Sounds of Beethoven quartet inspire Toronto cellist to see it in dance movement

I had a nice chat yesterday with Toronto-based cellist Rachel Mercer. The interview won't be published in the Star until January, when she returns from extended touring for a solo recital with pianist Minsoo Sohn for Music Toronto (the picture is of the two of them performing at the Ottawa International Chamber Music Festival in 2008).

But we did talk about something that kept me thinking all day yesterday -- the connection between live music and other art forms on the same stage.

Mercer and her fellow members of the 12-year-old Aviv String Quartet -- one of her several regular collaborations -- have worked with an Israeli videographer to mix music and moving images. She also mentioned how the second movement of Beethoven's "Heiliger Dankgesang" String Quartet (Op. 132) runs in her head with four dancers moving to the music lines of each of the four string players.

So I decided to see if I could conjure up some sort of mental image of dancers in listening to the second movement. Perhaps it's lacking the physical connection of moving a bow and fingers over strings that stymied my imagination, but nothing came readily to mind. I'm more moved by the third movement -- the one that gave the quartet its nickname. In 1825, Beethoven had just recovered from a serious illness, and poured his gratitude into this long movement, adding the inscription in German: "Holy song of thanksgiving by a convalescent to the Divinity, in the Lydian mode."

Here is the late, lamented Alban Berg String Quartet, performing the second and third movements of Beethoven's Op. 132 String Quartet in 1989. The Viennese quartet disbanded last year. At the time of this live performance, the members were violinists Günter Pichler and Gerhard Schultz, Thomas Kakuska on viola, and cellist Valentin Erben:

A thousand Kiwi ringy-dingies in honour of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture

It takes a load of creativity to put a symphony together -- whether it's for a 100-piece orchestra or 1,000 cellphones. It says a lot about our world that some of the most creative moments in art come from advertising and marketing these days.

But fun is fun.

The first clip was posted this week by Vodaphone New Zealand. Kiwi music producer Jol Mulholland is the mastermind (as well as the conductor).

The second and third clips give us a behind-the-scenes glipse at some of the logistics involved in making those 60 silly seconds possible:

Upcoming Philharmonia project takes London visitors right inside the orchestra

First there was Being John Malkovich. In 10 days, Londoners get a double bill of Being Esa-Pekka Salonen and Being the Philharmonia Orchestra. Think of it as a full-immersion experience, like being inside the actor's brain, except that this is inside a symphony orchestra.

Instead of being thrown out onto the side of a highway in New Jersey when the experience is over, you emerge into the sights and smells of the Thames.

I'm describing an art installation where each room takes the visitor into a different section of the orchestra visually (video screens showing the view from a particular spot inside the section, as recorded from multiple cameras, some strapped onto individual performer's heads, above) as well as aurally (speakers broadcasting the sound captured in the same spot) that opens Nov. 3 at the Bargehouse on London's South Bank.

If you've got conductor-envy, there's even a podium spot available.

This fascinating project is called re-rite, named after the performance of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring taking place simultaneously in each room.

Te website promises all kinds of online resources once the installation opens. Stay tuned, as they say.

Loose structure allows Nightingale stagers to choose their flightpath

I love what Robert Lepage has done with Igor Stravinsky's The Nightingale. The short opera's loose structure -- very similar to a 17th century English masque -- allows the director to do pretty much anything he wants with the instrumental interludes. It can be dance, or it can be something else to keep the eyes busy.

To give you a taste of the music, as well as an alternative staging option for television, taken from a Opéra national de Paris effort (with conductor James Conlon), here is Natalie Dessay, sounding a touch softer-edged than the Canadian Opera Company's fabulous songbird, Olga Peretyatko, in the opening scene:

Canada's Aaron Gervais a finalist in virtual composer-in-residence competition

Toronto ex-pat Juliana Farha had an ambitious dream to create a virtual meeting place for young performers, composers, their fans, and adventurous Internet surfers.

Three years of tireless toil by the London, England-based founder and her creative team are bearing fruit as Dilettante Music appears to be coming into its own, transferring its virtual activities into real-world results.

The latest marquee effort is a competition to name a composer-in-residence. The organization announced three finalists today -- including Edmonton-based Aaron Gervais (pictured, left). The other two are American David T. Little and Chiayu Hsu from Taiwan.

The winners are scheduled to be announced at a live concert at Wiltons Music Hall -- a historical treasure in Tower Hamlets -- on Nov. 5.

I'm a fan of Gervais' lighthearted approach to new music -- a field dominated by too many knitted brows.

The website will have more to listen to next week, as it prepares podcasts with the London Sinfonietta. But there's already a lot of background posted, including clips of Gervais' creations. Go explore on the main site itself, which freely crosses national boundaries.

