Let's face it, the world revolves around quid pro quo.
Photosynthesis takes light and returns oxygen. The oyster filters water and returns a pearl. Our labour returns the means of sustenance. Engaging in civic affairs maintains our freedoms.
But what about music?
Musicians labour to create it, and hope to earn the means to sustain themselves. People buy concert tickets and recorded albums to help make that exchange happen. The concert-goer and record-buyer get their reward in listening pleasure, so the exchange is straightforward.
When I listen to music that I am not directly paying for, I get pleasure. Even if I don't buy tickets to a single concert in a year, or buy a single audio track, I will still be exposed to several hours of music -- some of which I will not just hear but listen to.
So is it my responsibility to give something in return? Should I support a performing arts organization? Should I buy an instrument for a school band program? Should I regularly support my local buskers?
+++
Today's music clip is J.S. Bach's "Crab Canon" from A Musical Offering, courtesy of mathematical animator Jos Leys and musical collaborator Xantox on something electronic.
London's classical music writers have had a wonderful week attending a series of concerts given by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and its music director, Simon Rattle.
In a rambling essay in today's Observer magazine in the Guardian, Fona Maddocks tries -- and fails -- to explain the secret behind the famed orchestra's glorious sound. But she raised one point that made me think about institutions versus traditions.
Maddocks writes:
With so many thousands of words and hundreds of ecstatic adjectives applied to the Berlin Philharmonic this week, we still need to ask that basic question: what's its secret? Even Rattle admits finding it hard to say. Speaking on Radio 4's Today programme, he admitted "it's a mystery", adding that orchestras may change their clothes – the personnel – but the body remains the same.
That last sentence left me wondering about tradition in music -- how, in Persian or Chinese or Western or any other musical culture, master passes on a way of thinking and a way of doing. There is evolution and change, but it is gradual and barely noticeable until well after it has happened.
On the flip side, though, I think a lot of people begin to confuse working traditions with institutions after a while. And any symphony orchestra is, in a practical, everyday sense, no more than the sum of its current music director and members. Change music directors and you really can change the sound and feel and mood of an orchestra.
I catch about half of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra's programmes every season and continue to notice a wide disparity in sound, depending on the conductor.
So, the personnel are more than just clothes. But, if I want to keep that simile going, perhaps we should admit, too, that, in the case of orchestras, the clothes make the man.
+++
The music clip I thought would go well with this is the all-string Metamorphosen by Richard Strauss. The strings are what need the most care and affection in a symphony orchestra -- and here are the gorgeous results from a 1978 RCA recording made at the Scottish Rite Cathedral by the Philadelphia Orchestra and conductor Eugene Ormandy:
It's barely light out, and it's already clear that it's going to be one of those slate-grey, can't-wait-for-spring Saturdays.
Here are three antidotes, filled with musical colour as well as heat-generating drama. Two are free:
ON THE NET: Ravel's Shéhérézade This is a powerful performance by the Orchestra National de Lyon under conductor Josep Pons, the new music director at the Liceu opera in Barcelona. The soprano is Mireille Delunsch, who has rarely strayed far beyond her native France in a rich, busy opera career.
ON RADIO: Gluck's Iphigénie en Tauride, 1 p.m. on CBC Radio 2 The last of Gluck's French operas had its premiere in Paris in 1779. The Metropolitan Opera is broadcasting a remount of its 2007 production, again starring mezzo Susan Graham in the title role, and tenor Placido Domingo as her brother Oreste. Given that Domingo is coming to Toronto to inaugurate the BlackCreek Music Festival on June 4, this is a good chance to hear how improbably fine a 70-year-old can sound.
LIVE AND IN-PERSON: Unaccompanied 20th century choral music Peter Mahon leads the Tallis Choir in a 7:30 p.m. concert at St. Patrick's Church (141 McCaul St.) that features Four Motets for a Time fo Penitence as well as the Four Christmas Motets by Francis Poulenc. The programme also contains the Mass for Double Choir by Frank Martin, a Swiss-born composer who died in 1974. Tickets are $10-$30.
Written in the 1920s, the Mass is a compelling blend of old and new. Here is the beginning and end -- Kyrie and Agnus Dei -- as sung by the University of Southern Mississippi Chorale (and one enthusiastic baby) led by Gregory Fuller, and whose aesthetic pairs up very nicely with Poulenc's:
The funeral for Ken Winters is at Trinity College Chapel today at 2 p.m. There is a clear purity to the space, thanks to plain walls and mostly clear glass in the windows, that is far more Lutheran than Anglican in spirit. Members of the Tafelmusik Chamber Choir and organist John Tuttle will make sure there is plenty of J.S. Bach to be heard.
I really want to be there, to help celebrate the life of a great appreciator and missionary of fine musicmaking, but I can't. So I'm leaving two secular and one sacred musical offerings:
Schubert's An die Musik, sung by Janet Baker (accompanied by a young Murray Perahia).
Franz Schober's poem translates as:
Oh lovely Art, in how many grey hours, When life's fierce orbit ensnared me, Have you kindled my heart to warm love, Carried me away into a better world!
