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.
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:
One of our city's most intriguing experimenters, John Kameel Farah, has finished recording Between Carthage and Rome, a new album of new works in Berlin, and is ready to give us a preview in a live set tonight at 8, at Beit Zatoun in Mirvish Village (612 Markham St.).
Expect a blend of ancient, Renaissance and electronic -- something you're not likely to hear anywhere else. It's powered by an amazingly keen mind, unbounded curiosity -- and impressive technique.
If you're in an Elizabethan frame of mind, check out a very nice recent recording of Farah's of William Byrd's Lady Nevell's Grounde -- done totally straight on harpsichord -- on Farah's website.
For something more au courant, here is Farah improvising in Berlin's Church of the Holy Cross last summer:
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).
As François Filiatrault eloquently points out in the accompanying booklet, music was an integral part of Shakespeare's plays -- as references, as actual songs to be performed and as background music played by an offstage consort. In this new album, Canadian countertenor Daniel Taylor brings together his favourite collaborators in his Theatre of Early Music for a rich, 21-track sampler of all things musically Shakespearean.
Of course, we get the title song -- performed this time by tenor Charles Daniels instead of Taylor. Also present is veteran soprano Emma Kirkby in this beautiful-sounding recording made in London's Henry Wood Hall last June. Taylor sings solo for eight of the songs, including the gorgeous opener, "By Beauteous Softness," set by Henry Purcell and accompanied by Elizabeth Kenny on lute.
Taylor's voice, still lush, has darkened over the past few years, adding an even deeper lustre to the melancholy he clearly cherishes. Although the selection of songs covers all moods and occasions, the preponderance is for introspection, if not outright lament. And no one does this as well as Taylor these days.
Kenny is a pleasure in a solo Galliard by John Dowland. Fabulous soprano Carolyn Sampson brings a powerful, lithe delicacy to "If Music be the Food of Love," in another Purcell setting. Baritone Neal Davies does well in the ensemble songs as well as in his one solo: John Dowland's "If My Complaints Could Passions Move."
Taylor has ceded one song -- Robert Johnson's setting of "Where the Bee Sucks" -- to fellow countertenor Michael Chance, if for no other reason than to show how rare is the depth of a voice like Taylor's.
My only wish from the booklet, which includes all the lyrics, would have been to give a little bit of context or history for each song.
Overall, this is a carefully crafted, nicely performed outing that could, ideally, have used a bit more variation in tempo and mood. That said, there could hardly be finer accompaniment to a rainy summer afternoon.
+++
There isn't a video available to go with the new disc, so here is a diversionary treat both upbeat and humorous featuring Carolyn Sampson, singing "I Myself Shall Adore" from Handel's Semele at the BBC Proms last year with Harry Christophers and the Sixteen:
SAVALL’s performance this sunday, may 8, 2011 at koerner hall
has already been re-scheduled for thursday, march 1, 2012
Following an injury he sustained while on a European tour, and on the advice of doctors, one of the most celebrated viol (viola da gamba) players,Jordi Savall, has cancelled his North American concerts. Mr. Savall and his ensembleHespèrion XXI, 2011 Grammy Award winners for Best Small Ensemble Performance, were slated to make theirKoerner Hall debut this Sunday, May 8, 2011, at 8:00pm.
Mervon Mehta, Executive Director, Performing Arts, has been able to re-book Mr. Savall for the recently announced 2011-12 concert season, for Thursday, March 1, 2012, at 8:00pm.
The Royal Conservatory regrets the inconvenience and ticket buyers have the option of keeping their existing tickets, which will be valid for the new date, exchanging into a concert during our 2011-12 season, or obtaining a refund.
Ticket exchanges and refunds are available by calling 416.408.0208
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.
I'm not sure many Torontonians appreciate what's been going on in our concert halls lately. Here is just one example from one week out of 52, found in today's New York Times ArtsBeat blog:
(For details on the remaining concerts -- most of which are sold-out, click here.)
TORONTO — Sometimes you get lucky. I came here to see how the Toronto Symphony was faring a decade after its troubled times, and that, it turns out, would have been satisfying enough.
But the timing also allowed me to catch up with the acclaimed early-music ensemble Tafelmusik at the Trinity-St. Paul’s Center, a converted church near Toronto University, on Thursday. And it was a superb evening: a revival of the group’s magnum opus, “The Galileo Project,” created in 2009 to celebrate the International Year of Astronomy, tied to the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s development of the astronomical telescope.
