I can't think of a finer way to ring in a new year than with some fine music -- which is pretty much guaranteed by the Berlin Philharmonic, conductor Gustavo Dudamel and Latvian mezzo Elina Garanca in a few minutes (8 p.m. Berlin time), in the annual St. Silvester's Day (a.k.a. New Year's Day) concert from the Philharmonie.
The concert is being made available for free streaming live today, or on demand starting tomorrow afternoon, at medici.tv.
I wrote a year-end best-of/worst-of article for Tuesday's Star. It included a Top 10 Concerts list, with no explanation of what made each one so special, so I thought I'd fix that here, by counting down to today's No. 1 item.
This had to be something where everything turned out right. Opera, by its very nature, can have the most impact on an audience member -- for better or worse -- so it has a natural advantage here. And it certainly didn't disappoint in 2010:
Photo: Canadian Opera Company
1. An unforgettable October Canadian Opera Company production – and a remarkable performance of tenor Alan Oke in the lead role – of Benjamin Britten’s Death in Venice.
Here is what I wrote in my review, which ran Oct. 18 in the Star:
In short, opera doesn't get any better than the Canadian Opera Company's current production of Death in Venice, which opened at the Four Seasons Centre on Saturday night.
Although this adaptation of Thomas Mann's 1912 novella by British composer Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) and librettist Myfanwy Piper (1911-1997) doesn't come with hummable arias, it packs a wallop. The music and words are so inextricably intertwined in their depiction of a middle-aged writer's breakdown, and the dramatic pacing so well measured, that they immediately conjure the magic of great theatre.
It's hard to imagine anything better than what we get at the hands of conductor Steuart Bedford - chosen by Britten to lead the opera's premiere in 1973 - fellow Briton, tenor Alan Oke in the lead role of Gustav von Aschenbach, and a strong, beautifully prepared cast and chorus.
Bedford's reading of the score extracts the full power of this modern music with gentle contours. He teases out the lyrical, while never letting us forget that there are dark emotional and physical undercurrents from the moment the stage lights go up.
Oke spends most of the opera's two hours onstage and is a remarkable actor, tiptoeing deftly along the oh-so-delicate line between dignity and emotional defeat.
His honeyed tenor matched each mood with its extraordinarily wide dynamic and expressive range.
Oke has travelled with this production from its debut at the Aldeburgh Festival in 2007 to Lyon, Prague and Bregenz, Austria, before arriving in Toronto, in what must be the role of a lifetime.
British baritone Peter Savidge also deserves special mention for his colourful versatility in a variety of roles.
What makes this presentation really stand out is the exquisite staging by Japanese director, actor and writer Yoshi Oida.
Although the set is little more than a series of boardwalks, it would be wrong to call it minimalist.
Oida has touched and shaped every last, tiny detail of the story so that all we see, hear and feel works together toward a focused dramatic message.
In the story, Aschenbach, a creatively stuck writer, finds his life and his values unravelling during a beach vacation in Venice, where he falls under the spell of Tadzio, a beautiful adolescent boy.
Because words are never exchanged between the older man and the youth, Tadzio is portrayed silently by a dancer, as are his seven beachfront playmates.
The locally cast dancers were impeccably prepared and evocatively choreographed by Daniela Kurz and Katharina Bader.
Jane Dutton's lighting sets the right mood during every moment. And Richard Hudson's Edwardian costumes provide eye candy while reminding us of when this is all taking place.
This unforgettable production of Death in Venice is opera at its finest as fabulous musicianship meets imaginative yet respectful direction and fastidious staging. It satisfies emotionally as well as intellectually.
The production was broadcast on CBC Radio 2's Saturday Afternoon at the Opera on Dec. 11, so it should appear on the broadcaster's concerts-on-demand web page sometime soon.
Denis Dutton, the Los Angeles-born founder of the Arts & Letters Daily aggregator website, and professor of philosophy at Canterbury University in Christchurch died on Dec. 28 in New Zealand. He was 66.
The Chronicle of Higher Education, which bought Arts & Letters Daily in 2002, says that it will continue to compile the site without Dutton.
Earlier this year, Dutton gave a provocative, 15-minute lecture for TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design), where he laid out a Darwinian explanation for human attraction to beauty -- from natural beauty through to beautiful art. It's an argument that's well worth a listen. The animation is fun, too.
