I've learned from painful experience in my occasional forays into composing or arranging music for my church job that some keys simply don't suit some instruments (my orchestration basics are lost far back in the mists of time, and I'm almost always too lazy or frazzled to go back to my reference materials, which I've kept since university).
That means having to apologise to grimacing players at the one-and-only pre-performance rehearsal.
The first of three concerts from this year's BBC Proms will air in high-definition as an encore at 2:30 p.m., at most of the Cineplex theatres that usually carry operas from the Met.
This is serious music, very nicely performed. Check out the details here.
Remember, also, that BBC's Radio 3 is streaming many of the concerts live on the web, and archives them for a week, if you can't listen live. All the details are here.
Star theatre critic Richard Ouzounian laid out a list of hot-summer songs in today's paper (try as I might, I can't find the story on our website). So I have my colleage to blame for having Ella Fitzgerald singing "It's Too Darn Hot" stuck in my brain all morning.
Using that song as a mantra when even a short dog walk drenches my t-shirt in sweat is, for me, counter-productive. I think we need to serve up the day, and our headphones, on the rocks.
So here are three art-music pieces to chill by. Your suggestions are welcome -- either here, or emailed to jterauds@thestar.ca.
1. "Soundstill VI" from the late Ann Southam's Pond Life suite for solo piano, as performed by Christina Petrowska Quilico. You have to approach this like a meditation exercise, and don't be put off by what sounds like a serialist tone row developing at the start of the piece.
2. The 1930 arrangement for small orchestra of "The Housatonic at Stockbridge" from Three Places in New England, by Charles Ives, inspried by a hike he and wife Harmony took as newlyweds in the Berkshires in the summer of 1908.
First, the lines of verse by Robert Underwood Johnson that inspired Ives as much as the views and atmosphere in Stockbridge, Mass.:
Contented river! In thy dreamy realm The cloudy willow and the plumy elm: Thou beautiful! From ev'ry dreamy hill what eye but wanders with thee at thy will, Contented river! And yet over-shy To mask thy beauty from the eager eye; Hast thou a thought to hide from field and town? In some deep current of the sunlit brown Ah! there's a restive ripple, And the swift red leaves September's firstlings faster drift; Wouldst thou away, dear stream? Come, whisper near! I also of much resting have a fear: Let me tomorrow thy companion be, By fall and shallow to the adventurous sea!
3. "Jeux d'eau" by Maurice Ravel, inspired by French symbolist poet Henri de Régnier's verse "Fête d'eau." Ravel included this line from the poem with the piece, which I'm translating as "The river god laughing at the water that tickles him." Jean-Yves Thibaudet gets just the right amount of splash going:
Brian Current rehearses Soma with the National Youth Orchestra of Canada on July 14. Photo: John Terauds
Executive director Barbara Smith describes the National Youth Orchestra of Canada as a microcosm of the country's youth (the youngest members are 16). After spending time with them at "boot camp" on the pastoral University of Western Ontario campus in London, I realised that it was also a micricosm of the whole classical-music world, reflecting the broad range of opinion and belief in programming and teaching, as well.
I need to sit and think and distill the experience into something for the Star.
In the meantime, one rehearsal session is still rattling around in my poor little brain.
On Thursday, Toronto composer (and head of new-music performance at the Royal Conservatory of Music) Brian Current arrived to rehearse Soma, a new commission from the orchestra.
After plowing through the opening measures of his intense, deftly structured, often uncomfortably piercing evocation of a journey towards an exalted state, Current stopped the music to do some fixing with the players.
Part of his work involved getting the players to make "ugly" noises with instruments. Current said that we've been so culturally conditioned these days to think of art music as relaxing, and to make as beautiful sound as possible with our instruments that it's not easy to think of the act of making music as an act of provocation.
It takes only a moment of reflection to realize that a movie soundtrack, an opera, even a string quartet can be a stream of provocations -- to joy, to tears, to anger, to extasy. So much of the history of Western music is about new pieces -- from Gesualdo to Stravinsky to Adams -- provoking listeners into fits of dislike, with acceptance, even appreciation, coming much later.
"Your job is not to relax; your job is to inspire people," insisted Current. He later elaborated that each artist's real job is to reflect "what it is to be alive in this time and in this place."
How much of our daily classical music experience lives up to this ideal?
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In the spirit of good, old-fashioned fun, which is very much a part of the experience, here's a clip of the brass and percussion sections of the National Youth Orchestra rehearsing a flash mob that they're going to surprise conductor Jonathan Darlington with tonight after dinner:
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.
