Thanks to David Guion for suggesting "La nuite- froide et sombre" as a piece to distract us from oppressive summer heat.
So much of what is magnetic about Renaissance polyphony comes from the tension generated by the voices as their lines slide, rub and trip by each other. You don't even have to know what the words are saying to immediately get a sense of mood and atmosphere.
Imagine an vast, dark great room, one of those medieval rooms with a fireplace larger than a Toronto studio condo, with a cluster of friends and neighbours making music together after dinner.
The lyrics come from 16th century poet du Bellay, this 1576 setting for four voices is by Orlando di Lasso.
La nuict froide & sombre
Couvrant d'obscure ombre
La terre & les cieux,
Aussi doux que miel,
Fait couler du ciel
Le sommeil aux yeux.
Puis le jour luisant
Au labeur duisant,
Sa lueur expose,
Et d'un tein divers,
Ce grand univers
Tapisse & compose.
I'd translate it this way:
The cold, dark night Covers with sombre shadow Both earth and sky, As sweetly as honey It causes from the sky to pour Sleep into the eyes.
Then gleaming day Working its way along Turns up its beams, And with its many hues Furnishes and arranges This great universe.
Imagine spending your entire life scraping out a living as a copy editor and music copyist, so you can spend every free moment as a composer who no one is seriously interested in.
That, oversimplified, is the story of English composer Havergal Brian, who died, aged 96, in 1972. (Click on the link for everything you may want to know.) He left behind stacks and stacks of music -- including 32 symphonies -- that not many people could get excited about. An old guard of influential Englsh musical figures, including Proms founder Sir Henry Wood and conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, did their best to champion Brian's work.
Today, the Proms give us a very rare opportunity to hear his most notorious creation: Symphony No. 1, called the Gothic. Brian spent eight years crafting this two-hour behemoth, which calls for a huge main orchestra, organ, four offstage brass bands, a children's choir and an Edwardian choral society-size adult choir and, as you can imagine, a gargantuan stage.
Thank goodness for Royal Albert Hall.
Today's Proms performance, with live streaming audio, features more than 1,000 performers, according to the BBC. After the live stream, the concert will remain available for listening for seven days.
Havergal completed the work in 1927. It was published in 1932 as his Symphony no. 2, then renumbered by Brian three decades later. Apparently, it made it in to the Guiness Book of World Records as the longest symphony. It didn't have its premiere until 1961.
It's difficult to describe the style of Brian's writing in this symphony; it's so eclectic that it echoes a little bit of everything inside its massive sprawl. It's like a big sonic tapestry where the creator keeps changing the colour and thickness of the yarn, while reinterpreting the design, as the loom chugs along.
That sounds awful, but it isn't, really. It simply demands a different kind of listening. I've imagined myself as a passenger on a long train ride, with the Gothic Symphony a grand succession of unfolding panoramas that come and go as I sit back in wonder.
Here is the first of three sections of a messily exuberant setting of the Te Deum that make up the work's second half. This is from a 1989 Slovak Philharmonic recording -- the first official recording (there was a bootleg LP of a live concert floating around before that):
In a jollier vein, here is a Comic Overture ispired by J.M. Synge's 1909 play, The Tinker's Wedding. The music dates from 1948. The performance is by the late, great Sir Charles Mackerras and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic:
To close, Roger Vigoles accompanying baritone Brian Rayner Cook in Brian's overwrought, 1910 setting of Robert Herrick's poem, "Why Dost Thou Wound and Break My Heart:"
It's funny how earbuds or earphones place the music inside our head, but we still don't feel like we're inside the music. Usually it still sounds as if it's being projected towards us, as in a traditional concert hall or from stereo speakers.
Vancouver composer Jordan Nobles has spent more than a decade experimenting with spatial effects in music, where the performers are placed around the audience, or in different parts of the space in which the performance is happening. For the most practical reasons, few composers think beyond the traditional performance configurations when writing music.
But hearing music all around is a bewitching experience, and it changes our relationship to it, and to the space. It also changes us.
The first time I employed this new technique in my own composition, I was fascinated by the behaviour of the audience. When the music began, at first people looked around, turning their heads this way and that and straining their necks to see the musicians surrounding them. After a while, they gave up trying to ‘see’ every musical entrance or event and sat still, many with eyes closed, and just listened. They were experiencing the novelty of being inside the music itself, instead of having it projected toward them. This is the way in which we experience sound in the real world of nature, as opposed to the world of today's media where sound and images are constantly projected uni-directionally at us from stages, screens and speakers. We are in the center of our environment; sound does not come from one direction but surrounds us completely. Unlike the eyes, the ears can hear all 360 degrees around no matter which way they are facing - and hey are always open. We experience spaces not just by seeing them but by listening. With your eyes closed, you can tell what type and size of room you are in. Our ears and brains developed with the capacity to process a depth of information through sound direction and reflection which is simply not possible in the conventional concert hall setting. In a sense, when we create a spatial music event, we are waking up areas of the brain that are too often neglected in our contemporary life.