I wrote a year-end best-of/worst-of article for Tuesday's Star. It included a Top 10 Concerts list, with no explanation of what made each one so special, so I thought I'd fix that here, by counting down from 10 each day to Dec. 31.
2. The electric Feb. 18 Toronto Symphony Orchestra and Toronto Mendelssohn Choir performance of Verdi’s Messa da Requiem, led by guest conductor Gianandrea Noseda.
This was a great concert -- the kind that makes the world feel like a different place when you emerge from the concert hall.
"If everyone could face death with the help of a live performance of Verdi's Requiem, the world would have no more need of grief counsellors," I wrote in my review in the Star. "It means even more when the live performance is as fine as Noseda's inspired reading, which took into account all the potential of the silences between the notes as the notes themselves."
Gianandrea Noseda has, for the past seven or eight years, been a guest of the Toronto Symphony at least once a season. I've been there for most of these visits, and have always come away impressed with his musical leadership.
Unfortunately for Toronto, Noseda has too many other things -- most of them operatic -- on his plate now, so we won't seem him at all this season.
If you want to hear him at work sometime soon, you can tune in to the Saturday afternoon Metropolitan Opera radio broadcast on Jan. 15, for a performance of Verdi's La Traviata.
I wrote a year-end best-of/worst-of article for Tuesday's Star. It included a Top 10 Concerts list, with no explanation of what made each one so special, so I thought I'd fix that here, by counting down from 10 each day to Dec. 31.
3. Veteran pianist John O’Conor, director of the Royal Irish Academy of Music for Music, gave the solo recital of the year for Music Toronto on Jan. 27.
We're always on the lookout for the next bright, young thing, often overlooking the virtues of age an experience in the process -- especially when it comes to the musicians who, for whatever reason, are not on the international A-list.
John O'Conor, director of the Royal Irish Academy of Music, is a case in point. At 63, he has reached an age where his fingers are still fleet, but he has a lifetime of experience and insight to bring to the music he chooses to play (and teach).
The incredible power of his personal vision in the Music Toronto recital was most obvious when he tackled Beethoven's Op. 110 Sonata No. 31.
It was "a performance that kept me on the edge of my seat," I wrote in my review. "This was not a pretty interpretation. It was even awkward in spots. But it was dramatically riveting as O'Conor sliced each of Beethoven's thoughts into distinct pieces, linking them together with a "you won't believe what's going to happen next" buildup of suspense.
"This was nothing short of a masterstroke of musical theatre, performed by two hands on a keyboard."
So much of the art music we hear sounds studied rather than spontaneous -- on disc, because it's been spliced and edited to death, or live, because the artist has spent so much time practising and thinking, forgetting that they have to let go a bit when there's an audience in the room.
I'm so grateful that O'Conor was able to swing by and remind me of that, last January.
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Here is O'Conor playing Beethoven's "Waldstein" sonata a long time ago -- in 1987:
I wrote a year-end best-of/worst-of article for yesterday's Star. It included a Top 10 Concerts list, with no explanation of what made each one so special, so I thought I'd fix that here, by counting down from 10 each day to Dec. 31.
4. Performance of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time at the Toronto Summer Music Festival, on Aug. 12, by the Gryphon Trio and clarinettist James Campbell.
I've included by review from the concert, below. What I wanted to add in the context of the Top 10 Concerts list is that this is a fine time to remind myself of the remarkable quality of Toronto's professional musicians.
How lucky we are that, from the small scale of period-performance upstarts Scaramella and Classical Music Consort, to the always-daring New Music Concerts to Opera Atelier to the grand-old Toronto Symphony, the performances by local musicians we can choose from year-round are as fine and compelling as any I might hear in any of the world's great cities.
This Toronto Summer Music performance was an ideal case in point, presented by a group of increadibly hardworking musicians who devote a lot of their energy to nurturing and promoting fine music in this city, province and country:
People say that the experience of great art puts us in touch with the eternal. On Thursday evening, the Gryphon Trio and clarinetist James Campbell achieved that literally in the closing professional concert of this year's Toronto Summer Music Festival at the University of Toronto's MacMillan Theatre.
These accomplished Canadian musicians used their every technical skill and considerable artistry to evoke (to say interpret wouldn't do the effort justice) the Quartet for the End of Time, French composer Olivier Messiaen's 1941 confession of faith, created while imprisoned in a German prisoner-of-war camp.