Since 1609 was also the year Monteverdi’s landmark opera “Orfeo” was published, and since Galileo was, in the narrator’s words, an “amateur member of a professional family of lute players,” many musical avenues were open, and the project — programmed and scripted by Alison Mackay, Tafelmusik’s double-bassist — took most of them. Especially in the first half, the program offered some of the Baroque era’s choicest morsels, including selections from “Orfeo” and from Lully’s “Phaeton.”
The second half, with the added agenda of representing composers involved in what the narrator called “the most famous arts festival of the 18th century,” the Festival of the Planets in 1719, celebrating a royal wedding in Dresden, had drier moments in works by Georg Philipp Telemann, Jan Dismas Zelenka and Sylvius Leopold Weiss. (The 32 oboists and bassoonists of the festival were gamely represented here by 2 oboists and a lone bassoonist.) But the culmination came — as it only could, in an event steeped in intellect and imagination — with Bach: the Sinfonia from the Cantata No. 1, “How Brightly Shines the Morning Star,” introduced by snippets from Kepler’s “Harmony of the Worlds.”
All of this was woven into a theatrical production designed by Glenn Davidson and directed by Marshall Pynkoski. The narration incorporated texts by and about Galileo and Newton, poetry by Ovid and Shakespeare, and modern commentary; and a stream of colorful astronomical images were projected onto a round screen, as if viewed through a giant telescope.
The actor Shaun Smyth was an excellent narrator, and in an anonymous 18th-century “Astronomical Drinking Song,” a purposefully mediocre singer. He and the players not anchored to large instruments moved about the stage — sometimes circling in orbits, occasionally breaking into near-dance, always interacting with one another — and occasionally wandering into the auditorium.
That the musical performance, through it all, was of the highest order hardly needs saying. As usual Jeanne Lamon, Tafelmusik’s music director, led from the violin. Charlotte Nediger, on harpsichord, and Ms. Mackay, on bass, were also solid presences, and the bursts of virtuosity were too widespread and numerous to list.
But what was truly remarkable, for a band of 17 playing a kaleidoscopic variety of repertory, was that it was all done from memory: necessarily, given the almost constant movement and the occasional semidarkness. It said much for the professionalism of the enterprise that an understudy, replacing an ailing violinist, could step seamlessly into the mix.
This production, which has traveled to China and Malaysia, to Mexico and California, and is bound for Australia, the Netherlands and Spain, has yet to find its way to New York. That can’t happen soon enough.
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:
It's fun to start something on the spur of the moment. It's another to make it work. The submissions and suggestions for my list of The Necessary 100 pieces of music (thanks to Daniel Shapiro for the title) are coming in -- see the comments at the bottom of yesterdays post, plus more below.
I'm going to keep posting your submissions, and provide one suggestion a day. Then, when it feels like we're reaching some sort of critical mass, I'll start getting this little beast of a list organized.
I was thinking it would be fun to try to convince a music downloading service to offer a Necessary 100 package at an attractive price. But let's see how things go, first...
SUBMISSIONS VIA EMAIL:
From Daniel Shapiro: The challenge to choose the Necessary 100 may indeed be too challenging, at least for those of us with jobs and lives to live, but I offer the following:
1. Mozart's Clarinet Concerto, which I think is simply the most beautiful full-length classical piece. Period.
2. J.S. Bach's A Musical Offering. This isn't Bach's finest work (I've no idea how to choose that, and I'd take Bach's work alone if I could have only one composer), but it displays a command of counterpoint that never fails to astonish me. As a sometime composer, I know that trying to make a worthwhile extended contrapuntal section is tremendously difficult; in this piece, Bach does five-part counterpoint, and in one short section six-part. Having worked for a long, tortuous period to achieve three- and four-part counterpoint, I listen to this simply awestruck.
(Here are flutist Marc and harpsichordist Pierre Hantaï to give us a taste of the main theme and ricercar (a 3):)
3. Leonard Cohen's New Skin for the Old Ceremony. (If we are choosing full-length works including operas, albums of song belong here (what about The Who's Tommy?), and not just individual songs. I am not a big Schubert fan, but if someone chose the Winterreise as a group, I think we'd have to let them.) The individual songs are extraordinary pieces, but together form a kind of look into the soul, dark and light, brutal and sensitive, that seems to me unparallelled.
4. Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited. The collection of songs here are the epitome of what makes this songwriter's canon so great. The extended metaphors of the title song and "Desolation Row," the harsh but empathetic attitude embodied in "Like a Rolling Stone," "Ballad of a Thin Man," and "Queen Jane Approximately," and the sheer exuberance in melody and rhyme of practically every song on the album makes this necessary.
5. Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. I once heard an overnight FM host object to playing some of the great "warhorses" (his word) of classical music, because we've heard them so often; I recall thinking that we listen to them over and over because they repay the time and effort. He was referring to Grieg's Piano Concerto (lower down on my own list, but surely in there somewhere), but the notion applies to this, in my opinion as in many others', simply the greatest symphony in the repertoire. Yes, the Ninth is magnificent, the Eroica is extraordinary, and I have a warm spot for the rich and surprising Seventh (and the Fourth is my pocket fave, the one I like when the others are just too much), but the Fifth rings down the centuries with a greatness unlike the others; it's on a separate plane. What is more thrilling than its opening four notes, more surprising and striking than the oboe obbligato, more satisfying as a complete orchestral meal?
6. Antonio Vivaldi's Four Seasons. Again, we listened to it too many times, but it got played so much because it's so terrific. From the traditional versions to the Nigel Kennedy and Il Giardino Armonico re-imaginings, the range and the delight of this sequence of pieces continues to enthrall new listeners. And, if you come to it without the jaded ear most of us older listeners have acquired, you'll hear anew its wonder and mastery.
7. Joni Mitchell's Blue. A series of songs so personal they'll have the hair on the back of your neck standing on end. Strong melody, instrumentation that shows the beginnings of her interest in jazz without losing the lightness of pop songs, yet songs that have real weight.
8. Hector Berlioz's Harold in Italy. Berlioz's masterpiece, I think, and so much better than the rest of his work that it belongs here. If I ever chose to learn to play the viola, it would be to play this. What melodic invention! What sheer pleasure in the sound of life!
9. Gordon Lightfoot's "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald." When I first heard this, I was simply floored. The recreation of mediaeval ballad style, complete with daring rhymes ("too rough to feed ya" and "been good to know ya" reminded me of no one so much as Geoffrey Chaucer) and the even more daring tactic of letting the simple melody take care of itself, as a ballad will. I separate it from the album it was on not because there were no other good songs (Lightfoot's catalogue of wonderful songs is second to no one's), but because it's just such an unbelievable achievement of mature songcraft, that every time I hear it I am astounded and captured by it.
I don't really have time to fill in ninety-one more items, but I would like to include more Bach, along with Brahms, Prokofiev, Schumann's string quintet, albums by the Beatles (Rubber Soul or Sergeant Pepper), Phil Ochs (Rehearsals for Retirement), Gershwin (Concerto in F and Fred Astaire's album of song stylings, perhaps), Handel, Haydn, Miles Davis's Kind of Blue, Dave Brubeck's Time Out, Randy Newman's Little Criminals, Shostakovich, something by Poulenc, and — well, you see why I have to stop now.
From Canadian Opera Company Orchestra tuba Scott Irvine:
I'm not even going to try to limit myself to 100. Sometimes I need the bombast and swagger of stuff like Walton's Crown Imperial, or the intimacy of Feldman's chamber works. Bach plays a big role, as does the music of Vaughan Williams, (that's where you and I first got into contact). I'm also a string 4tet junkie, so Beethoven looms large as well. And of course, I've been in the COC Orchestra for over 25 years, so Mozart, Puccini, Strauss and Wagner have to figure in there somewhere.
So I will name just one piece -- number 1 on my list, above everything else. It's the first CD I would grab in case of fire:
Schubert - String Quintet in C major, D956
Here's the music, as performed by our very own Penderecki String Quartet, with cellist Roman Borys, earlier this year:
MY DAILY SUBMISSION Because of the jumble in my head over this little game, I'm going to do this chronologically, so that my eensy little brain can keep my own list straight.
Early Music: Libro Vermell de Montserrat If nothing else, this collection of 10 devotional songs and dances compiled in the 14th century in the Catalan monastery in Montserrat (home to a shrine to the Black Virgin) serves to remind us of how dancing does not have to be confined to deafening clubs in the Entertainment District. This simple music, written in one or two parts, was not meant to be listened to but meant to be sung and enjoyed by anyone who had made the pilgrimage to Montserrat. This is music that's all about life.
Here is "Stella Splendens" and "Los Set goxs recomptarem" (The Seven Joys):
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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