).

The TSO are back next week, first with the film Home Alone in concert, followed by three Best of Tchaikovsky concerts led by guest conductor Keri-Lynn Wilson.

Keri-Lynn WIlson (photo: Daria Stravs Tisu)

That was quite a workout tonight, watching Angela Hewitt leading the orchestra while playing four different concerti on one concert programme with the Toronto Symphony at Roy Thomson Hall. She had a very busy evening, playing note-perfect as far as I could tell.

The two halves of the concert were similar, each one consisting of a Bach keyboard concerto & a Mozart piano concerto.

• JS Bach: Keyboard Concerto #3 BWV 1054
• WA Mozart: Piano Concerto # 9 K 271
  (intermission)
• JS Bach: Keyboard Concerto # 7 BWV 1058
• WA Mozart: Piano Concerto #20 K 466

While the orchestral forces were relatively small tonight, we were watching the A team, the top performers. For the Bach concerti the orchestra was a mere 28 players, including the principals in most of the sections, augmented for the Mozart by four additional wind players in the Jeunnehomme Concerto K271, and a few more for the D minor concert 466.

Leader & pianist Angela Hewitt

Hearing this sort of program had the remarkable effect of making the Mozart sound edgy and new.

Roy Thomson Hall was packed for the occasion, and I think it’s fair to say that Hewitt did not disappoint. The audience reception got stronger with each piece.

The program repeats Sunday November 19th at 3 pm at the George Weston Recital Hall.