As Campbell explained in his insightful introduction, this eight-movement piece is now considered to be one of the masterpieces of 20th century music. The proof was in the delicately ethereal performance that followed.
The secret to making this abstract piece work is to levitate the notes so that they hang suspended somewhere between stage and heaven, sometimes wafting, occasionally raining down on the audience. Time, both in terms of the listener's attention and the notes and beats being counted, should cease to matter as the Apocalypse, as seen by St. John-the-Divine in the Book of Revelation, comes to end life as we know it.
The sustained silence at the end of the piece proved that the musicians had achieved their goal and, in the process, confirmed that the experience of serious, emotionally stirring and intellectually challenging music has a place in the hot days and nights of a Toronto summer.
All four musicians - pianist Jamie Parker, violinist Annalee Patipatanakoon, cellist Roan Borys and Campbell on clarinet - delivered exceptional performances. This music was performed with a backdrop of large projections of landscape paintings by visual artist Stephen Hutchings. The images that accompany music were something for each beholder to appreciate for themselves. I preferred to keep my eyes shut, the better to enjoy the a personal transferrance of sound into shimmering, shifting rainbows of colour.
The Quartet was preceeded by the Op. 80 Piano Trio composed by Robert Schumann eight decades previously. Here, also, the Gryphons came through with an impeccably balanced, elegantly rendered interpretation of something from a much simpler time.
I have a year-end best-of/worst-of article for in today's Star. It includes a Top 10 Concerts list, with no explanation of what made each one so special, so I thought I'd fix that here, by counting down from 10 each day to Dec. 31.
5. Opera Atelier’s April production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro at the Elgin Theatre.
I'm not a foodie, but I've eaten out often enough to have noticed that, the shorter and the more limited the menu, the better the chance that the kitchen is going to do a good job.
And so it is with little Opera Atelier, its two annual productions coming from the Baroque and Classical eras. I think that because the composer's name guarantees good ticket sales, co-artistic directors Marshall Pynkoski and Jeannette Lejeunesse-Zingg are currently taking us through Mozart's output, one opera per season.
In theory, the company's limited aesthetic pallette -- similar techniques in direction, choreography, costumes and scenery -- should make for tedious similarity from production to production. How many opera companies in the world rely on a single director, choreographer and set designer? But such is the power of nuance that director Pynkoski -- who leaves no detail of a staging unexamined -- makes each production look and feel fresh.
The freshness was particularly striking in Marriage of Figaro, which has had every conceivable sort of staging. Pynkoski's love of commedia dell'arte worked especially well in this subversive story, augmented by a fine cast and great work by the Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra.
Although the grand creative gesture is the most fun -- and gets the most notoriety -- it is careful attention to detail that ultimately makes the difference between something being good and something being great.
I'm back on Monday the 27th. I hope you have a safe and even-keeled holiday.
Here's a clip from the first-ever televised broadcast of Lessons & Carols from Kings College Chapel, Cambridge, from 1954. The choirmaster carefully keeping time is Boris Ord.
I've had to write a year-end best-of/worst-of article for publication in the Star. It includes a Top 10 Concerts list, with no explanation of what made each one so special, so I thought I'd fix that here, by counting down from 10 each day to Dec. 31.
When I looked at the finished list, I noticed that each performance on the list fulfilled a need I have as a concert- or opera-goer.
6. Toronto Symphony Orchestra October 6 concert celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of American composer Samuel Barber, with music director Peter Oundjian.
Richard Bradshaw's oft-stated goal during his Long March to the corner of Queen St. and University Ave. was to make opera the city's hot culture ticket. He succeeded, and then some. I don't even have to leave my email box for proof: Over the past four days, the Star's theatre critic, Richard Ouzounian, came asking for permission to write about Marriage of Figaro, which opens in a month, and our former visual arts critic -- now freelance contributor -- Peter Goddard asked if he could write about Nixon in China.
In the five-and-a-half years since I became music critic, I can't remember anyone at the Star showing the slightest interest in writing about a regular-season Toronto Symphony programme (or just about any form of classical music).
I wrote yesterday about how classical music is not dead nor dying. But the way it is presented and marketed may be, given how little of it filters out past devoted concertgoers.
Focusing just on the Toronto Symphony, I'm convinced to the core of my being that the orchestra needs to get out of Roy Thomson Hall as often as possible, or risk becoming an irrelevance. They're not about to find a record label or time on TV. But they can take matters into their own hands.
Now that the summer music festival idea in Niagara is dead, there is no impediment to considering concerts in the city's public places and spaces. And, if the conviction is there on the orchestra's part, the money to pay for it will follow -- as it always does when people really, really believe in something (see Richard Bradshaw, above).
I'm repeating this plea because the Toronto Symphony Orchestra is so good, these days. The whole city, not just 20,000 subscribers (I'm guessing at that number, by the way) should be excited about what this group can do. And the Samuel Barber birthday concert was an ideal example of everything this grand, old organization can do right -- from the programming through to the guests and the performances. Even more the pity that there were quite a few empty seats at Roy Thomson Hall on that night.
I'm excited by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and I'd love to see my colleagues -- and the rest of the city -- get pumped, too.
Here is my review from Oct. 6:
The Toronto Symphony Orchestra's 100th birthday cake for composer Samuel Barber was a blaze of candles on Wednesday night at Roy Thomson Hall.
The evening, entirely devoted to the music of this American master, was a succession of Wow! moments from an intensely atmospheric beginning to a blazing end.
Superbly led by music director Peter Oundjian, this was our city's flagship orchestra at its very best. It served up impeccably rendered interpretations of a representative sample of Barber's work, spanning his early days as a composer in the 1930s, to the pinnacle of his success and popularity in the early 1960s. (He died in 1981.)
The evening's program was given additional heft and interest by two spectacular soloists: Canadian Jon Kimura Parker, playing the Piano Concerto, and American Gil Shaham, in the Violin Concerto.
The concert began with an intensely luminous reading of Barber's most famous piece: the Adagio for Strings, which he adapted out of the slow movement of his nearly forgotten String Quartet in 1935.
The orchestra and its conductor were equally impressive in the Symphony No. 1, created a year later.
The two concertos were equally captivating, thanks to magnetic performances from the two soloists. Parker tossed off the fierce piano part with panache and a big dollop of lyrical aplomb. Shaham used his bow as a light sabre, casting intense beams of sunshine on this already-luminous showpiece.
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Here is a clip of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra trying to summon up Wagner's Valkyries outdoors last March:
I've had to write a year-end best-of/worst-of article for publication in the Star. It includes a Top 10 Concerts list, with no explanation of what made each one so special, so I thought I'd fix that here, by counting down from 10 each day to Dec. 31.
When I looked at the finished list, I noticed that each performance on the list fulfilled a need I have as a concert- or opera-goer.
7. Rotterdam Philharmonic February concert at Roy Thomson Hall with music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin, on Feb. 24.
There's been a lot written over the past couple of years about the wave of hot-and-sexy young conductors who are heating up concert halls and opera houses around the world. That wave includes Montrealer Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who, in his mid 30s, is a musical citizen of the world.
With guest soloist, pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Nézet-Séguin presented a compelling concert at Roy Thomson Hall. "Together, they presented a spectacular evening of music shaped by deep convictions and propelled by prodigious life force," I wrote in my review.
I don't need to rehash the glories of the young maestro. If you've been living under a rock and haven't had a chance to hear him at work, do so. You won't be disappointed.
What I do want to point out, though, is that the hot-and-sexy young conductor is not a new creature. The real draw is this person's ability to make music in a magnetically engaging way -- something that, hopefully, gets even finer with experience.
Ernest Ansermet was 35 when he founded the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande -- and had already spent a couple of seasons as Diaghilev's ballet conductor. Thomas Beecham was 20 -- and self-taught -- when he stood up in front of the Hallé Orchestra for the first time in 1899. Arturo Toscanini, a cellist, was leading premieres of new operas in his early 30s.
In more modern times, Charles Dutoit, a violist, was 22 the first time he visited with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. Andrew Davis was 30 when he took over as music director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.
What I'm celebrating is not that there is a new breed of hot, young conductor that is reinvigorating music, but that that there continues to be a steady supply of hot, young conductors who can introduce each successive generation of potential listeners to the joys of art music and opera.
If classical music really were dying, as some observers would have us believe, the supply of bright young musicians would be drying up. It's quite the opposite.
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Here are two clips of Nézet-Séguin, the first of him rehearsing his latest conquest, the Philadelphia Orchestra, in Mahler's Fifth, the second of him chatting about the joys of making music in a group -- and as an act of love and respect:
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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