There are two great reasons to listen to CBC Radio 2 today:
1. Saturday Afternoon at the Opera (1 p.m. EST) features the Canadian Opera Company's fantastic production of Death in Venice by Benjamin Britten. We are also promised an interview with Toronto tenor Lawrence Wiliford regarding his new CD of Britten songs. Details here.
2. This evening, on The Signal (10 p.m. EST), you can catch a Soundstreams concert of choral music by Arvo Pärt and R. Murray Schafer featuring university voices, recorded earlier this fall at Koerner Hall. Details here.
American documentary filmmaker Michael Lawrence sent me a note this morning, after reading my interview with Simone Dinnerstein, who is in Toronto tomorrow to play Bach's Goldberg Variations at Koerner Hall. He wanted to fill me in on the next steps in a monumental, ongoing labour of love and obsession he calls the Bach Project.
Lawrence's note reminded me of a beautiful segment in the project that features Dinnerstein. She plays the Aria (followed by a short clip of a variation), while talking about Bach and the Goldbergs and her feelings about the music.
Her description of listening to Bach being like looking at all the stars in a clear night sky is particularly apt. Even if you have no idea what it all means, you can't help but admire the view. What Dinnerstein doen't add, but implies, I'm sure, is if you do eventually begin to figure out what it means, and discern the patterns and interrelationships between the notes/stars, the view only becomes more beautiful.
I've followed Lawrence's Goldberg clip with the promotional video from Dinnerstein's new Bach album for Sony Classical, which gets released in a few weeks, where she says more about what Bach means to her, and the importance of capturing multi-dimensionality in music. (The piano she is playing in the video is the Hamburg Steinway she fell in love with while recording in Berlin. It was delivered to her home in Brooklyn a couple of weeks ago.)
New Music Concerts was not able to get Elliott Carter to Toronto for tonight's celebration of his 102nd birthday at the Isabel Bader Theatre (the actual birthday is tomorrow). But his music will be there -- six pieces Carter has written since turning 99. All are Canadian premieres; one is a world premiere.
It's not just by virtue of longevity that Carter has become known as a connoisseur's composer. Long ago, when the art music world was in the thrall of atonal composition, Carter (like his French counterpart, Olivier Messiaen) developed his very own musical grammar. I'm oversimplifying, but his music starts with a layering of diverse rhythms. For his sound palette, Carter assembled a catalogue of (unusual) chords, not a set of tone rows, as his serialist peers would usw.
The results are no easier to grasp at first hearing. Like a lot of expressionist visual art, Carter's music rewards multiple visits and analytical listening. Carter is not about music as divertissement.
The Isabel Bader Theatre is normally a horrible place to hear classical music because of its dry-as-dust acoustics. But it may be good for Carter's pieces, because each musical line can be heard with absolute clarity (not normally a beneficial thing in art music).
For all the details about tonight's concert, click here.
Here is a link to a 50-minute interview composer Paul Steenhuisen prepared with Carter a few weeks ago.
To give you a taste of larger-scale recent work by Carter, here is Interventions for Piano, which was premiered by the Boston Symphony and music director James Levine, with Daniel Barenboim as soloist, ahead of Carter's 100th birthday:
I've written about English bass-baritone Pavlo Hunka's great mission to record and disseminate Ukrainian art song in the world in today's Star -- but the story is not available online. So here it is:
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Pavlo Hunka has been using Canadian means to achieve a Ukrainian purpose.
On Sunday afternoon at Koerner Hall, the English-born operatic bass-baritone unveils the second phase of an ambitious, $5 million project to record the art songs of Ukraine.
It’s a project with international scope that would not have been possible without the support of former Canadian Opera Company general director Richard Bradshaw and a clutch of Toronto’s finest musicians.
Although the music belongs to another time and place, the means to bring it back to life are all about Canada.
Opera personality Stuart Hamilton introduces the afternoon’s music, to be sung by Hunka, soprano Monica Whicher, mezzo Krisztina Szabó and baritone Russell Braun. Canadian Opera Company head coach Albert Krywolt accompanies at the piano, with the help of cellist Roman Borys and Julie Ranti on flute.
The Koerner Hall audience will hear but a small selection of the 124 art songs that Hunka collected for a lavishly produced 6-CD box set that includes a paperback book with short histories of Ukrainian art song, background on composer Mykola Lysenko (1842-1912), as well as the complete texts, in translation.
On Sunday, Hunka will also push a ceremonial button to make all the sheet music available for free download – in the key of the singer’s choice – anywhere in the world (for details, visit www.uasp.ca).
“I’ve had loads and loads of highlights in my career,” says Hunka before going in to rehearse with Krywolt a couple of days ago, “but this is the most glorious event I’ve ever been part of.”
Hunka was raised in England by an English mother and Ukrainian-immigrant father. The bass-baritone, who has sung in several Canadian Opera Company productions since 2004, says he first became interested in Ukrainian music when he was 15.
“I promised my father that I would make a significant contribution to Ukrainian culture,” he says. And he meant it.
