Austrian Till Fellner leaves nothing to chance as Toronto date looms in a full-immersion Beethoven season

Many pianists have been seduced by the multi-layered pleasures of performing all of Beethoven's sonatas in public. One of these afficionados is  Till Fellner, a very serious, 37-year-old Viennese native whose most significant influence was Alfred Brendel. He's not doing it as some sort of marathon, but more as a leisurely guided tour spread out over three years. This is year two.

As part of his full musical immersion in Beethoven, Fellner's orchestra outings these days have also focused on that composer's concertos.

Fellner is one of those pianists who leaves nothing to chance. Every note has a specific intention behind it. His work doesn't sound spontaneous, but highly polished and sharply articulated.

It's worth giving him a try. National Public Radio put together a nice interview with Fellner late last week. The 40 minutes include a studio performance. Fellner has no plans to record the sonatas at this time, he said in New York (where he performed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's recital series) earlier this fall.

Here's how The Telegraph's Geoffrey Norris began a review of a live concert in London a month ago:

It is a major step when a pianist decides to encompass the complete canon of Beethoven's 32 sonatas. Some maintain that this is an undertaking that should be left to musicians of mature years, but it would be a pity to be denied Till Fellner's rich, discerning blend of perception, freshness and concentration because of some artificial age limit.

The Austrian pianist, now in his mid-thirties, has long been steeped in the central Austro-German repertoire, and, on the evidence of this inaugural recital of a two-year series, he has invaluable things to say about the sonatas' ingenuity and expressive range.

Torontonians are getting a chance to hear Fellner perform Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra and its music director, Kent Nagano, on Jan. 25. (The two have a Beethoven concerto recording project on the go.)

Here is Fellner performing the Adagio from Beethoven's "Emperor" Concerto with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra (I don't know who the conductor is):

Canadian Children's Opera Company's globe-spanning Christmas gives me a musical lesson in terror and awe

 I bumped into Toronto Symphony Orchestra music director Peter Oundjian at intermission last night, and asked him if he would be writing a review. After the concert, I saw him again. "Feels good doesn't it," he said smilingly of it being over. I had to agree that it did.

Oundjian was the one sitting comfortably in the audience, and I was the one working. Although I play every day, there's a big difference between doing it at home, or at the church, and doing it for a couple of hundred children and an audience of several hundred more. We had exactly one rehearsal together, where we ran through each piece once. It's enough to turn typical concert tension into terror.

It wasn't a difficult assignment, and it's one I did with pleasure: helping out the Canadian Children's Opera Company with its annual Christmas show. Most years, it's opera. This year, it was a pan-cultural musical revue-cum-pageant culminating in the Café Momus scene from Act 2 of La Bohème. (The company is premiering a new children's opera by Dean "The Hobbit" Burry, based on Pierre Burton's kids' book The Secret World of Og, in the spring.)

My contribution was a little bit of solo and orchestral organ. The ensemble work was tough: when looking at an orchestra part, you have no idea what the rest of the ensemble is doing, plus you have to count through all the gaps in the score. If you're a sole instrument, there's no one around you to help you with the next entry. I was perched high in the organ loft at St. Paul's Basilica, about 200 feet and a half-second of sound-wave travel away from the conductor and chorus. Also, I'm used to playing with a full score (I hadn't read solely from an orchestral part since high school, when I played bass clarinet in one of the bands).

I hope only music arranger Errol Gay and artistic director-conductor Ann Cooper Gay had any idea of how I mangled my parts.

Anyway, my personal terrors meant nothing as soon as the kids opened their mouths. I can only gasp in admiration at the energy and organizational skill needed to make a smooth show flow out of a crowd of 200 kids ranging in age from 5 to 18. To boot, they all made it look like they were having a whole lot of fun. That was impressive. (I wish they would post something on YouTube so that innocent bystanders could see and hear how great the CCOC choruses are.)

At one point last night, I though how children's concerts are both ephemeral and timeless. The growing kids will be in a different physical, intellectual and emotional place same time next year. Yet the pure quality of their voices, their enthusiasm, the way you can see them being inspired by the act of making great music, remains from generation to generation.

One of the criticisms levelled against critics is that it's too easy to yell from the sidelines. In many ways, this is justified. In a city like Toronto, home to hundreds of fabulous instrumentalists and singers, quality is something you take for granted. Once you do that, it's easy to forget the hours and hours of practice, preparation and organization behind every smooth show.

When I officially became the music critic, I vowed that I had to spend more time actually playing music, as well, for the sole purpose of reminding me, sometimes painfully, that I can't take anything for granted. Because those people on stage certainly don't.

