Tomorrow: John Tuttle's music on CBC Radio 2 and Detroit Symphony streams for free in HD

Organist and choir director John Tuttle is retiring after 30 years as the founding music director of the Exultate Chamber Singers. They give their final concert together at Grace Church-on-the-Hill a week from today, on May 13.

Tomorrow, Tuttle is the guest on This is My Music on CBC Radio 2, from 10 a.m. to noon. I'll be listening to find out how Tuttle's wit and broad musical horizons translate into his favourite pieces of music.

There's another musical moment to pay attention to tomorrow, across the river from Windsor. The Detroit Symphony Orchestra, which has somehow managed to scrape out a few spring concerts at the end of a strike-demolished season, is streaming its evening concert, starting at 8 p.m. It features Leila Josefowicz performing Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No. 1. Also on the programme is Sibelius' Symphony No. 2 and Shostakovich's perky Festive Overture. The conductor is Norwegian Arild Remmereit, who takes over as music director of the Rochester Philharmonic on Sepetember.

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Here, just because it's there, and because it is Franz Liszt's 200th, here is ever-elegant Cuban pianist Jorge Luis Prats performing Liszt's transcription of J.S. Bach's Prelude and Fugue for organ, in A minor:

Trio Medieval ready to release new disc of sacred music from 13th century England

Photo: Asa M. Mikkelsen

It's been a while since the excellent Norwegian female a cappella Trio Medieval has recorded a disc. In advance of the release of their latest, A Worcester Ladymass, next Tuesday, NPR is offering a free sneak peak on its website. It's a fantastic mix of great sound, serious scholarship and accessible new music.

The trio -- Anna Maria Friman, Linn Andrea Fugelseth and Torunn Ostrem  Osum -- sounds wonderful in this 13th century Mass setting, found at a Benedictine abbey in Worcester. As the introductory article at NPR notes, pages from the manuscript had been removed to bind and repair other books. English composer Gavin Bryars set the missing Credo and the closing Benedicamus Domino.

The original music is a fascinating hybrid of organum (plainsong with an, in this case, moving pedal point/accompaniment) and freer polyphony. Bryars didn't try to mimic the Worcester style at all, but his additions somehow manage to fit in very nicely.

Check it all out here.

Three French treats guaranteed to brighten a midwinter's Saturday

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 Necessary 100: Even Bugs Bunny found something to borrow from Gioachino Rossini's Barber of Seville

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.”

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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: 

The Necessary 100: Byrd, Bieber, Telemann and Pergolesi complete pre-Classical suggestions

Since I decided to work my way through my Necessary 100 list more or less chronologically, I want to catch a few pre-Classical strays before moving on.

I'm already beginning to feel like I could provide 100 candidates just from the Renaissance and Baroque. Handel, Bach and Vivaldi deserve many, many more nominations. And, What ho! No Palestrina and no Orlando Gibbons? Where are Gabrielli's brass choruses?

Some parlour games are more brutal than others.

That said, I want to make a case for some stragglers, because of their beauty and/or originality:

William Byrd: Selinger's Round
Byrd's sacred music is nothing short of exquisite. But one can find the same polyphony, movement and shape in his other pieces, including the 42 dances for keyboard he compiled in the late 1580s in My Ladye Nevells Booke. This is music that sounds fine no matter what instrument it is played on, as Glenn Gould proves here:

Georg Philipp Telemann: Six Paris Quartets
Magdeburg-born Telemann was the most famous German composer of his day, lived to a ripe old age (he was 86 when he died in 1767) and composed, according to French musicologist Bernard Wodon, about 6,000 pieces of music (of which slightly more than half have been catalogued at this point). A list compiled at Stanford University even shows 30 operas to his credit.

So what happened? For one thing, he outlived his style's popularity. The young Mozart was already scribbling music by the time Telemann died, and the German had spoken out vehemently against the banality and simplicity of this new style of music.

The Paris Quartets were written before the form was codified. They are individually titled as Concertos and Suites, featuring flute, violin, gamba and harpsichord -- the two high instruments play solo and duo, while the two lower instruments are continuo. (There are two sets of these pieces. To make a convoluted story short, the set I'm recommending for the Necessary 100 is the one Telemann wrote during a visit to Paris in 1737.)