Hunka has turned down several seasons’ worth of operatic roles in order to focus on his nationalistic mission, “because I can do it, and I want to do it,” he exclaims, with eyes flashing.
He went and found the songs, encouraged the Ukrainian-Canadian community to raise the $500,000 to pay for the Lysenko chapter, hired the recording and production staff at the CBC’s Glenn Gould Studio, established a network of Ukrainian musicologists around the world, coached the singers and oversaw the final editing of the CDs and production of the sheet-music database.
And Hunka is only getting started. With a true zealot’s energy, the singer hopes the project will showcase Ukrainian art song to the present day. “I hope we will eventually be able to present an anthology of 26 composers,” he explains.
Of course, he is also going out to spread the word.
“I need to get this music in front of young people, into conservatories, so that it can become part of the art song repertoire,” Hunka insists. He is determined to personally visit every music school he can think of to personally promote Ukrainian art song.
“Every opera I do has been done before and will be done again,” Hunka explains. “But if I don’t take up these art songs, no one else may come around to do this for another 150 years.”
Hunka smiles broadly as he points that all of the singers who took part in the Lysenko portion of the project have already included the songs in their personal concert programs – not as a gesture of goodwill, “but because this is beautiful music.”
That, ultimately, is why the rest of us should pay attention.
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In our conversation, Hunka mentioned that Lysenko had written many operas, which are beyond the scope of his art song project.
But I was curious. Here is "My soul trembles," an aria from Lysenko's Taras Bulba. The notes say it was recorded in 1972 at the Kyiv State Opera. The singer is L. Rudenko:
At the end of our interview about her book, Piano Lessons, 10 days ago, Australian pianist Anna Goldsworthy gave me a CD album that is, literally, a sountrack.
I listened to the disc as soon as I got home, and found her playing to be as unaffected, engaging and elegant as her prose. (You can read the short article that came out of our interview here.)
Besides teaching at the University of Melbourne and performing solo, Goldsworthy is also member of the Seraphim Trio. Here they are playing some early Mendelssohn:
Russian-born conductor Rudolf Barshai died at his home in Switzerland on Tuesday, aged 86. Trained as a violist, the conductor had close links with all the great composers and performers of the Soviet era, in particular Dmitri Shostakovich, who was his teacher at the Moscow Conservatory. In his post-Soviet career, he established a Canadian connection, serving as principal conductor of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra for a couple of seasons in the early 1980s.
Besides a great discography that includes the full cycle of Shostakovich symphonies, Barshai leaves behind many orchestral arrangements, including an elegant rendition of J.S. Bach's Art of the Fugue.
If you have time, here are three clips of an interview for German television on Shostakovich. Within the first 5 minutes, he explains more clearly than anyone else has been able to what Soviet authorities so feared about Shostakovich's music, and what makes it so appealing to a listener, by focusing in on a single, confounding G-major chord G, B and D) on which the composer superimposes a B-flat, which belongs to G-minor, creating ambiguity in sound and, consequently, quite a bit of tension -- even for ears who don't know what they are listening to.
The interview is followed by by Barshai's orchestration of Prokofiev's Visions fugitives, the "Dolente," movement:
This past weekend, the London Sunday Times ran a wonderful profile by Jasper Rees of opera and film director Franco Zeffirelli "visibly in the deep winter of a lifespan that began in 1923."
Zeffirelli is a classic combination of fruitful creator and not-so-nice human being. He is magnetic and repulsive, awe-inspiring and frustrating. In other words, he is absolutely compelling.
It's a great read.
If you don't have an online subscription to the London Times, you can find the article republished today in The Australian.
There's a book launch tomorrow night at the Royal Ontario Museum for Partita for Glenn Gould, by Montrealer Georges Leroux. (Click on the title for publication details.)
In its original French, the book won the Grand Prix du Livre de Montréal and was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award for Nonfiction. Given that the work is by a veteran University de Québec à Montreal philosophy professor with a lifelong love of Glenn Gould's playing, this should be a welcome addition to the huge-and-growing catalogue of biographies, meditations and appreciations of an artist who touched the lives of millions of listeners around the world.
Before I weigh in on the book, you should know that my predecessor as Star classical music critic, William Littler, is going to moderate a chat with Leroux as well as Michèle Hozer and Peter Raymont (the makers of the film Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould) tomorrow, starting at 7 p.m., at the ROM's Signy and Cléophée Eaton Theatre (level 1B). The evening includes the screening of the film. Tickets are $25 ($20 for ROM members), and can be reserved here.
As for my impressions of the book, the first thing you should know is that I repeatedly wanted to fling it across the room in frustration.
Early in his book, Leroux quotes from "Let's Ban Applause," something Gould wrote in 1962. Leroux writes that, in this passage, "we find the strongest expression of what will become (Gould's) artistic ethic. I regard it as a declaration of principle that underlies his entire aesthetic, and I will return to it often:"
I am disposed toward this view because I believe that the justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenaline, but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity. Through the ministrations of radio and the phonograph, we are rapidly and quite properly learning to appreciate the elements of aesthetic narcissism -- and I use that word in the best sense -- and are awakening to the challenge that each man contemplatively create his own divinity.