Music outreach to Toronto-area children a source of inspiration over my month-long journey

The idea for today's feature in the Star on music education for children in the Greater Toronto Area came when Dr. José Antonio Abreu came up here (with Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón Bolivár Youth Orchestra) from Venezuela at the end of October to receive the Glenn Gould Prize for his work in setting up and sustaining El Sistema.

Wherever these people go, spreading the word about music education as a means of empowering children and developing the spirit of cooperation, local groups spring up to launch similar initiatives. First, El Sistema conquered other Latin American countries. Now, there are El Sistema-inspried groups in Los Angeles, New York City and Edinburgh, to name but three. The New England Conservatory in Boston has begun training teachers in El Sistema-type practices.

I began a mental list of all the people I knew who were doing music outreach in Toronto's disadvantaged neighborhoods, and realised that, even thought the efforts are piecemeal, there is far more going on in the GTA than meets the eye.

Because the arts councils have recognized the value of educational outreach with music, just about every music presenter in Toronto has some sort of education programme as part of its regular music season. It's fantastic.

Today's article can't even begin to do justice to what's going on here. And I wish I could really express how inspired I was with every visit and interview during my month-long journey. For many young musicians who are trying to start a career in a field where jobs are scarce, taking on a teaching gig with an outreach project is often a way to help pay the rent. But it quickly turns into something more meaningful.

There are three more observations I had no space to make on paper:

1. Each organization has to struggle in its own little niche. Coordination between music schools and outreach efforts and the school boards would save many people much time and money, and help get more music into the hands of more kids.

I brought this up time and again in interviews. Everyone cheerfully acknowledged how central cordination would be great. But no one had the spare time or energy to take on the challenge.

2. Inertia rules. I think that the most common grumble I hear in Toronto (including from a longtime city councillor who I was sitting next to at a concert recently), is how it takes seemingly forever to get even the most minor changes or improvements made to our everyday environment -- from licensing street-food vendors, to figuring out whether a burnt-out street lamp is the responsibility of the city or the electric utility. Let's not even begin to talk about transit improvements...

From my brief toe-dip into this alien territory, I can see that the same is true of our education system. Until education faculties, who train our teachers and school administrators, and school boards really commit to the value of arts-based learning (a value that they see proven in surveys and reports from a variety of reliable sources every year), not much is going to change for today's young people.

3. The institutional monolith is obsolete.

I'm just musing out on a limb, here, but I can't help thinking that a centralized education system is ill-equipped to serve a sprawling city whose demographic and socioeconomic profiles change drastically from one region and neighborhood to another.

Venezuela's El Sistema is set up so that each centre is responsive to the needs of that particular community. That's how music outreach programs in Toronto have worked out, because they are piecemeal. They are highly responsive to local needs and issues, and unable to deal with bigger-picture issues. The school board oversees the bigger picture, but leaves the local details up to each school principal, without necessarily giving them the funds to be able to do much.

There has to be a middle ground. I think the Toronto District School Board is on the right track with its arts schools, it's new Africentric school, and with initiatives like the proposed all-boys school. These all came out of parent-sponsored initiatives -- bearing out statements I heard over and over again about how parents need to be engaged in their children's education.

There are a lot of time and financial pressures on parents in a big, expensive, traffic-clogged city. But simply dropping off kids and the responsibility of preparing them for adulthood in the 21st century at a school's doorstep is no way to get there.

And who better to show off the benefits of engagement and cooperation than a bunch of artists making music collaboratively.

Here are last year's boys from St. Michael's Choir School with the final word -- Bless the Lord, by Canadian composer Imant Raminsh:

Aradia offering $20 all-Haydn treat at Glenn Gould Studio this evening

Toronto's other period-instrument orchestra, the Aradia Ensemble, presents an all-Haydn concert today at 8 p.m. the Glenn Gould Studio. The organization, founded and led by violinist-conductor Kevin Mallon, is well represented on disc at Naxos, but has had a lot of trouble establishing a regular concert series. Made up of freelance musicians -- most of them the cream of Toronto's abundant crop -- the music is usually of a high calibre.

To try and spur interest, the price of tickets for tonight's performance has been reduced to $20. The promotion code to get the reduced price is "HAYDN."

That's a bargain for a programme that includes the Lord Nelson Mass, a setting of Salve Regina, as well as a freshly reconstructed fragment of the Missa Sunt Bona Mixta Malis.