Nobles is one of those composers who is not afraid to refer to familiar tonal/harmonic patterns in his music, making it particularly accessible to any audience.
CBC Radio Two's Concerts on Demand a couple of days ago added an excellent sampling of his work from a concert given by the Vancouver Cantata Singers, led by artistic director Eric Hannan at the Blusson Centre, a multi-level, oddly-shaped atrium-type space at Vancouver General Hospital (pictured at right).
Of course, the broadcast loses all sense of the spatial -- but the music itself is good, and well performed (except for the final piece, by Mendelssohn, in which the sopranos sound pretty ragged).
Besides three pieces by Nobles, there is one of Arvo Pärt's tintinnabulist wonders, a setting of the Te Deum, and Medusa, a fun little creation by fellow Vancouverite Kristopher Fulton.
Here is another one of Noble's choral experiments, Coriolis, in which he works on creating compelling dissonant vibrations. Being at the centre of the circle created by the members of Musica Intima in 2009 would likely be a brain-bending experience.
The Canadian Children's Opera Company performs at the Golden Hall of the Musikverein in Vienna on July 5
Canada did beautifully at the fifth annual Summa Cum Laude youth music festival in Vienna last week. Representing Toronto were members of the Canadian Children's Opera Company, who placed second in the treble choir category (treble refers to unchanged children's voices).
There were 30 choirs and instrumental groups present, with the biggest representation coming from China. The finalists all had a chance to perform in the glorious Musikverein. However, the real glory surely isn't in being a finalist, or in which history-soaked venue the performances happened in, but in the experience itself.
First of all, there is the heady feeling of making great music with one's peers -- something all children lucky enough to belong to a choir or band or orchestra experience every time they get together. Then there is the joy of meeting other, equally enthusiastic kids from other places. Then there is the adventure of seeing new places.
For 50 members of the Canadian Children's Opera Company and their artistic director Ann Cooper Gay, the Vienna stop was one of several destinations visited during this summer's outing to Austria and Italy, which began June 28 and ends on Wednesday.
It's incredibly difficult work to make all this happen -- from the fundraising in the months leading up to the trip, to figuring out how to keep track of each child and his or her socks, dirty underwear and nutritional quirks. In spite of all that, pretty much every child and parent and leader who has ever been part of a summer concert tour will tell you that they would do it over again and again in a heartbeat.
As the old credit card commercial would remind us, the memories are priceless.
Here are two video clips of the Canadian Children's Opera Company kids in action, at a museum in Liechtenstein on July 3 (there are no further details provided with these clips):
This is the fifth year in a row of June Sunday concerts at the Sharon Temple, a stone's throw beyond the northern limit of Hwy 404 at Green Line.
Initially, the artistic director was Stephen Cera. Now, the Music at Sharon series is co-led by Larry Beckwith and Rick Phillips, who have brought musicians entirely suited to this intimate, acoustically amazing wooden structure that feels like stepping into a time machine.
Over all this time, and despite my love of the Shaker-rustic meeting house, I've been to a single concert. And I suspect that the Sunday mid-afternoon time and the need for a drive all the way up to Newmarket (sometimes on weekends when the Don Valley Pkwy is closed), means that fewer downtowners have made treck than good intentions might suggest.
The fifth and final concert for 2011 happens at 2 p.m., today, as David Fallis's Toronto Consort presents a programme inspired by the plays of Shakespeare. The group's fame has spread considerably over the past few years, as it's supplied music for the TV ministeries on the Tudors and the Medicis. The Consort has performed together for a long time, and they bring polish as well as boundless enthusiasm to what they do.
For all the details, including directions, click here.
Here's the Toronto Consort singing something French, that translates, literally, as "The Dew of the Lovely Month of May," from the mid-16th century:
There's no obvious Australian connection historically, but St. James King Street, which calls itself the oldest remaining church in Sydney, is hosting a four-concert festival in honour of Tomás Luis de Victoria, the most famous composer from Renaissance Spain, and one of the great masters of polyphony. August marks the 400th anniversary of Victoria's death.
The Aussies even have a countdown clock on the website.