Leroux responds to Gould like so:
In this book I want to reflect on the meaning of this sense of wonder and this sovereignty of the artistic life, and also on the factors that limit the experience. I also want to look at the transcendence of a work of art and the sway it exercises over a life, even in its persistent elusiveness. My assumption is that these limits are pushed outward day by day, and I am tempted to see there a parallel with holiness. I would not recoil from speaking of the holiness of art, if by that one means the absolute, uncompromising commitment to a style of life. We would not revere a saint who did not give of himself freely; not would we admire an artist who took no risks. The demands of art are such that it claims life in its entirety, and that is the price of authenticity...
And so on (and on). And on.
It is such a Romantic view of the Artist, with a capital A. It also has all the elements of the Facebook world's preoccupation with All Things Me. And it all comes wrapped in the florid circumlocution of a seasoned lecturer on Philosophy.
Leroux gazes adoringly at his subject, returning obsessively to Gould's eccentric solitude as a source of fascination, from childhood through to the final recording of the Goldberg Variations. All of his biographical material is borrowed from those who came before, so what we get is an appreciation. There are no freshly unsealed letters, no secret trysts, no hatchets unearthed. Here is a man who loves music and adores Gould, and seems to have a fondness for the Artist as hero, building the sound studio as his Temple to Art.
This rubs me the wrong way, because I (currently) believe that it is this kind of unnatural fixation on the artist as icon that scares away many young people from the world of classical music. If we didn't have eccentrics, we wouldn't have any art. Musicians are human beings whose music will or won't connect with a listeners for purely human reasons.
For me, the ideal book about Gould that was not about Gould is Mark Kingwell's contribution to Penguin's Great Canadians series from last year. Kingwell looks beyond the self of the listener and the artist to look at a broader cultural and philosophical context for what made Glenn Gould so very special.
Kingwell used his philosophical background to help me see and understand how our society makes icons of artists. Kevin Bazzana's biography, Wondrous Strange, explained Gould the man and the artist in a straightforward, meticulously researched and elegantly laid out narrative.
For this pair of eyes, Leroux's extended meditation achieves neither.
Perhaps we should simply let the music speak to us directly, and stop trying to explain its mysterious attraction. The soil of Glenn Gould's life and work can only net so much fruit before it runs out of nutrients.
Here's Gould, playing the Fugue in E-flat, from Book II of the Well-Tempered Clavier, in 1963:
Here, for Scott, is a montage of Toronto streets, roads and alleyways, with a soundtrack of Gould playing Sellinger's Round, by William Byrd:
Cellist Denis Brott puts everything in perspective about halfway through the film, when he says: "A great instrument is when the limitations are always yours." That is what makes Old Master violins and cellos so valuable musically, and why so many string players dream of getting one in their hands.
Last year, Montrealer Ari Cohen followed a pan-Canadian competition for young, talented string players that awards the use, for three years, of one of 14 stringed instruments from the Canada Council's Instrument Bank.
We meet many of the competitors and several past winners, and discover what a close relationship these people have with their instruments. We find out how the enterprising Brott hooked up with William Taylor, a prominent business CEO, to raise some money for this project three decades ago. We also see how this competition is not just about musicality, but having a serious career plan.
The Instrument Bank competition is about the total artist and, satisfyingly, Cohen also manages to connect the viewer with the total person. It's a fine way to spend some time in front of the TV this evening -- on Bravo! at 8 p.m. (Eastern), with a repeat broadcast on Oct. 30 at 7 p.m.
Jazz people know and love him, as do fans of Hollywood film scores, opera and classical music. Over his 81 years, André Previn has led a remarkably productive, eclectic and acclaimed career as a composer, pianist, conductor and eager collaborator.
He has even spent time as tabloid fodder, when he took on Mia Farrow as the third of his five marriages.
Although pretty slim, this DVD offers up a tidy, nicely balanced, 51-minute version of this-is-your-life, André Previn, made by Lillian Birnbaum and Peter Stephan Jungk in 2008. The sole bonus is an excellent live performance from the Mozarteum in Salzburg, from 2000. It features Previn at the piano, in Mozart’s Piano Quartet in G minor, K.476.
In the doc, we see Previn in a live musical piano duo with Oscar Peterson, on British TV doing comedy with an orchestra in black-and-white and, best of all, we get to appreciate him through the lens of the important women in his life: Farrow, ex-fifth wife, violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, and soprano Renée Fleming, who premiered his opera adaptation of Tennessee Williams' Streetcar Named Desire.
Much of the talking is done in taxis, minivans and trains, giving the impression that Previn is always on the move. On one train, he says that his constant search for new challenges has a simple motive: If you say you’re happy with what you’re doing and want to keep doing it, “that’s when you get old and stale.”
It’s an inspiration (or kick in the ass) for people in any field, at any age.
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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