COC returns to Saturday Afternoon at the Opera with Madama Butterfly tomorrow, followed by live Web chat

One of the pleasures of going to a live performance is talking about it afterwards. The Canadian Opera Company, which returns to the airwaves tomorrow afternoon with a broadcast of its recent production of Puccini's Madama Butterfly on CBC Radio 2, is hosting chat on its website. As the reader comment suggests, it's supposed to happen during the show, which sounds a bit distracting to me. (If you're listening on the Internet, try the COC first. I find the CBC's site very difficult to navigate.)

James Westman (who sings the role of Sharpless), Peter Barrett (Prince Yamadori) and costume designer Susan Benson will be part of the chat, sharing some anecdotes, as well as answering questions.

Once Saturday's broadcast is over, Madama Butterfly goes into streaming on demand for 12 months on the CBC and COC websites.

Next Saturday, it's the turn for The Nightingale and Other Fables, the fabulous Stravinsky compendium staged by Robert Lepage.

The COC has, over the last year, added a lot of content to its website, including a lot of background information on its productions and resources for further reading and listening. General director Alexander Neef also keeps a blog.

Students need to be reminded that there is far more to a musical performance than getting the notes right

I was privileged with a request to sit on an audition jury yesterday. It was a great experience which reminded me of how, in the hundreds and hundreds of hours student musicians spend honing their art, they and their teachers often overlook stagecraft.

Every time a performer walks out in front of an audience -- whether it's in someone's living room, in a subway station, or concert hall -- every gesture and word becomes part of the performance. It's not just the music; that only works when you're listening to your iPod.

A stumbling walk. Slouching. Failing to make eye contact with the auditorium. Mumbling. Speaking in broken thoughts and sentences. Ill-fitting clothes. They all can potentially detract from an audience member's impression of what is otherwise fine music.

I can -- and I'm sure you can, too -- name famous musicians, even legendary ones, who regularly committed one or more of the above crimes. But when you're just starting out and competing with 200 other soloists for the same, single job, why leave even the smallest detail up to chance?

In her talk at the Toronto Public Library earlier this month, soprano Measha Brueggergosman -- who is carefully constructed fabulousness on heels -- had a question from a voice student who was looking for some wardrobe advice.

The young diva replied categorically that, whether we like it or not, the first, visual impression is key. If you want to be fabulous, you have to look fabulous first. Then you back up the first impression with the finest performance you can muster.

A deeper element of this stagecraft is conveying the emotion of the music to the audience. Ideally, this would come through fine once the piece of music is fully prepared. But it often doesn't, especially in student recitals.

Here are four videos. I'm using voice, but it could be any other instrument, really. Two are of students, one of a master (plus a bonus). I'm using "Ich Grolle Nicht," from Robert Schumann's Dichterliebe cycle, because it's short and I still remember my painful struggles as a 21-year-old with its many-layered demands.

In case you don't know the text, Heinrich Heine's poem translates as:

"I bear no grudge, even when my heart also breaks/ Love lost forever, I bear no grudge/ Although you glow with diamond splendour/ No light shines into your heart's night/ I know that well.

"I bear no grudge, even when my heart also breaks/ I saw you in my dreams/ And saw the night in your heart's chambers/ I saw the snake that bites your heart/ I saw, my love, how miserable you really are."

First up, 17-year-old Paraguayan José Mongelos, in spring, 2007. Leaving aside the other problems here, ask yourself one, simple question. If you didn't know what the words meant, would you get any idea from this performance?

Here is Chinese voice student Chjan Chun at a 2004 competition in Kiev. This may be the slowest I've ever heard it sung.

I was hoping to find a good example from one of the vocal greats. The best I could come up with has no visuals, which defeats part of the purpose of this whole exercise, so I had to add a second video. First, here is the ideal vocal performance (for me, today), thanks to a 1951 recording of the legendary Catalan soprano Victoria de los Angeles and accompanist Gerald Moore, followed by the amazing Thomas Quasthoff, singing "Hör ich das Liedchen klingen" (I Hear the little song's sound), also from Dichterliebe, with Hélène Grimaud, recorded at the 2007 Verbier Festival in Switzerland.

What makes both performances special is how the artists have carefully shaped every nuance of the text as well as the notes. With Quasthoff, appreciate how he uses his eyes to convey an extra layer of emotion to his audience.

One-act opera by Bohuslav Martinu gets rare Toronto performances at Royal Conservatory

Yesterday, there was a real deer wandering around near the Bay St. bus terminal. Today and tomorrow, there's a deer trapped inside a fence at the Royal Conservatory of Music, and someone has to figure out how to get it out -- operatically.

Because it's opera, so it's not simple. Freeing the deer is part of a riddle inserted in a strange little one-act opera written in 1937 (and revised in 1951) by Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu: Comedy on the Bridge. Thing is, it's not really a comedy (although it does have a happy ending), nor is the riddle about the trapped deer important in the end.