My not-so-recent Grove dictionary says that the known works by Victoria include about 20 settings of the Mass, a Funeral Mass, 18 Magnificats, a well-known series of anthems and motets for Holy Week published in 1585.
The image is from a section of the Gloria from Victoria's Missa Gaudeamus, published in 1576, just before the 28-year-old returned to Spain from a long stint in Rome, to go work as the chaplain to Philip II's sister, the Dowager Empress Maria.
One of the qualities that makes Victoria's music special is the skill with which he matches textual meaning and musical expression. He is also a master of creative dissonance.
As a substantial sample, here is the choir of St. James King Street with a gorgeous interpretations of the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus and Agnus Dei from Victoria's Mass for the Ascension of Christ (which would traditionally be performed on the Feast of the Ascension, which happened this past Thursday, this year) from an album they've recorded, titled No Ordinary Sunday.
The choir's music director is British-born Warren Trevelyan-Jones (there's an interesting interview about the church, the history of sacred choral music and the difficulty in finding good "consort" singers in a culture dominated by opera with Trevelyan-Jones from a half-hour May 1 radio broadcast available on the ABC website).
CBC Radio 2 has been piling on the offerings in its Concerts on Demand site.
The biggest of the recent treats is Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra and Chamber Choir's recent performance of the Mass in B Minor by J.S. Bach. The performance was one of the finest and most moving I have ever heard. (And I still marvel at the celestial justice that this was the final concert Canadian music instsitution Ken Winters got to review before he died.)
Find a quiet moment sometime soon, and give it a listen here.
Another treat among the archive on concerts is a programme devoted to the chamber music of Healey Willan (1880-1968) given by the Chamber Players of Canada at Dominion-Chalmers United Church in Ottawa, in April.
The whole recital is a study in small-is-beautiful. The style of writing is very similar to his choral compositions and organ preludes, relying a carefully crafted thematic development and counterpoint. There are no big surprises -- other than my suprise that we don't hear these pieces more often, mixed in with the European chamber music canon.
There's a sweet Melody for Cello and Piano that has such a long melodic line that it left me mentally gasping for breath. The most substantial piece of the concert is a three-movement Piano Trio in B Minor. The drama of the key really comes to life in the Finale. I think the trio understates its performance a bit, but, otherwise, it's a satisfying listen.
The one thing I really, really wish I could do today -- instead of doing what I have to do today -- is go to the 80th birthday celebration concert being held for Toronto composer Derek Holman at University of Toronto's Walter Hall tonight at 7:30 p.m.
The concert is free, followed by a reception at Massey College.
My first contact with him was as a chorister at St. Simon-the-Apostle Church in 1986-87 and again in 1988-89, two years I took off from being an organist and choirmaster. (Holman retired from the organist and choirmaster's job in 1998.)
Like so many musicians from the English tradition (he was born in Cornwall and graduated from the Royal Academy of Music), Holman wears his art lightly, the music coming out with a seemingly natural ease and grace. Surely, under that ease, further leavened by Holman's easy, wicked wit, probably lie all the demands and struggles and agonies and demons that just about every creative person wrestles with in the metaphorical dark hours.
The trick is to make it look easy.
My last contact with Holman was two years ago at the premiere of The Four Seasons, a song cycle he wrote in memory of late Canadian Opera Company general director Richard Bradshaw. It was beautiful and deeply touching, especially as sung by tenor Lawrence Wiliford.
Wiliford was so taken with Holman's music that he commissioned a new set of songs, Steam, Sweps and Semi-Circles, which get their premiere tonight.
Among the other treats on the programme are Choir 21, under David Fallis, who will sing a selection from Holman's choral output. The Talisker Players and Peter Stoll present A Serenade for Clarinet and Strings, a gorgeous work from 1989. And the Canadian Children's Opera Company will celebrate their onetime leader with a song he wrote for them.
Holman's music is largely tonal, rooted in the sort of modal sensibility of composers like Herbert Howells and Maurice Duruflé. It's an aesthetic that was not in fashion at the Univeristy of Toronto, where he taught for many years.
Hopefully, now that it is safe to perform tonal new music without fear of embarassment, a new generation of musicians and listeners will discover, as Lawrence Wiliford did, the magic of Derek Holman's art and keep him busy for a few more years.
The only clip available on YouTube is of a setting of the Magnificant and Ninc Dimittis for the Anglican Evensong service. There is plenty more to read and listen to at the Canadian Music Centre's website. Below is a biography of Holman provided by Elizabeth Andreson (via the concert organizers).