How often has a sigh escaping from your harp, A sweet, sacred chord of yours Opened up for me the heaven of better times, Oh lovely Art, for that I thank you!
... and Ralph Vaughan Williams' luminous setting of Dante Gabriel Rosetti's poem "Silent Noon," sung here by Anthony Rolfe Johnson (David Willison is at the piano):
Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass, -- The finger-points look through like rosy blooms: Your eyes smile peace. The pasture gleams and glooms 'Neath billowing skies that scatter and amass. All round our nest, far as the eye can pass, Are golden kingcup-fields with silver edge Where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorn-hedge. 'Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass.
Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragon-fly Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky: -- So this wing'd hour is dropt to us from above. Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower, This close-companioned inarticulate hour When twofold silence was the song of love.
And an uncredited performance of a setting by Nadia Boulanger of "Lux Aeterna" text from the Requiem Mass:
Watching and hearing Vasily Petrenko, music director of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, at work with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra last night was a treat. Here was another one of those young conductors who added a layer of magic to the music. His leadership wasn't about flash or panache. The word that came to mind over and over again was vibrancy, as if the orchestra had a colour-saturation control that the maestro had somehow turned up a few notches.
The orchestra also played particularly well, meaning that they were with Petrenko physically as well as emotionally.
It made me think again about what it is, exactly, that makes a great conductor. Everyone agrees on a certain set of basic attributes, which are part of teaching at any music school: of being prepared and knowing how to communicate one's musical ideas to each section of an orchestra.
Of course, it's not so simple.
I had a chance to sit down with Lorin Maazel a couple of weeks ago, in connection with the BlackCreek Music Festival launching in Toronto this summer.
A half-century ago, he was a hotshot conductor like Petrenko. Now he's a legend. (I have to admit I was intimidated at the prospect of an interview, and Maazel turned out to be far gentler than I feared.)
I asked Maazel what it is that makes a great conductor -- what is that special extra something.
He paused for a second.
"It's a good question, and I have no idea what it is. No one knows what it is that makes a conductor special, except that you know it when you hear it."
Petrenko has it. This is his first Toronto gig -- catch it if you can tonight. Hearing André Laplante play the Liszt First Piano Concerto is double-extra-creamy icing on the evening's cake.
Here's something fun that was posted on YouTube a couple of days ago. The music is by Irish-based Mexican flamenco duo Rodrigo Sanchez and Gabriela Quintero:
I was very much looking forward to Alexandre Tharaud's recital for Music Toronto last night. When he cancelled, I decided to spend the evening at home.
I was doing some post-dinner reading and came across the name of French pianist Marcelle Meyer, pictured at left with six of her composer friends (Les Six: Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud and Francis Poulenc).
Her story and legacy has inspired Tharaud, so I thought I'd check her out. My reading and then listening on YouTube turned into a fantastic, intimate piano recital (having nice speakers on my home computer helps a lot).
There is something Tharaud said in an interview last year that goes to the core of what we hear when we listen to an interpreter.
This is my own translation: "A pianist who hides behind a text probably doesn't realise that he is presenting himself naked on disc. When I listen to a pianist, I hear the composer and the interpreter's life in equal aprts.
"When Marcelle Mayer plays Mozart, I hear as much of Mozart's times as I do of Marcelle Meyer's."
Meyer, born in the northern city of Lille in 1897, entered the Conservatoire in Paris when she was 14. The legendary Alfred Cortot was her main teacher. Between her incredible musicality and marriage to actor Pierre Bertin in 1917, Meyer quickly arrived at the centre of French cultural life and became a fierce champion of contemporary French music.
She premiered pieces by Eric Satie and the second book of Preludes by Claude Debussy. She left a small but impressive stack of discs, recorded just when the quality of sound reproduction made a significant leap forward in the 1940s and '50s.
Meyer also championed the keyboard music of the Baroque era -- Couperin, Rameau and Bach, in particular.
She was planning a North American tour in 1958 when she died suddenly at her sister's piano.
Amazon.ca says it has one copy of a 17-CD box set containing all of Meyer's commercial recordings, issued in 2007 by EMI Classics.
Here is a little recital for you, ending with a clip from a concert in Rome (where she plays Manuel de Falla's Nights in the Gardens of Spain) from six months before her death. What impresses me the most by Meyer's playing is the absolute clarity of her thinking. We don't play Baroque music like this any more, but, in listening to her play, I find a lot to love. Her Ravel and Debussy are magical, and give us some insight over how the composer wanted the music to sound.
Instead of some Mozart, I've inserted a Haydn sonata in the middle. It's a noisy recording, unfortunately, and a bit ungainly in interpretation.