The setting is pretty universal. In this case, a bridge over a river separates two sides in a war in the early 19th century (a time before blowing up the bridge and levelling the two villages would have been the first priority), setting up a very serious scene for a series of arguments as characters from both sides end up in the middle. The five-person singing cast (there are spoken roles for the bridge sentries), light orchestral demands and 35-minute running time make this an ideal school opera.

The opera students at the Conservatory's Glenn Gould School are on the stage at Mazzoleni Hall today at noon and tomorrow at 8 p.m.

To fill out the performance time, Glenn Gould School dean James Anagnoson and his longtime duo partner Leslie Kinton perform Martinu's Three Czech Dances for Two Pianos.

Admission is only $10. More information here.

Here's a clip from a 2008 Lisbon production at the Teatro National de Sao Carlos of Comedy on the Bridge, featuring young Portuguese singers (it was paired with Gian Garlo Menotti's The Telephone):

Here are Igor and Renata Ardasev, at the gorgeous recital hall at the Brnö Conservatory, giving us a taste of the Czech Dances:

Creative British musician invents acoustic keyboard that can be tuned in microtones, on the fly

All hail conquering hero Geoff Smith, who has overthrown the tyranny of the fixed scale at the keyboard.

So many times when I hear a concert that blends Western and Eastern traditions, I think about how the Eastern instruments inevitably have to be played or tuned to adjust for Western ears. We should be in the post post-colonial era, but the West still wields its power in unexpected ways. But no one ever expected that true globe-spanning new music would ever come easily.

Digital audio generation allows composers and performers to adjust sound in micro-tones, but most serious artists prefer playing on acoustic instruments.

Enter British hammer dulcimer master and composer Geoff Smith, who has devoted this first decade of the 21st century to a true hybrid acoustic instrument that can accommodate any musical tradition that you can tap out on its keyboard.

Smith calls his invention a "fluid piano." I think he must've called it that because everybody knows what a piano is. His gizmo really is a fluid clavichord. It is shaped like one, has a wooden (instead of a piano's heavy cast iron) frame and the strings are struck by a little wooden dowel, not a felt-covered hammer.

There's also a section of the strings at the other end, between the bridge and the hitch pins, that can be plucked like a harp.

The cool part is in the tuning. There are traditional tuning pins for each note's two or three strings. Those are adjusted in Western style (more often than a modern piano's because wooden-framed instruments are much less stable than metal ones). Between the pins and the hammer are sliders, which allow each note to be adjusted fluidly across a full tone, allowing the performer to literally mimic any scale from any musical tradition. There's another set of sliders to allow similarly fluid tuning for the harp string segment.

It is simple, straightforward, brilliant.

There's a detailed article in yesterday's Guardian, along with a companion video:

New music gets its own Web stream on New York City's WQXR radio site

New York City radio station WQXR, now part of the WNYC family, has a new Web stream linked to the station's nighttime show, Q2 with Terrance McKnight. Among the choices playing this morning is the Manhattan Trilogy by Einojuhani Rautavaara, performed by the Helsinki Philharmonic, under Leif Segerstam.

Starting this week, listeners are being promised a recorded performance from last month by Terry Riley and his collaborators from the hip Greenwich Village music boîte, Le poisson rouge.

Laughter is a fine way to sneak a peek at the magic of a symphony orchestra

The composers may be dead, but not our interest in spreading love of orchestral music to new audiences.

As far as I know, no show has ever overthrown the dominance of Sergei Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf as a children's introduction to the orchestra. Also great is Benjamin Britten's Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra.

Not that people haven't tried to do something else.

Americans have been treated to Garrison Keillor's Young Lutheran take and, more recently, a clever Lemony Snicket-inspired mystery story, The Composer is Dead, by the Beaudelaire orphans' creator Daniel Handler and his composer buddy Nathaniel Stookey. It was commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony, and performed in Toronto two seasons ago.

I love Snicket's call to bows: "Those who want justice should go to the police station. Those who want something a little more interesting, should go to the orchestra."

There's a show running in England currently (live in Liverpool at Philharmonic Hall tonight, fyi) by funnyman Bill Bailey. It's called, appropriately enough, Bill Bailey's Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra. My guess is it's probably more suited to adults than children. Not having seen the show, I wonder how the comedian, who is at his sharpest when he isn't allowed to ramble, manages to sustain this over an evening.

I mention it, because it's being released on DVD and Blu-Ray today in the U.K.

Here is a promotional trailer, made last year at Royal Albert Hall.

Bailey is pretty nimble on a keyboard. Here's an old sketch of his, about the influence of Cockney music on classical composers: