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Summer festivals can be a challenge.  Bayreuth may be the ne plus ultra for Wagner but you sit on hard seats as your reward for having traveled around the world.  Tonight’s Toronto Summer Music Festival concert (in Walter Hall, not the Bayreuth Festspielhaus) was a bit of an ordeal due to air conditioning that was on the fritz at the wrong time.  It led to some adventures for the string players trying to stay in tune.

The concert was ostensibly to honour Anton Kuerti although they didn’t explain the rationale for the progam or the players, other than to tell us that pianist Jane Coop –who played in every part of the program tonight—was a Kuerti student long ago. She told us that even now his teaching sometimes comes back to her when she’s playing.

In addition to the challenge posed by the heat & humidity most of the performers tonight seemed dressed for the usual air-conditioning, under layers of fabric. I spoke to a friend at the concert who –like me– had been almost chilly in the a-c at the last concert here, and so was dressed too warmly for the unexpected tropical heat.   I don’t envy anyone who took part, as this was service above & beyond.

There were four distinct sections to the program, each calling for a different kind of performance:

• Solo piano, as Coop played the seven Beethoven Bagatelles op 33
• Collaborative piano with violin, Coop and Barry Shiffman playing Mozart sonata K 304
• Vocal music (again calling for collaborative piano & viola this time) as Laura Pudwell sang two Brahms songs with Coop & former TSM artistic director Douglas McNabney
• Chamber music, as Coop, Shiffman & McNabney were joined by cellist Joseph Johnson for Schumann’s piano quartet op 47.

Coop showed us a different side of herself in each one.  In the Beethoven we saw a deadpan comedienne at work, serving up the oddball humour of Beethoven in these quirky little masterpieces, jewels that deserve to be better known.  Coop played up the sudden shifts of tone, the unexpected coups de théâtre emerging from passages of tranquility and elegance, that had us laughing out loud a few times.  I think Beethoven would have approved, and hope Kuerti liked it.

The Mozart violin sonata was especially poignant in the menuetto second movement.  Pudwelll’s plangent sound saturated the hall in the Brahms songs, with McNabney offering soulful sounds in the lower part of his instrument.

Mezzo-soprano Laura Pudwell

After the interval I was reminded that Schumann used to be my favourite composer, someone that I believe isn’t played often enough.  The foursome of Coop, Johnson, McNabney & Shiffman each seized the stage for their solo moments, Johnson being particularly effective with his beautiful sound.

The Festival is coming to its close this weekend, concluding on Saturday (info).

Tonight’s Toronto Summer Music Concert featured violinist Jonathan Crow & pianist Philip Chiu.

The first guy is the draw.  Jonathan Crow is the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s concertmaster, and in his first season as the artistic director of Toronto Summer Music Festival.  When he came out into the corridor afterwards you could be forgiven for mistaking him for a rock star, given the electric response among his fans.

Violinist Jonathan Crow, Artistic Director of Toronto Summer Music Festival & Toronto Symphony Concertmaster

The concert was promoted as “Jonathan Crow”.  And the other person playing? I didn’t give the pianist a second thought until I got to the hall, but he set us straight in due course.  Both Crow & Chiu took their turns being the witty host.  Again, I expected this from Crow, whereas Chiu’s wit was a pleasant surprise.  More importantly, Chiu held his own playing some difficult repertoire.

For the umpteenth time this year, I heard a Sesquicentennial rationale for a concert programme.  This one made a bit of sense, as we heard works for piano & violin from the two founding cultures:

1. Claude Debussy: violin sonata (1917)
2. Healey WIllan: violin sonata #1 (1916)
   (intermission)
3. Edward Elgar: selections for violin and piano (from the 1880s and after)
4. Maurice Ravel: Violin sonata #2 (1927)

The works strike an intriguing balance, given that we heard from two French composers, two English composers, AND a Canadian: Willan qualifying for inclusion in lists of Canadian composers even though he was born in England.

As we heard in one of the witty introductions it seems that Crow & Chiu used to work together at McGill University and so have developed a genuine rapport that was especially evident in the Ravel that closed the program.  While they made beautiful music together all night long, they took it to another level with the Ravel sonata.  The opening movement is poetry, closing with a reminiscence of earlier themes as though we’re hearing them in a dream or hallucination.  The second movement is blues, reminding me a bit of the foxtrot from L’enfants et les sortileges but without any singing dishes.  The closing movement’s perpetuum mobile is every bit as hair-raising as that name might suggest, the violin perpetually playing, the two of them building to a colossal climax.

Before that we heard a contrasting pair of sonatas and some sweet little tunes.  Crow & Chiu gave Debussy’s sonata a decidedly modern ride, without any schmaltz or excess.  From what I understand this is how the composer liked it, as they appeared to follow the score without deviation or rubato.