Telus Centre sound-and-light show worth Nuit Blanche detour tonight

For music lovers, one Michelin guide-type "worth a detour" stop on tonight's Nuit Blanche itinerary has to be the Royal Conservatory of Music's Telus Centre. Starting at 7 p.m., the entire building is being filled with sound and artistic lighting, as part of a massive installation featuring live acoustic and electronic music.

Back in June, I bumped into Toronto composer Brian Current, the evening's curator/artistic director, who was enthusiastically talking up the potential for mixing architectural space and sound. He was going to be relying on a new electronic instrument, the EBow, for help, and was looking for ways to find as many of these devices as possible.

The centrepiece of the sound installation in veteran American composer James Tenney's In a Large Open Space, a piece that gets regular performances. It was written for 12 or more instruments in 1994. There is a lot to see, as well as hear, including Koerner Hall and the Michael and Sonia Koerner collection of rare instruments, which are now on display in the airy, multi-storey glass atrium that connects the new portion of the building with Victorian Ihnatowycz Hall.

You can follow the Nuit Blanche team's updates on Twitter.

Here is a clip from Tenney's piece, posted in July. The performers are Sonidero 13, the new music ensemble of the Escuela Superior de Música in Mexico City (coincidentally, Brian Current is the conductor of the Royal Conservatory's New Music Ensemble):

Lala Land Dudamania marketing push spawns conducting computer game

The Los Angeles Philharmonic has added a you-be-the-conductor computer game -- and iPod app -- as part of its massive promotional mobilization around new music director, Gustavo Dudamel.

The 28-year-old Venezuelan conductor creates a sensation wherever he goes. And now we can conduct like him, too.

... well, not exactly.

I've tried the game and it didn't feel at all like conducting. Essentially, the player is asked to press the A S D and/or F keys to cute the different sections of the orchestra as the music plays. If your keystrokes match the cues, you win points.

Click here to give it a go.

I think I can keep my job, because, on the first outing, I scored enough to be awarded the title of "Conductor" by the game. I don't have to slink off in embarrassment, even though I have to admit that I barely heard a single note of the music as I tried to focus on hitting the targets at the right moment.

As for the real Gustavo, the LA Phil has plenty of background music and video to enjoy on the orchestra's all-Gustavo Dudamel microsite.

BBC Proms concerts free on Web, coming to Cineplex Sept. 12

Some of the summer's finest music is available for free streaming on the Net -- and is coming soon to a Cineplex movie theatre near us.

BBC Proms on the Net

If you've only ever experienced Walt Disney's fairies, you may not realise that various legends present them as much more (and much less) than luminous wisps that grant poor little girls their fondest wishes.

Igor Stravinsky's ballet score The Fairy's Kiss sounds sweet enough, but it's about a supernatural flit who falls in love with a young boy, kisses him, then waits until he is ready to wed before coming back to pluck him away so that she can have him for her own.

Premiered in Paris in 1928 as Le baiser de la fée to commemorate fairytale ballet score master Peter Ilytch Tchaikovsky, the score for The Fairy's Kiss is peppered with musical quotations from Stravinsky's predecessor. It is also among Stravinsky's more conventionally (read, tonally) beautiful scores. The composer revised and expanded the score for George Balanchine's New York City Ballet in 1950.

You can hear it online on BBC3, part of the broadcaster's Internet streaming of the 2009 Henry Wood Promenade Concerts -- better known as "the Proms."

These 100 concerts, which began July 17, are a summer-long feast of music from all eras. This year, there's been a particular bounty of newer works (completely unlike the strange Edwardian relic that is the Toronto Symphony's annual Last Night of the Proms, with its pomp and circumstance frozen in a lump of British Imperial amber).

This particular performance of the Sravinsky score from Monday night at Royal Albert Hall is dynamically rich, if a bit too soft-edged at times. It nicely shows off the talents of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra's new principal conductor, 33-year-old Ukranian, Kirill Karabits (shown, left).

Karabits apprenticed at the Budapest Festival Orchestra a few years before Torontonian Julian Kuerti, currently assistant conductor with the Boston Symphony.

The Stravinsky ballet is available for free on BBC iPlayer until Monday

Tonight: Catch Harry Christopher and The Sixteen as they tackle George Frideric Handel's fabulous Coronation Anthems and excerpts from his opera Semele.

BBC Proms at the Movies

Cineplex announced early this morning that this year's Last Night at the Proms will be broadcast in high definition to movie theatres across the country on Sept. 12 -- at 2:30 p.m., Toronto time.