We'll start, as everyone should (he wrote, primly), with J.S. Bach -- in this case the mind-twisting "Chromatic" Fantasy and Fugue, in D minor, BWV 903. The penultimate clip is with our special guest, Darius Milhaud, the composer, on the other piano:
If you can spare a downtown lunch hour today and Thursday, the Canadian Opera Company's free concert series in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre at the Four Seasons Centre is particularly compelling this week:
TODAY
Three Toronto musicians widely recognized as masters of their instruments -- Lucas Harris (lute), Wendy Zhao (pipa) and Bassam Bishara (oud) -- are getting together at noon for a fun compare-and contrast.
Click on the image at left for full programme details.
+++
THURSDAY
Toronto Symphony Orchestra cellist Winona Zelenka offers an hour's worth of unaccompanied cello by Bach. Britten and Cassadó.
Click on the image at right for full programme details
Versailles Spectacles, the organization in charge of a small, year-round opera season and summer musical entertainment at the Château de Versailles near Paris, today unveiled a spectacular summer festival called Venise Vivaldi Versailles, running from June 24 to July 17.
The co-producer of the festival is the record label Naïve, which will be celebrating the conclusion of a massive, 12-year project to record all of Vivaldi's music (a project that has included Canadian contralto Marie-Nicole Lemieux, back when she was starting out).
The aesthetic inspiration comes from the extravagant parties thrown in and around the palace by King Louis XV (1710-1774). (Details here.)
Mezzo Cecilia Bartoli and red-hot countertenor Philippe Jaroussky present solo recitals, Jordi Savall leads a performance of Vivaldi's opera Teuzzone, William Christie leads staged performances of Lully's opera Atys, there will be several different interpretations of Vivaldi's Four Seasons -- and John Malkovich is doing a musical play on the life of Casanova.
There will be evenings of fireworks mixed with performance art and music, and even a Baroque-themed masked ball at the Orangerie on July 9.
+++
One of my favourite of the Naïve Vivaldi recordings is La Senna festeggiante (Festival time on the Seine). There is a single, undated, manuscript copy of the score for this serenata (a secular mix of vocal and instrumental movements that's a cross between a cantata and an opera) at the National Library in Turin. The extensive background notes that came with my copy of the Naïve album -- the 12th in the Vivaldi series, and the first of his secular voal music, back in 2001 -- say that the piece was written between 1722-25, a time when Vivaldi was the favourite composer of France's ambassador to Venice, the Comte de Gergy.
You can find all of the details on this album here.
Written as the culmination of a day-long party, the Italian serenata was sort of like an English masque. La Senna festeggiante is totally over the top -- and fabulous. Unfortunately, it's too obscure to draw tourists to Versailles, so it won't be part of the summer lineup.
But that doesn't mean we can't listen to the Overture. This is from a live, 2009 performance by period-performance ensemble Il delirio fantastico led by Vincent Bernhardt:
While Beethoven was becoming the most Daring Young Man in the German-speaking musical world, Gioachino Rossini was sipping the finest champagne and chatting up the most eligible ladies as Italy's most successful young opera composer. It's hard to believe that his opera-writing career didn't even last 20 years (his final opera, Guillaume Tell, premiered in Paris in 1829,when he was 37, yet the composer lived on for another 39 years).
There are many reasons for choosing something else like La cenerentola (Cinderella), but I'll stick with Il baribiere di Siviglia, which had its premiere exactly 195 years ago, today. It's been on the top-hit list ever since. Its music has been pillaged mercilessly in popular culture -- even showing in Bugs Bunny cartoons in the mid-20th century.
There is a side reason to embrace Rossini (or another of his peers), and that is the influence bel canto opera had on Romantic composers, especially Chopin. Chopin drew inspiration for his long melodies directly from bel canto. No bel canto; no Chopin. So there.
In his study book on The Barber of Seville, Burton Fisher cites the occasion when a young Rossini had a chance to meet an old (51!) and ill Beethoven, in 1822. The older man gave him this little piece of advice:
“Ah, Rossini. So you’re the composer of The Barber of Seville. I congratulate you. It will be played as long as Italian opera exists. Never try to write anything else but opera buffa; any other style would do violence to your nature.”
+++
I don't need to leave a clip of the Barber of Seville. Instead, I want to share my adoration for something from Rossini's old age, when he wrote little trifles for his own private amusement. Here is my very favourite work of his, the Petite Messe Solenelle -- neither petite nor always solenelle.
I prefer the original, two-piano-plus-harmonium arrangement he completed shortly before his death in 1868, but this version, featuring the orchestra of the Leipzig Gewandhaus conducted by Riccardo Chailly is just too good to not share.
One hears all the signature sounds of Rossini bel canto opera as well as incredible musical craft at work in the fugues that litter this work, for example.
The soloists are: Alexandrina Pendatchanska, soprano; Manuela Custer, mezzosoprano; Stefano Secco, tenor; and Mirco Palazzi, bass. Click here to go to the whole thing. For a sample passage, check out "Et resurrexit" below:
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.
TheStar.com
Copyright Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Toronto Star or www.thestar.com. The Star is not responsible for the content or views expressed on external sites.
Distribution, transmission or republication of any material is strictly prohibited without the prior written permission of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. For information please contact us using our webmaster form. www.thestar.com online since 1996.
Recent Comments