In contrast, Willan’s sonata seemed to take us back to the 19th century, a work that’s especially challenging for the pianist.  The first movement sounds like Rachmaninoff, the second more like Brahms, while the third has the exquisite gossamer textures of Mendelssohn’s faerie music, including some gorgeous melodies.  I wonder that this work isn’t played more often, except for a piano part that is ferociously difficult.  I daresay Chiu played it note-perfect throughout and with great sympathy for Crow’s soulful and expressive approach to the occasional broad melody.

The Elgar collection included three tunes I’ve never heard and two that are quite well known, namely the “Chanson du matin” and the “Salut d’amour”.  Chiu was very understated throughout the Elgar, and indeed Crow opted for a very delicate and self-effacing approach to the melodies.  This was a schmaltz-free reading.

We’re now in the last week of Crow’s first TSM Festival, which concludes August 5th.  

This was the one I’ve been looking forward to for months, as James Ehnes played a full program of unaccompanied violin music in Koerner Hall.   I swear Ehnes played more notes than what he’d be required to play in three concerts with orchestra.  He was completely exposed, nowhere to hide.  Koerner’s acoustic gave us such intimacy that it was as though we could hear Ehnes’ thoughts.

The program consisted of four items:

• The Partita in B minor of JS Bach
• The “Ballade” from Sonata #3 of Eugène Ysaÿe
• Sonatina “In homage to JS Bach” by Barrie Cabena in its world premiere
• The Partita in D minor of JS Bach

Without question this was the best concert I heard so far in 2017.

Violinist James Ehnes (photo: Ben Ealovega)

I am reminded of something from long ago in my undergraduate days, studying philosophy.  I dimly recall a kind of hierarchy of the disciplines, with the understanding that mathematics is more pure than physics, which is more pure than chemistry and softer sciences are understood to be lower in the pecking order.  I can’t recall whether metaphysics –meaning religion—trumped science in the end, only that there’s something similar at work in the arts.  Walter Pater said “all the arts aspire to the condition of music.”  And what do the different types of music aspire to? I have to think that when we transcribe Bach for orchestra –as Stokowski did in the 20th century—that it waters down (some might say “bastardizes”) its purity.  I find the original piano version of “Pictures at an Exhibition” by Mussorgsky purer than the bombastic orchestrated version by Ravel.  The purest and more rarefied music? The solo violin music by JS Bach.  While I’ve played piano transcriptions of the Chaconne in D minor that concludes that Partita, both the massive one by Busoni and the subtler one-handed one by Brahms, each aspires after the rare air of the original.  And while I’ve heard this wonderful music in recordings, I realize now that it’s a totally different experience live, watching the violinist martial his/her resources, shaping phrases and building drama.  This is a most memorable performance, that bodes well for the festival.  The day after tomorrow –Wednesday night July 19th –Ehnes will be back, teamed with Jonathan Crow at the Church of the Redeemer in an all- Bach program.

For the B minor it’s eight movements, some delicate and lyrical, some brilliantly fast.  One wouldn’t believe how much variety there is in this music, but for the subtleties Ehnes brings, sometimes so soulful and distant, then urgent and passionate.

And then we came to Ysaÿe, and it was clear we’re not in Leipzig anymore, Toto.  Here Ehnes used a different body language, leaning from one foot to the other, playing a piece that was almost like an eight minute cadenza, big bold melodic lines, powerful double stops, delicate little figures, then heavy accents leading to an explosive ending.

Cabena’s new work might be understood as neo-classical if this were the early 20th century, or perhaps we can call it “post-modern” in this century, for its use of recognizable phrases that remind one of Bach.  It would have been better had they found space in the program to explain & discuss a bit, as a new work really benefits from explanation more than the pieces we’ve heard before, both to explain the inter-textual references, but also to give us some context within the composer’s other works.

And then we came to the item I was really waiting for, namely the D-minor Bach. In March I posted an earlier Ehnes performance of the Chaconne that I found on youtube, that pales beside what I heard tonight. In person I watched the drama unfold, an entire audience spellbound, mesmerized.  Wow.

It’s better in person of course.

Tonight’s concert by the St Lawrence Quartet launching the 2017 Toronto Summer Music Festival, the first under their new Artistic Director Jonathan Crow, has me wishing I could spend the next few weeks doing nothing but going to TSM concerts.  There was a sense of occasion, a genuine electricity in the air.  Crow explained that the theme for TSM 2017 is taken from the Sesquicentennial of Canada, as in a focus on Canadian composers and performers.  When I saw tonight’s program –placing an R Murray Schafer string quartet between quartets by Haydn and Beethoven—I wondered how he would compare.