Yes, the BBC Symphony (under David Robertson) will play Elgar's Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1, but there will be much, much more on the wildly varied programme, including Oliver Knussen's Flourish with Fireworks. Wonderful mezzo Sarah Connolly is the headline soloist.

The Cineplex tickets go on sale Friday. At $21.95 for adults, they are more than twice the price of the summer opera re-broadcast tickets the company has been offering this year.

Move over, Mr. Da Ponte, Twitter is taking over the opera libretto from here

Is was bound to happen sooner or later; it was just a matter of where and when. But I'm surprised that it was London's Royal Opera House -- one of the world's premier presenters -- that would try to weave an opera out of tweets on a real stage.

It's an old-fashioned parlour game that can be played on a global scale.

It's happening soon. Here is a news item that came from the United Kingdom Press Association last night:

Covent Garden to host Twitter opera

(UKPA) – 19 hours ago

The Royal Opera House has invited users of the micro-blogging website Twitter to write an opera, line by line, in "tweets" of 140 characters or less, and the first scene of the first act is now complete.

When the work is finished, excerpts will be set to music and performed at the ROH in London's Covent Garden as part of a special event in September.

The ROH blog gave a precis of Act One, Scene One in traditional opera summariser style: "William is languishing in a tower, having been kidnapped by a group of birds who are anxious for revenge after he has killed one of their number.

"Hans has promised to rescue him. The Woman With No Name is off to her biochemistry laboratory to make a potion to let people speak to the birds."

The scheme was launched on Friday as part of the ROH's Deloitte Ignite season and aims to get more people involved in the creative side of opera.

The as yet untitled new work begins in Covent Garden, with a bird singing of the natural world: "'Flowers they are strange to me, The fruits of nature that I see, Are worms and seeds and cats and rats. 'Nuts, I love hazelnuts.' Bang! The bird dropped from the sky, dead, its tiny wings were frozen."

William and the nameless woman who is with him quarrel, and he tells her: "I can't stand you - no, stronger. You are a horse. And now escape is what I long for."

The scene ends with Hans, sword aloft, swearing to rescue William, his true love, while the still-nameless woman says she will return to her laboratory to make a "potion to unlock the secrets of nature, and allow the birds to talk to us".

Composer Helen Porter will use familiar opera tunes and some original composition to set the work to music, and excerpts will be performed for the public at the ROH on September 5 and 6.

***

It would be easy to dismiss this as mercenary marketing, but too many people in the opera world take themselves and their artform too seriously. It's never a bad thing to shake things up.

So far, the tweets are setting up a merrily nonsensical tone. It's as if the characters from 30 Rock decided to write an opera. Here are two consecutive tweets from the opening scene:

“A small bird twitters over there, He sings without a single care, If only we could be so free, Without the worries and the …

concerns of a nihilist. I would bring you flowers, but they would die. I would love you, but, why?

Why? Just because. Sometimes that's reason enough.

Here is YouTube denizen Bill Dyszel, who has made a specialty of setting tweets to music, levelling an vengeful intonation at the Royal Opera House for ignoring his contributions to the genre:

Snobbery vs. serialism: a correction

I received a very nice email last night from Jacques Françaix, the son of composer Jean Françaix, about whom I wrote recently. I thought I'd share it with you. The translation error Jacques refers to was, in fact, my inability to read his father's handwriting:

Dear Sir,

First I would thank you very much about all the nice things you wrote about my father and his music (and about the website I did too!). It's quite unusual to read from a critic that my father can write serious music!!
Indeed it is very strange that most of the musicans and people like my father's music, except most of the critics!

Secondly, I would like to indicate you an error in the traduction you made about my father's manifesto: you translated the word snobisme by serialism, instead of snobbery.

Permettez-moi de continuer en français, pour que mon propos soit clair. En effet, mon père avait sa façon de penser, mais il laissait à d'autres le soin de dire au public ce qu'il devait penser ou non de tel ou tel type de musique. Le snobisme est une attitude universelle et intemporelle.

(Translation of the above: Please allow me to continue in French, so that I can be more clear. Indeed, my father had his own way of thinking, but he left it up to other to let the public know how they should think about different types of music. Snobbery is an universal attitude not tied to a time or place.)

I continue in my (bad) English to tell you I would be happy if you accept to join, on Facebook, the group "Friends of Jean Françaix," which was created by my American friend Paul Wehage, composer and saxophonist who well known my father and often played his music.

Bien cordialement

Jacques Françaix

Here are snippets from two recent recitals -- a Piano Trio by Françaix, performed by Austrian siblings Jess-Trio-Wien, followed by pianist Simon Tedeschi playing the last of Françaix's Five Encores (Cinq bis):