Here is Il Giardino Armonico with a fine taste, the Chaconne movement from the final piece, known as No. 12:

Heinrich Ignaz Biber: Missa Salisburgensis
This Bohemian-born composer spent most of his working life in Salzburg. Biber is best known for fabulous violin compositions, but there's nothing quite like his 1682 Missa Salisburgensis, which has no peer for sheer, glorious, polychoral excess. The score calls for 16 individual voices and 37 instruments.

Here is the Credo, brought to us by Musica Antiqua Köln and the Gabrielli Consort led by Reinhard Goebel:

Giovanni Battista Pergolesi: Stabat Mater
This short-lived Italian composer (he was 26 when he died in 1736) was best known for his comic operas while he was alive. But Pergolesi lives on forever in his 1736 setting of Stabat Mater, a poetic meditation on Mary standing near the cross where her son has been hung to die.

Here is a brief taste, taken from the 2009 St. Denis Festival, in Paris. Soloists Sabina Puertolas and Vivica Genaux are joined by Les Talens lyriques and conductor Christophe Rousset:

 

The Necessary 100: Let's not forget George Frideric Handel's Messiah and other big hits

Everything we need to know about Western art music has its roots in the 17th and 18th centuries, so we need to spend more time with some of its seminal composers -- and give them a few more credits on the Necessary 100 list.

Today's man: George Frideric Handel, an incredibly inventive, self-reinventive individual, born in Germany in 1685, musically spit-and-polished in Rome and then transplanted to the England of soon-to-be King George I. Handel wrote music for every occasion, both sacred and secular. He died in 1759. He had his own opera company. I'm going to over-simplify in saying that Handel's music is less complex, less intellectual than J.S. Bach's, but makes up for it by being unfailingly beguiling.

How else to explain the zillions of performances of the three sets of works that should be on our Necessary 100 list. There's no reason to sneer at excessive popularity here. I remind myself that it was Messiah and the Coronation Anthems that were my personal introduction to Handel's music -- and introduction that has fostered a lifelong love.

*Water Music
In 1717, King George I loved the sound of these three barge-borne suites so much that he asked to hear them again twice. Unlike the Baroque ensembles we hear these days, Handel had a pretty large orchestra at his disposal for this proejct, probably numbering around 50.

Here is Concerto Köln performing the first five minutes of the first suite in Nantes, France in 2006:

*The Coronation Anthems
Just before George I died in 1727, he made Handel a British subject. Handel repaid the favour by composing four anthems for the coronation of George II (the last British monarch to not be born on English soil).  Handel had a couple of hundred singers and instrumentalists at his disposal for these big, gorgeous pieces.

Here is an XXL version of "Zadok the Priest," with the BBC Symphony and Chorus led by Sir Andrew Davis outside Buckingham Palace for the Quen's Golden Jubilee in 2002:

*Messiah
In 1741, Handel's Italian operas had gone out of fashion, his opera company was nothing but a pile of debts. Rather than sulk, he took his friend Charles Jennens' collected texts on the promise of Christian salvation and wrote the greatest oratoio hit of all time. 'Nuff said.

Here, for the heck of it, is a Toronto group rehearsing "But Who May Abide the Day of His Coming" in Mandarin:

The Necessary 100: There are three stops we have to make in 18th century France

I'm continuing my cherry-pick through Larry Beckwith's list with Jean-Philippe Rameau's Les Indes galantes. While we're in 17th century France, we need to make two more musical stops to pick up stuff I would like to recommend for the Necessary 100 list: Couperin's pioneering music for harpsichord and a Requiem setting by the nearly forgotten jean Gilles:

*Les Indes galantes, by Jean-Philippe Rameau
This piece was billed "ballet héroique" at its revival in 1736, which featured a new fourth act featuring "Les Sauvages" of New France (where a Frenchman and a Spaniard vie for the affections of Indian Zima, who wants nothing to do with the colonists). It is as much opera as ballet, and, while the colonial themes of each act are fascinating from a cultural-history point of view, the music is the real treasure here.