Violinist Jonathan Crow, Artistic Director of Toronto Summer Music Festival & Toronto Symphony Concertmaster

While I’m as nationalistic as the next guy I figured

• at worst we would hear a new sound beside the two familiar composers
• at worst the Canadian work would be more than just a token few minutes to begin the concert

I did not expect that Schafer would more than hold his own, that he’d seem to be a peer of the two icons with whom he shared the stage.  Some of that needs to be properly attributed to Crow & the St Lawrence Quartet whose intelligent programming brought out the complementary aspects of the three works.  And nothing was held back in the performance of the Schafer.

Composer R Murray Schafer

From a lush romantic interpretation of the Haydn Op 20 #2 in C Major, a textbook demonstration of how quartets usually work, we went to the Schafer, a three movement composition that deconstructs the quartet experience in three vivid movements.

The first movement began with Christopher Costanza, cello, alone on the stage.  He was playing notes on two strings that sometimes were close to the same pitch, sometimes slightly different, calling our ears’ attention to the phenomena of tuning, harmonics, and the actual creation of the sound from first principles.  In time we hear a second musical sound from backstage and we see Lesley Robertson, viola, gradually coming to her place onstage.  In due course we also have each of the violins arriving, namely Geoff Nuttall and Owen Dalby.

Violinist Geoff Nuttall

Schafer is known for operas & spectacles that have something of the “happening” about them, so I wasn’t surprised when I started seeing his string quartet in dramatic terms, indeed, wanting to understand the piece for its dramaturgy.  Where the first movement gradually assembled the players into a team, we were watching a piece that was busily problematizing the usual principles & relationships of the quartet.  Were we watching four players working together from the same score, or were we at times watching four independent agents improvising?   And part of this framework was the audience’s apprehension of the event.  At times we could barely hear what was happening backstage or in the auditorium as the players gradually approached and assembled into an ensemble.  Some of the movements by the players were more flamboyant than usual, indeed at one point I thought Geoff Nuttall, who seemed to be channeling Lyle Lovett via the violin, reminded me of that “Walk like an Egyptian” song from the 80s, in his movement vocabulary.   Were we watching music played by virtuosi, or a performance where the musicians enacted roles? I think this is the sort of question Schafer suggested to us.

In the second movement Schafer held up a distorted mirror to what we had been seeing and doing in the Haydn (or any concert situation).  Where the first movement was slow as the ensemble gradually coalesced onstage, the second movement was a visceral appeal to my most immature impulses.  I think if the audience had been comprised of children, we would have been clapping and stomping along with this vibrant pulsing composition, indeed I wanted to jump to my feet and dance.  Of course that’s not done at Koerner Hall when a string quartet is playing, so I pretended to be an adult.  I wasn’t the only one, as i heard lots of giggles.  This middle movement included some fast passages, but often augmented by vocal work from the quartet. Yes I was stifling my jubilation, although in places the audience laughed loudly.  At times I thought the quartet resembled the Swingles Singers, after they’d been afflicted with Tourettes; and not to mock anyone with that condition, but the players seemed to be seized by primal impulses, the music seeming to emerge from the id of this quartet, pure raw irrational noises.  The playing –controlled as it was—seemed galvanic, as though someone were shooting electricity into them.  I was reminded of “talking like a pirate day” on Facebook, with some of the “arrr” sounds coming out of the players.  And then in the last movement, for the most part Schafer confounded expectation by having large swaths of unison among the four players.  How elegant they sounded, even if these weren’t the melodies of a Haydn or a Beethoven.  And then Nuttall rose to his feet, began to play a busy but beautiful solo passage, while the other three: cohered into a tonic chords.  Nuttall took his solo into the wings, fainter and fainter, against that solid assonant affirmation to conclude.

I was not the only one  impressed, as the huge reception turned to the Master in the hall, namely Schafer himself. I’m thrilled that he got to hear the work played with such lucidity and commitment, and especially that it –and he– were so warmly received by this enthusiastic audience.

We closed with Beethoven’s Op 131 in a reading that was probably the most conservative interpretation of the three works presented.  I’m not complaining, not by a long shot. Where the players showed flamboyance and daring in the Haydn—thinking especially of Nuttall & Costanza for their bold cantabile playing—they approached the Beethoven with a steady consistency, wonderfully tight with one another.   It was bliss watching their inter-actions, the eye contact and body language, accentuating the stunning sounds.  This is all one could ask for in chamber music.

Does Crow’s arrival signal something different from TSM?  I don’t know, although a new artistic direction and the energies of youth are usually welcome.  I’m looking forward to seeing more of TSM, indeed I wish I had the time to dive in every night.