"Strombo," (2011), 19 x 30 inches, by Harry Enchin
During my walk yesterday around the 50th annual Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition at Nathan Phillips Square, the biggest crowd of excited spectators had gathered around Harry Enchin's photo collages that seamlessly blended street views culled from the City of Toronto Archives with current images. It was Toronto then and now, as seen from two perspectives magically (or, shoould we say Photoshopically) merged into one.
It made me think how people appreciate the past, but don't always get excited about it -- unless they can see something of themselves in it, too. Enchin managed to make that connection very successfully.
It also made me wonder about how conscious classical music programmers are about trying to make a connection between sensibilities and expectations of today with the music of the past.
I know that the act of interpretation literally brings the music of the past into the present, but most people who aren't already fans usually think of it as something that's exclusively from the past.
Perhaps we need to mix up the setting and take the concert out of the traditional auditorium. Perhaps we need to mix in background visuals.
The easiest thing to do is for an artist to offer the audience a few words of introduction about the music, to at least personalize it.
An example of the flip side of this is new music that draws explicit connections to something from the past -- like the "Fugue" movement in Paul Hindemith's Piano Sonata No. 3 in B-flat Major, from 1936 (as played by Glenn Gould, here):
It's Canada Day, and I'm about to put my feet up and hide the laptop for the next 10 days.
Before I go, I thought I'd celebrate this strange and wonderful country with a wish that, someday soon, our performing arts will become an even better reflection the mix of cultures and influences in our big cities -- which is where most Canadians and Canadians-in-waiting live.
There is a major disconnect between the faces I see on the subway or streetcar and the faces I see at Roy Thomson Hall, the Four Seasons Centre, Koerner Hall, the Jane Mallet Theatre and Walter Hall. Perhaps this is the way it's supposed to be, but, if you believe, like me, that a society's culture is a mirror of itself, then that reflected image tells me that there's a big disconnect going on culturally as well as economically.
Rather than harp on a problem, I've tried to find an example of an artist who I think reflects a positive vision of our cultural future: Haligonian Dinuk Wijeratne.
Born in Sri Lanka, raised in Dubai, educated in England and New York City and, now, transplanted to Halifax, this pianist, composer and conductor is the embodiment of the urban reality I see and feel and hear around me every day -- and his home base is a city nowhere near as diverse as Toronto.
I've chosen three examples to show off different aspects of what Wijeratne does.
The first features Canadian pianist David Jalbert in a recital from the Chapelle Historique du Bon Pasteur in Montreal.
The second is the first part of a performance by Wijeratne, frequent collaborator, clarinetist Kinan Azmeh and tabla player Mayookh Bhaumik at the 2008 Atlantic Jazz Festival:
The third is is of Wijeratne explaining and presenting his work as music director of the Nova Scotia Youth Symphony:
Today's free noonhour recital at the Toronto Jazz Festival's open stage in David Pecaut Square is excellent young Torontonian Chris Donnelly. His recent solo album, Metamorphosis, a single, 50-minute work of his own creation, was a huge treat. And its well worth brining a take-out lunch to the square to get a sample of his craft.
In case you're not familiar with Donnelly, here's a guick introduction, thanks to last year's edition of the biennial Nottingham International Jazz Competition (Donnelly was one of the four finalists, as he had been on his previous try, in 2008).
If you only have time for one clip, start with Part 2:
I was totally blown away by the art of Jacky Terrasson. The 44-year-old puts absolutely everything into his unorthodox interplay of keys, harmonies and rhythms. often, it sounds as if his right hand knoweth not what his left hand is up to -- but it's all part of his incredible art.
This was not on tonight's programme, but is a beautiful example of what Terrasson does. Here is Dame Felicity Lott presenting Francis Poulenc's "Les Chemins de l'amour," (with accompanist Maciej Pikulski at a 2008 recital recorded at the Château de Compiègne), followed by Terrasson's reimagining which, somehow, manages to retain the full meaning and feeling of the text, without ever giving us a single word.
First, Jean Anouilh's text about the elusive traces of love:
Les chemins qui vont à la mer Ont gardé de notre passage Des fleurs, des feuilles et l'écho sous leurs arbres De nos deux rires clairs.
Hélas, des jours de bonheur, Radieuses joies envolées, Je vais sans retrouver traces dans mon coeur.
Chemins de mon amour, Je vous cherche toujours. Chemins perdus vous n'êtes plus Et vos échos sont sourds. Chemins du désespoir, Chemins du souvenir, Chemins du premier jour, Divins chemins d'amour.
Si je dois l'oublier un jour, La vie effaçant toute chose, Je veux dans mon coeur qu'un souvenir Repose plus fort que l'autre amour.
Le souvenir du chemin, Où tremblante et toute éperdue, Un jour j'ai senti sur moi brûler tes mains
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:
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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