Poor Ben Heppner. Adored around the world, and a welcome guest on the finest international opera stages, the Brampton-based tenor's Toronto curse won't let up.
I'm sure he hoped as much as the rest of Toronto that, following two aborted Roy Thomson Hall solo recitals over the years, that it would be third time lucky at the Canadian Opera Company's 60th anniversary gala at the Four Seasons Centre on Nov. 7.
But the company sent out a press release this evening announcing that Heppner feels he hasn't sufficiently recovered from a viral infection he caught earlier this month, and, therefore, won't be able to honour his singing engagement.
Moving swiftly, the COC nabbed Mexican star tenor Ramón Vargas as a worthy substitute. Joining him on stage will be Halton Hills-based baritone Russell Braun, who is also at the top of his game.
A COC spokesperson said that there may be a few more names added to the evening. She expected that the evening would maintain the original program mix of French and German operatic excerpts accompanied by the Canadian Opera Company orchestra, led by new music director Johannes Debus. There are no plans to accept ticket returns, she said.
Here is Vargas singing the immortal "Ce gelida mamina" from the spring, 2008 Metropolitan Opera production of Puccini's La Bohème: with Angela Gheorghiu:
I wanted to find something spooky but not too obvious for Halloween -- and hit on Beethoven's Piano Trio No. 5 (Op. 70, No. 1). This creation from 1808 is a bright and sparkly affair set in D Major. But some pretty dark clouds descend for the second movement, which earned the whole work the nickname, "Ghost."
Apparently, Beethoven was working on an opera based on Shakespeare's Macbeth, and that ghostly second movement was a way of working through some creepy-sounding ideas (were talking pre-Romantic music here, so the creepiness is in choice of harmonies and other technical points, not in outright emotionalism).
The account by composer Louis Spohr that starts off the first video makes that performance sound particularly scary (a deaf Beethoven going off the rails at the piano).
Here's a long-ago dream trio -- Pinchas Zukerman on violin, Jacqueline du Pré (who died in 1987) on cello and Daniel Barenboim at the piano -- performing all three movements. There's no date with this video, but one has to assume it's at least 40 years old:
I love how the YouTube video often replaces or supplements a musician's audition disc. One of the cleverest I've seen was passed along by a cello-playing friend: American cellist Wells Cunningham (who spent a couple of years as principal cello of the New World Symphony and has been a backup musician for J-Lo) playing both parts of a famous party piece, a Passacaglia by Handel (arranged for violin and viola more than a century ago by Johan Halvorsen), using the violin like a mini cello.
This must've taken a lot of work -- but it's all in the interests of a book Cunningham has self-published on cello technique.
Here are Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman showing what the original arrangement sounds like, at a 60th anniversary gala for the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, in 1997:
Jury chair, retired University of Toronto piano professor William Aide, announced the names in alphabetical order: Michael Brown, United States; Yue Chu, China; Ran Dank, Israel; Jonathan Floril, Spain; Stanislav Khristenko, Russia; Natacha Kudritskaya, Ukraine; Soyeon Lee, South Korea; Tom Poster, United Kingdom; Evgeny Starodubtsev, Russia; Georgy Tchaidze, Russia; Gilles Vonsattel, Switzerland; and Kirill Zwegintsov, Ukraine.
Each semi-finalist's recital is meant to last 65 minutes, and is to include 10 minutes of art song with fabulous Quebec contralto Marie-Nicole Lemieux.
The competition has been streaming the performances on its website. There are details of each pianist's repertoire, and short video introductions for each one.
Lemieux alone is worth your time. Here she is singing one of my favourite mélodies, "L'Heure exquise" by Reynaldo Hahn, with Daniel Blumenthal at the piano:
After hearing the Venezuelan Brass and their Canadian friends at Koerner Hall last night, I woke up in the middle of the night realising that I have learned five lessons from the Simón Bolivár Youth Orchestra's Toronto visit, based on their fine music, observing the young musicians at work, interviews and background reading and discussion:
1. THE ONE CAN'T THRIVE WITHOUT THE MANY
El Sistema places the individual at a young age into a community that quickly teaches the power of teamwork, reinforced by friendship. It doesn't matter whether the kids go on to become professional musicians or not -- and most don't. The lesson is there for life.