Derek Holman was born in Cornwall, England in 1931. He was educated at Truro School and at the Royal Academy of Music, studying with York Bowen, Eric Thiman and William McKie. He received no formal instruction in composition but was awarded three composition prizes whilst a student, and graduated with the degree of Bachelor of Music from the University of London, and the Fellowship Diploma from the Royal College of Organists.
Throughout his adult life, Holman has been active as a composer, teacher and church musician. His varied experience as a teacher began with two years as a sergeant-instructor in the British Army of the Rhine, followed by two years as Music Master at the Westminster Abbey Choir School. From 1956 to 1965, he was Tutor, later Warden, at the headquarters of the Royal School of Church Music. In 1965 he immigrated with his family to Canada, and from 1967 taught at the University of Toronto, in the Faculty of Music's Department of Theory and Composition, retiring as a Professor in 1996.
As an organist and choir-director, Dr. Holman held posts in Anglican churches in England and Canada, retiring from St. Simon's Bloor St. in Toronto in 1998. From 1975-85 he conducted the Canadian Children's Opera Chorus.
Derek Holman's considerable output as a composer consists almost entirely of choral works, ranging from hymn-tunes to full-scale oratorios, and songs for solo-voice and piano. Most of these works were commissioned by a wide range of performing artists or organizations, including the CBC, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, the Toronto Children's Chorus, the International Choral Festival of 1993, the Aldeburgh Connection and many others.
Holman's collaborations with Robertson Davies include three Gaudy Night cantatas for Massey College, a children's opera, Dr. Cannon's Cure, and the oratorio Jezebel, premiered at Roy Thomson Hall in 1993. A second oratorio The Invisible Reality to words by P.K. Page was premiered there in 2000, as part of Toronto's Millennial Celebrations.
Of Holman's sixty-plus songs, most are found in twelve song-cycles. These include Ash Roses, written for Karina Gauvin, The Centred Passion, written for Mark Pedrotti in 1986, and recorded by Gerald Finley and Stephen Ralls in1998 for CBC Records, and in 2008, The Four Seasons, commissioned by the Canadian Opera Company in memory of their director, Richard Bradshaw.
Dr. Holman holds the degree of Doctor of Music from the University of London and is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music. He was made a member of the Order of Canada in 2003.
I attended the last of four New Music 101 lecture-concerts yesterday by the Toronto Reference Library and the Canadian Music Centre. They had asked me to host the series and wouldn't take no for an answer when I said I didn't feel like I knew enough to stand up in front of everybody.
I'm glad I ended up hosting, because it taught me that, having made the effort to make plans and leave home, an audience arrives open and expectant.
Over the four sessions, which contained far more music than words, I was also struck by how difficult it is for many musicians to speak about what they do.
Anyone who seriously pursues music is taught to express themselves through their instrument. But throwing out some words is often just as valuable. As one audience member pointed out after the event last night, it helps humanize the performance as well as the music itself.
Non-classical musicians seem to understand this better. Pop, roots and jazz concerts usually feature quite a bit of banter between performer(s) and audience.
I think every music school should offer a half course that has nothing to do with history, theory or performance practice, and everything to do with how to talk to an audience. it might do wonders for all genres of art music -- from Early to as-yet-unnamed.
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Among the replies I received on yesterday's blog question was Bill McBirnie's suggestion of American composer Morten Lauridsen's 1994 setting of "O Magnum Mysterium" (O Wonderful Mystery). It's a sublime piece of contemporary a cappella choral writing, performed herre by the Brussels Chamber Choir under director Helen Cassano:
It's great to live in a city where the classical music and opera worlds are alive, well and overflowing with possibilities. It's end-of-season concert time, and tonight's harvest is particularly succulent.
Once upon a time, Toronto was known as a choral city, and still has numerous excellent choirs. One of them, the Exultate Chamber Singers, marks a major milestone with the retirement of founding director, John Tuttle, after 30 years, tonight at the acoustically excellent and aesthetically pleasing Grace Church-on-the-Hill. (The picture I chose is from 2003.)
Tuttle is going out in deep sonic style, in a programme anchored in Rachmaninov's All-Night Vigil -- one of the masterpieces of the a cappella repertoire. The choir is also offering up the premiere of a new work by Toronto composer Derek Holman (who gets to celebrate his own musical anniversary with a concert celebrating his 80th birthday on June 1 -- details to come).
The tickets ($25-$40) for tonight's concert include admission to the choir's 30th anniversary/Tuttle retirement reception afterward. You can pick them up at the door, or call 416-971-9229
Here, to give a taste of the Rachmaninov, is Edmonton's fabulous Pro Coro Canada choir, under director Richard Sparks, performing at Edmonton's Winspear Centre. This is the "Great Doxology":
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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