Let's play a game: How much is enough when it comes to favourite composers or pieces of music?

Back in the 20th century, a friend of mine returned from a prolonged stay in South Asia with a suitcase. He rented a room painted white and slept on a tatami mat. He made me think of a modern-day monk.

"That's all I need," he declared proudly. Then I watched him reintegrate into Western life. Within three years he had bought a house and had filled it to the brim with found and reclaimed furnishings.

My friend's swift transformation made me acutely aware of how overstuffed our lives are and how, despite our best efforts, it's hard to keep cherishing a lone prized object, when there are 50 more vying for our attention.

Our entire way of life is built upon desire for more. If we stopped shopping recreationally, our economy would collapse -- just witness life in the U.S.A, circa 2011. It's the same with art: books, paintings, music.

If we reduce our consumption of culture, artists starve and potential goes unrealised. It becomes our duty of read, to listen, to devour the fruits of others' creativity.

But I'm interested in how much we really need. There's a growing movement of people who are trying to live with 100 things, led by a guy named Dave Bruno -- an unsound plan for our economy, but a brilliant tonic for our cluttered lives.

I'd like to play a similar game with Western art music. It's like the old music on a desert island game, and this one is particularly challenging, probably impossible.

What are the 100 pieces of music -- including full operas -- that we simply can't live without in 2011?

Email your suggestions, and short justification to jterauds@thestar.ca

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I would be very unhappy if I had to surrender this little piece of music from my life. As improbable as it may sound, it is Gabriel Fauré's Nocturne No. 2 for solo piano. There is a full story, a subtantial journey, in its 6-plus minutes. It is pretty, but is also beautifully structured. Even so, I know it doesn't stand a chance of making it onto a Top 100 list.

Here is the great French pianist Samson François (1924-1970) to play it:

Mahler miniature a 10-minute chamber-music effusion of sound and emotion

The Associates of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra invited the Toronto Mahler Society out to join its regular audience at Trinity-St. Paul's Centre last night for the first of its Five Small Concerts, thanks to the presence of two Mahler's attempt at a Piano Quartet, in A minor, which was tidied up and finished by Alfred Schnittke in 1988.

I popped in to hear this piece, which I had never heard before. It turned out to be a quite the little musical drama in miniature.

Here it is, interpreted by Bulgaria's Quarto Quartet in live performance last year:

 

With $100,000 top prize, Calgary-based Honens piano competition becomes world's richest

The Honens International Piano Competition announced a long, long list of changes today. The most significant are a decision to pick a single laureate, who will receive a cheque for $100,000, making this the richest prize among the world's piano competitions.

Although the huge purse makes for a great headline, the real news is how the competition is sharpening its desire to shape and build a significant international career rather than just award prizes. Given the proliferation of competitions and the shrinking number of venues and recording opportunities in the Western world, these enhancements are timely and very valuable.

You can read the long and significant list of details here.

The next competition, which concludes in 2012, is open for applications as of Feb. 1.

How new is new is the modern composer's never-ending dilemma -- but is it the right question?

The University of Toronto Faculty of Music holds an annual, week-long New Music Festival that began yesterday. Also over the weekend, New York Times music critic Antony Tommasini produced his Top 10 classical composers list, and composer-professor Missy Mazzoli weighed in on NPR's Deceptive Cadence blog on the newness dilemma many of today's composers wrestle with every day.

Although Tommasini was ostensibly writing about the distant past, he was looking for the timeless: "...what came through in the comments from readers and, I hope, my articles and videos is that for most of us these composers are not monumental idols but living, compelling presences. Just as we organize our lives by keeping those we love in a network of support, we do something similar with the composers we rely on."

Mazzoli, a composer who tries to straddle the spiky divide between art music and something more populist, is trying to make the case for Tommasini's "compelling presence," rather than a self-conciousness about making serious art, about pushing boundaries for the sake of pushing boundaries:

Most of my students, and many of the composers I met through my work with the MATA Festival [a three-day young-composers' fest hosted by New York City's Poisson Rouge in May], still struggle needlessly with the idea that their music will not be taken seriously as "classical" music if it does not include some of the surface tropes of early 20th century academic sound. If it does not include a Latin text, some feathered beaming and a metric modulation, it's not certified "classical music."

I'm sure that these twin issues are on the mind of anyone involved in any new-music enterprise. As a critic, I carry them around with me, too. I have to admit that I've gone from a position of wanting to slam my head against a brick wall (in the 1980s) to feeling hopeful about new music -- because the focus is back on creating and making music, not on making a statement or following a particular school of thought.

Although the lines are not as neatly drawn as I make them out to be here, I've met so many younger composers and their performer friends for whom the pleasure is in the act of creation itself, not in following some sort of code or overcoming serious technical challenges (I've spoken to several older composers and their performer friends for whom overcoming the seemingly impossible -- not making music -- was the source of greatest satisfaction).

There is room for challenge as well as comfort in the art music aesthetic -- so the real issue, I think, is sincerity. The question is not, am I writing something that will meet strict criteria for originality and seriousness, but do I sincerely and deeply believe in the notes I'm arranging on these staves.

This sincerity is at the heart of every composer on Tommsini's list, and is what sustains our "network of support."