Here are two scenes from a production led by William Christie, featuring soprano Patricia Petibon as Zima (more details about the production here):

*The Art of Playing the Harpsichord, by François Couperin
Couperin was a generation older than Rameau, dying in 1733. His greatest musical legacy is a series of four books that laid out the full spectrum of possibilities of those twangy little keyboards. It's not fair to lump so many pieces into the the Necessary 100, so I'm choosing two of the most popular, "Les barricades mystérieuses," performed by Scott Ross on the harpsichord, and "Tic toc choc" as played by Alexandre Tharaud on the modern piano (a challenge, because it was written to be played on two separate keyboards), in a clever 2008 video by Elise McLeod:

*Requiem, by Jean Gilles
Here is someone who is nearly forgotten, but who wrote one of the most beautifully crafted settings of the Requiem Mass I have ever heard. Jean Gilles (1668-1705) lived in southern France, ending his short life as the master of music at the cathedral in Toulouse. His setting of the Requiem was used at Rameau's funeral in 1764 and, even more significantly, at the funeral of King Louis XV in 1774. It deserves to be heard much more often.

Here is an elegant 2005 performance by the Netherlands Bach Society:

 

The Necessary 100: Fadeproof favourites from Purcell, Vivaldi and Bach deserve automatic place on the list

I wanted to add three more commentaries to the compositions I bolded in Larry Beckwith's Necessary 100 submissions posted yesterday. I'll keep going down the list in coming days.

We're firmly in the Baroque world now. These three picks from Beckwith's list are absolute naturals for this list, due to their enduring popularity, even among people who don't consider themselves classical music listeners.

Henry Purcell: Dido and Aeneas
It wasn't until after George Frideric Handel disembarked on the blighty side of the English Channel that audiences got a taste of serious Italian opera. In the meantime, the English had been enjoying masques -- grand entertainments that mixed words, music and dance. Dido and Aeneas, which had its premiere at a girls' school in 1688, was one of the first English operas, meaning that it was meant to be sung all the way through. The piece packs a great story of love and loss into less than an hour. The music is gorgeous -- instrumentally, chorally and in the solo arias. The most famous and haunting aria is Dido's Lament, which has been enjoyed by three centuries' worth of appreciative ears.

Here is Canadian mezzo Laura Pudwell -- a frequent and welcome performer in Toronto -- at her very best in Dido's Lament, from a recording made with Le Concert Spirituel:

Vivaldi: 'Winter' from The Four Seasons
The violin concertos that we know as The Four Seasons are but the tip of Vivaldi creative iceberg. We hear these pieces far too often, but there's also a reason for that: this is instrumental at its most inventive and evocative. These concertos come from a book of 12, known as Op. 8, published in 1725. Vivaldi added the title "Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione" -- the melding of harmony and creativity -- something that turned out not to be just marketing hype.

There were little descriptive sonnets included for each concerto. The breaks correspond to the different movements. Here is a rough English translation for Winter:

Shivering, frozen mid the frosty snow in biting, stinging winds;
running to and fro to stamp one's icy feet, teeth chattering in the bitter chill.

To rest contentedly beside the hearth, while those outside are drenched by pouring rain.

We tread the icy path slowly and cautiously, for fear of tripping and falling.
Then turn abruptly, slip, crash on the ground and, rising, hasten on across the ice lest it cracks up.
We feel the chill north winds course through the home despite the locked and bolted doors...
this is winter, which nonetheless brings its own delights.

This is Renaldo Alessandrini leading soloist Francesca Vicari and the Concerto italiano period-instrument orchestra in what we should call the X-treme Baroque interpretation of all three movements of Winter, a.k.a. the Violin Concerto in F-minor, RV 297:

 

J.S. Bach: Suites for Unaccompanied Cello
Here is another set of pieces  -- six suites -- that hardly needs an introduction. We don't actually know when Bach wrote them. The earliest surviving score dates from 1726. The seductive music means it hardly matters (and for a fascinating story of one man's growing obsession and fascination with these pieces, get your hands on Montrealer Eric Siblin's 2009 book, The Cello Suites).

Here is Toronto Symphony Orchestra cellist Winona Zelenka performing the Sarabande from Suite No. 2:

 

Highlight of 2010: Conductor Gianandrea Noseda's electric performance of Verdi Requiem with Toronto Symphony Orchestra

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.

 

My wishes to all for a happy Christmas

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.