There is a later payoff for the professional musician. Orchestra managers here complain about how the hundreds of young hopefuls who audition for orchestra positions are so steeped in solo repertoire that many have no interest in figuring out what to do with an orchestral part. What lands jobs is not only being able to play a solo nicely but being able to play and understand the context of, say, the viola's role inside a Mahler symphony.
The Venezuelans work in groups from the day they begin their musical education, so they know each other's orchestral parts. The conductors -- all of whom play at least one other instrument -- know their scores by heart.
In my conversation yesterday with conductor Diego Matheuz, who is also a violinist, he acknowledged that other conducting students have to spend hours staring at scores, or sitting at a piano, because they have no orchestra -- no practice instrument -- of their own. "We have opportunities to practice with an orchestra not only as a conductor but by playing. One of the most important things is playing in the orchestra. You learn to meet the orchestra deeply, from inside, from the desk... It allows us to know the score completely.
"The whole performance is charged with the energy of partnership because it's a member of the orchestra playing with them and conducting them."
There's such a marked contrast between the Venezuelans' inclusive-collaborative mentality and our obsession with solo glory. There's a further benefit to downplaying the individual when you look at how many of the thousands of talented music students are able to translate their work into successful solo careers. In our system, as it exists now, failure to gain solo recognition is painful and turning to teaching is, for many, a humiliating last resort. For the Venezuelans, the joy of teaching a new generation is simply part of the same reward package that came with the first paper violin at age 5.
Isn't it time we started reducing the number of rpescriptions for beta-blockers and began valuing success in terms of fulfillment rather than in numbers -- of competition wins, job offers, record deals and salary expectations?
2. NOTHING BEATS HARD WORK
I probed one of the Youth Symphony's other three conductors, Christian Vásquez, about how he is able to learn all his conducting scores by heart. He admitted that he has a photographic memory, just like Gustavo Dudamel's.
He then added that he spends at least five hours a day on learning scores.
The kids in El Sistema spend four hours a day, six days a week at the music centres -- this is on top of regular schooling. Compare that to the average 10-year-old on piano lessons, and how hard it is to spend an hour a day practicing.
3. BEING NERVOUS IS OK
Matheuz has worked with Claudio Abbado in Italy. Vásquez has directed the Orchestre de Radio-France. Given that both have been conducting for more than a decade (they started in their early teens), it would be easy to assume they're not too nervous about it.
"It's the conductor's nature to be nervous," said Matheuz, laughing. "We must be really scared if we don't feel nervous." Once the music starts, the nerves stop. "It flows into an energy."
4. GIVE KIDS A CHANCE TO FALL IN LOVE
In today's Star article, Matheuz tells of how he fell in love with the violin from hearing a band in his town.
Vásquez, who is from a middle-class family, was walking past his local music centre one day and heard the orchestra rehearsing. "I thought, wow, that sounds amazing," he told me. He went inside, liked what he saw, then went home and tried to convince his parents to let him join.
5. BE FLEXIBLE
Everywhere the Simón Bolivár Youth Orchestra goes, it leaves a wake of people eager to embrace El Sistema. It's easy to point at something that has evolved over 35 years (and is still a living, evolving organism), and say that could work for us. But the founders had no idea what they were doing when they started -- and they started with a very small group of young people and no money.
José Antonio Abreu's original beef was that there were no professional orchestra in the country with Venezuelan musicians in it. That particular problem was solved in Canada three-quarters of a century ago.
Venezuela has urban poverty -- and attendant extra-legal and criminal activity -- like nothing we can imagine here. Joining El Sistema can literally be a life saver.
In Toronto, music is one of many extra-curricular options. Participants at a symposium yesterday were showered with studies and statistics on how music improves learning. It's something no child or adult who has worked with music in groups needs to have proven to them. They know, because the results are so clear and so quick and so positive. (The less people that are involved in musicmaking, the more studies they need to prove that musicmaking makes a difference in people's lives.)
They key is to find ways in which music and our local realities can work together productively. It's also important to remember that there are hundreds of people already doing this in Toronto right now, and they need every bit of moral and financial support they can find.
BONUS: DEEDS SPEAK VOLUMES
At intermission last night, the guide/translator who was traveling with the Caracas String Quartet's school and community visits on Tuesday told me how the foursome charmed a group of homeless young people at the SKETCH centre. The Venezuelans had not been aware that there was poverty in Canada. They played, then ended up spending nearly an hour more in the centre drawing artwork with their hosts.
The string players were shocked to hear that the homeless kids had not been invited to the Rogers Centre concert today, so found 20 tickets for them to be able to go hear a fine symphony orchestra in action.
Here is Christian Vásquez, one of the four young conductors who will be on the Rogers Centre podium today, leading the Simón Bolivár orchestra in a clip from Dvorak's "New World" Symhphony:
I went down to the Rogers Centre today to see the Venezuela's Simón Bolivár Youth Orchestra rehearse for tomoroow's concert for 14,700 Greater Toronto Area students.
More on that later. In the meantime, here is a shot of 25-year-old conductor Diego Matheuz working the group through some Tchaikovsky:
Like any hot artistic property, Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel's Toronto visit lasted only long enough to manage a quick rehearsal with the visiting Simón Bolivár Youth Orchestra, lead the concert at the Four Seasons Centre on Monday night and then vanish back into his whirlwind schedule. We were told ahead of time that there would be no interviews and, quite rightly, Venezuela's El Sistema and its many orchestras work as self-sustaining communities, so any conductor can come and go without compromising the artistic integrity of the group.
So, in case you want more on Dudamel, there is a fantastic package of words and music prepared by National Public Radio. It was put together earlier this month for his official start as music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Today, as the Royal Conservatory of Music hosts a day-long symposium on music education, you can read a Boston Globe article about how a visit by Dudamel and the Simón Bolivár orchestra in 2007 -- and long nurtured by El Sistema founder José Antonio Abreu -- helped fire up an interesting initiative at the New England Conservatory, which will prepare teachers for setting up El Sistema-type music education centres in areas where children are too poor to have access to music education and musical instruments.
At the same time, Californians have been celebrating the Venezuelan-inspired Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles, which has a similar purpose. (The picture of five YOLA members, above, is from violinist.com)
Keep in mind that there are differences between Canadian and American public education systems. We may think that the Toronto District School Board is short of money, but it's not nearly as impoverished as thousands of school boards in the United States. I've spoken to many middle-class Americans over the last few years who would not even consider sending their children to a public school. It's private school or nothing. Fortunately, we haven't reached that stage here.
On Monday, I received an old-fashioned paper letter from Star reader Carlos Baranyai, with a special request:
"I am a native of Argentina and back in 1948 a musician came to our town. I am referring to French violinist Ginette Neveu, and her brother Jean, the pianist. That concert impressed me enormously. I still remember the music she played, Brahms second sonata and that magnificent Tzigane, by Ravel. Next year both flew to USA and tragically the plane plunged into the Atlantic. This Oct. 28th will be the sixtieth anniversary of their death. Am I asking you too much to write a few words remembering this outstanding musician?"
I had heard of Ginette (born in 1919) and Jean-Paul, but had never heard them play until checking out YouTube this week, so I have nothing to say other than shaking my head at the tragedy of a super-talented 30-year-old artist being tragically killed. There is a bit more information here.
Here is Ginette neveu, performing Maurice Ravel's Tzigane:
Never underestimate a teenager's ability to go straight to the root of a problem.
This morning, subsets of Venezuela's Simón Bolivár Youth Orchestra travelled out to eight GTA schools to give concerts, followed by a 20-minute Q&A session. I went to Humberside Collegiate Institute (one of Old Toronto's nicest public high schools) to see and hear the Caracas String Quartet perform for a collection of music classes from High Park-area schools.
Lismer Hall was full, and the students -- ranging in age from about 10 to 18, it looked like -- were dead quiet during a 15-minute clip from a 2007 profile of Venezuela's El Sistema presented on 60 Minutes. Then the quartet -- 23-year-old violinists Boris Suarez and Luis Enrique Barazarte, violist Luis David Aguilar, 27, and 26-year-old cellist Leandro Bandres -- came out to play all four movements of Tchaikovsky's beautiful, but complex, Op. 11 String Quartet in D Major.
Beyond brief introductions, there was no introduction of the music itself. The foursome (in performance at Lismer Hall this morning, above) simply played -- and played with great focus and intensity.
But with no context, and given most teens' unfamiliarity with chamber music, the squirm factor was pretty high by the time the second movement started.
What the Venezuelans are doing is nothing short of amazing. But, that said, it takes a bit more interaction to get urban teens to focus on something so unfamiliar. When members of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra go out on tours -- which they do repeatedly every school year -- the musicians, working with their education department, carefully craft programs that include explanations, audience participation, and a hefty dose of fun.
Even though both are hit-and-run exposures to music, I'm willing to bet that memories of the TSO's visits have a better chance of surviving the lunch bell.
The Q&A session, helped along by an interpreter, went nicely. The kids asked about favourite composers (Beethoven got the biggest cheer from the crowd), how long they've been playing together, what makes music special.
Then one teen said that El Sistema might be fine in a country where regular school happens in the morning, and music can take place all afternoon. What about Toronto, where school goes to mid-afternoon, followed by a raft of extra-curricular activities?
The answer? It needs to become part of the school curriculum. "You need to lobby the school board to put music on the curriculum."
Here's the rub. In Venezuela, El Sistema offers something to children who have nothing. In Toronto, especially in a prosperous and desirable school catchment zone like High Park, music is but one of many, many after-school options for kids who have everything.
After lunch today, the Caracas String Quartet is visiting a homeless drop-in centre in the King and Dufferin area. It's like going to the other extreme.
I had a few minutes to chat with the members of the quartet after the kids had left the auditorium. They do this type of outreach concert wherever they go. They acknowledeged that it would be good to spend a bit more time doing something in a workshop-type format -- but that there never is enough time.
I hope that tomorrow, as educators, politicians and bureaucrats gather at the Royal Conservatory to hear maestro Abreu -- El Sistema's founder -- speak, and talk about the issues surrounding music and education, that they will also be conscious of the many differences in political and social circumstance here, and acknowledge and embrace the many people who are already giving of their time and musical talents in community outreach to vulnerable children around Toronto.
While listening to the music at Humberside this morning, I looked down on the floor and saw something that made me smile -- a juxtaposition that belongs in every student's hands:
I don't think there were many people at the Four Seasons Centre who weren't left slack-jawed by the wonderfulness of the Simón Bolivár Youth Orchestra last night. (My review is in today's Star.)
It was one of those occasions when the pros wanted to be there as much as fans.
Normally a quiet, reserved man, conductor Ivars Taurins -- best known in Toronto as the director of the Tafelmusik Chamber Choir -- couldn't stop smiling at intermission. He looked like he was floating on air.
He had brought some of his conducting students to the afternoon rehearsal. His big revelation was how everyone in the orchestra appeared to know exactly where they fit into the larger structure of a piece. If a woodwind needed a moment of correction, the strings knew exactly where this was happening relative to their parts.
"It's a very 18th century century approach to orchestral playing," beamed Taurins of the organic, communal nature of the performance.
This is the operational mirror of José Antonio Abreu's philosophy behind Venezuela's El Sistema: that people can change their lives through (to use 1990s management-speke, not Abreu's words) goal-oriented, team-based approach that puts the we ahead of the I.
Not that these kids don't need occasional reminders from someone in charge.
At yesterday's rehearsal, maestro Gustavo Dudamel had to focus the 200-plus teens and 20-somethings on stage. Tired from travel and (hopefully) excited to the in Canada for the first time, they were noticeably scattered when they assembled at the start of the rehearsal.
At one point, Dudamel stopped the music and reminded them how each musician's "mentality" -- mental attitude, thoughts, concentration -- affects the sound of their instrument and, hence, the sound of the whole orchestra.
Assuming that the technical side of the performance is taken care of, harmonizing the mysterious link between what's going on inside of our heads and what comes out from our mouth or fingers when we play is the key to making great music. It doesn't matter how old you are, which country you're from, or how well-paid you are for being on that stage. This is why a great symphony orchestra will sound lame when they are not inspired by their conductor, and why a great one will make them sound noticeably better.
Here is a full-size treat: San Francisco violinist Richard Biaggini performing the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto with the Simón Bolivár Youth Orchestra in 2007:
John Terauds started at the Toronto Star as a freelance writer in 1988, and has been on staff since 1997. He began writing on classical music in 2001, and has been the full-time classical music critic since 2005.
He is also the organist and choir director at St. Peter's Anglican Church, a parish founded in 1863 in downtown Toronto.
If he's not listening to, writing about or playing music, it means he's either asleep, unconscious, walking his dog -- or all of the above.
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