Here is a satisfying example of music that manages to be new and timeless at the same time: Devil's Dictionary, by Canadian composer Gary Kulesha, performed by the Mexico City Wind Quintet. It not daring new music, but it is impeccably structured (for those with a rigorous mindset) and contains much lyrical beauty (for those looking for a melodic arc or two). Plus, there is plenty of challenge for the interpreters, without pushing the boundaries of their instruments:

Britain's James Rhodes: Total emotional breakdown followed by passionately hip musicmaking

There's a nice profile in today's Observer magazine in the Guardian on James Rhodes, a 35-year-old hipster who gave up live as a financial editor in London's City a few years ago in order to devote himself to classical piano. Except that there's nothing of the City -- or of classical aesthetic convention -- in what he does.

I'm not sure if he's anything more than a flash in the pan (if for no other reason than his personal emotional stamina), but I like what he's doing in terms of trying to connect with an audience in different ways.

(Don't miss the short video that accompanies the article: Here's this long-haired, tattoed dude surrounded by the gilded history in London's Steinway Hall, a jarring juxtaposition.)

In a review of a recital at London's über-hip Roundhouse in 2009, the Guardian's young Erica Jeal thought "Rhodes's abilities as an interpreter don't yet do justice to the real greats on his programme:"

Rhodes is fed up with the traditional piano recital format - and who can blame him? So, though his programme is decidedly old-school, he presents it more like a pop gig. Half the audience are sitting at round tables with drinks, and cameras project live footage on to the screens behind Rhodes's spotlit Steinway. On one level, it has worked: the average age of the audience is at most half that of the Wigmore Hall, where it can safely be said nobody has introduced Busoni's arrangement of Bach's D minor Chaconne as being "like a fucking cathedral".

Here's a sample of some of Rhodes' playing, none of which moves me much, but, again, that's not the point of why I'm bringing him up. This is from last summer's Cheltenham Music Festival:

TODAY AT 3 p.m.: Don't miss Cape Bretoner Ian Hominick's free piano recital at the Great Hall, Hart House.

Musical comedy duo Igudesman and Joo finally get their Toronto premiere on Apr. 2

Just received an email from Show One Productions announcing that the musical comedy duo of Igudesman and Joo are finally coming to Toronto for two shows at the St. Lawrence Centre on Apr. 2. You'll find ticket info here.

They're very, very silly -- and very, very funny.

Here they are being especially rambunctuous with guest Emanuel Ax, followed y one of their original hit sketches, "I Will Survive":

Exposure is surest way to breed appreciation in the arts

I don't think I've ever been chastised as gently as by Toronto Arts Council executive director Claire Hopkinson yesterday afternoon. I'm sure she would describe our 90 minutes together a get-acquainted session (I had never visited the council's offices, and hadn't spoken to Hopkinson since she left Tapestry New Opera Works five years ago), nothing more. 

Hopkinson had read my blog entry about culture, and was eager to point out that dollars-and-cents are not the only way in which the arts try to justify themselves, and, similarly, an appeal to vanity is equally one-dimensional.

We talked about a lot of different things yesterday, but what left the deepest impression was needing to have faith in the power of persistence -- and confidence in the power of each artform to speak to those people who have made the journey to experience it.

If our mayor, the budget chief and everyone else who helps shape policy in this city, were to see and experience how the arts make a difference in our community centres and parks and auditoriums and galleries and libraries -- and how they build bonds between children as strong as those fostered by sports teams -- perhaps we would need to worry less about the dollars-and-cents.

I guess we have to make sure that not only our politicians but also the rest of their staff always get invited, introduced and exposed to our creative efforts.

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Here's a clip from the launch of the Toronto Arts Foundation's Neighbourhood Arts Network, last year:

Joyce DiDonato shows the world which female vocal type wears the pants in the operatic family

NPR is streaming a full preview of American mezzo-sorpano Joyce DiDonato's new album of opera arias, Diva/Divo, which is being released on Tuesday by Virgin Classics.

It's great listening. Check it our here.

Beethoven and Shostakovich an interesting pairing for lunchtime chamber music recital

Today's installment in the Canadian Opera Company's excellent series of free lunchtime concerts pairs chamber music by Beethoven and Shostakovich -- both meticulous architects and masters of drama.

The the performers regularly work with the COC or the COC Orchestra: pianist Jean Desmarais, violinist Pam Hinman and cellist Garrett Knecht. (The two string players are, among other things, members of violinist Moshe Hammer's "Hammer Band" musical outreach missionary troupe who go out to provide free string-instrument lessons to children in schools in the Jane-Finch area.)

Today's performance begins at 12:15 p.m., in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre at the Four Seasons Centre. the programme is:

Sonata for Violin and Piano in G Major, Op. 30, No. 3 ..................................Ludwig van Beethoven

12 Variations on “Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen”, Op. 66 ............................................. Beethoven

Piano Trio No. 2 in E Minor, Op. 67 ..........................................................Dmitri Shostakovich

Here is Shostakovich at the piano in a 1945 performance of the final movement of his Trio No. 2, with violinist Dmitri Tziganov and cellist Sergei Shirinsky:

Comedy duo gets laughs by surfacing with Ave Maria on an Argentinean beach

It's time for a comedy break, brought to you by John Malkovich and musical comedy duo (violinist Aleksey) Igudesman and (pianist Hyung-ki) Joo (access their website here):