Two mother lodes of free streaming get mined, starting today, as the BBC Proms -- audio streamed live, then archived -- and Verbier Festival -- audio and video streamed live, then archived -- open their seasons.
The BBC Proms do not pander, but they know how to go big. The annual festival kicks off today with a First Night performance of Janacek's roiling Glagolitic Mass, conducted by Jiri Belohlávek. You can listen in on BBC 3, which has a whole site devoted to the Proms.
Meanwhile, a bit to the east, and up a mountain or two is the Verbier Festival, which has invited conductor Charles Dutoit and pianist Nelson Freire to add their star power to the high-altitude romp. The programme offers an unlikely pairing: Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 2 with Stravinsky's 1911 Petrouchka Suite. (What makes the odd pairing possible -- and which we won't see -- is a street festival outside the Salle des Combins during intermission).
Select performances from Verbier are streamed on medici.tv live before being available for free for a limited time. The site asks for registration, but, in my experience, they are really good about not sending too many solicitation emails.
I'm packing myself off to London (Ontario) to drop in on National Youth Orchestra boot camp and and a visit with this summer's conductor, Jonathan Darlington. It's a great moment to celebrate one of my reliable sources of inspiration: seeing young talents making music for the sheer, unbridled enjoyment of it.
A lot of our culture of consumption -- which very much includes the performing arts -- relies on the thrill of discovery, where often the performer is a brighter and shinier object than the material they are performing. But, for me, it's the sheer exuberance of young sensibilities that turns my crank.
I've spoken to so many people who work with kids, and, to a person, they say that engaging with them in creative ways is the single best way to stay young. This is the true fountain of youth -- and the well is constantly being replenished.
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In that youthful vein, it's worth checking out freshly-turned-19 British pianist Benjamin Grosvenor who, tomorrow, will be the youngest soloist to perform at the First Night of the Proms -- the start of what I think is the world's finest and richest summer music festival. (He joins his own country's National Youth Orchestra for a concert in Birmingham in early August.)
We can hear many of the Proms concerts over the web, thanks to BBC 3.
Grosvenor has a freshly-released album on Decca, which I haven't had a chance to hear, yet, because the international release date isn't until next spring. He's been buzzing about the U.K. and Europe over the past couple of years, and it looks like he's on the verge of becoming much better known in this corner of the world.
Earlier this year, the Guardian's Tom Service sat down with a nice chat with Grosvenor, which you can read here.
Here's Grosvenor tackling Chopin's Nocturne in F-sharp Major during his Decca recording sessions, followed by a clip of his cherubic 11-year-old self performing Scarlatti and Balakirev at the BBC Young Musician of the Year final round in 2004. He won, of course.
The Canadian Children's Opera Company performs at the Golden Hall of the Musikverein in Vienna on July 5
Canada did beautifully at the fifth annual Summa Cum Laude youth music festival in Vienna last week. Representing Toronto were members of the Canadian Children's Opera Company, who placed second in the treble choir category (treble refers to unchanged children's voices).
There were 30 choirs and instrumental groups present, with the biggest representation coming from China. The finalists all had a chance to perform in the glorious Musikverein. However, the real glory surely isn't in being a finalist, or in which history-soaked venue the performances happened in, but in the experience itself.
First of all, there is the heady feeling of making great music with one's peers -- something all children lucky enough to belong to a choir or band or orchestra experience every time they get together. Then there is the joy of meeting other, equally enthusiastic kids from other places. Then there is the adventure of seeing new places.
For 50 members of the Canadian Children's Opera Company and their artistic director Ann Cooper Gay, the Vienna stop was one of several destinations visited during this summer's outing to Austria and Italy, which began June 28 and ends on Wednesday.
It's incredibly difficult work to make all this happen -- from the fundraising in the months leading up to the trip, to figuring out how to keep track of each child and his or her socks, dirty underwear and nutritional quirks. In spite of all that, pretty much every child and parent and leader who has ever been part of a summer concert tour will tell you that they would do it over again and again in a heartbeat.
As the old credit card commercial would remind us, the memories are priceless.
Here are two video clips of the Canadian Children's Opera Company kids in action, at a museum in Liechtenstein on July 3 (there are no further details provided with these clips):
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
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:
QUATUOR FRANZ JOSEPH Hyacinthe Jadin, Op. 1 String Quartets (ATMA) **** First of all, you're forgiven if you thought Hyacinthe Jadin was a woman. You're also forgiven if you've never heard of this French composer, born into a family of Flemish musicians working in the court of Louis XVI and who came of age and died of tuberculosis (aged 24) during the First Republic. There are two dates cited for his birth, but the correct one likely is April 27, 1776.
Hyacinthe's more famous and longer-lived brother deserves brief mention in English-language reference texts, and Hyacinthe only rates a short mention in my Dictionnaire de la musique.
So you're forgiven, yet again, for thinking that there probably isn't much to appreciate. Wrong again.
Montreal period-instrument Quatuor Franz Joseph has been championing Jadin's string quartets for years. They recorded the first three (out of a total published output of 12) -- all dedicated to Joseph Haydn -- in 2008, but ATMA has only just released them.
In short, these four-movement pieces are gorgeous, and given their full due in muscular, engaging interpretations by the Quatuor.
This is music that would have been unusual, and likely not appreciated, in the France of 1795, the year this set of three quartets was published. They are written in a style closely reminiscent of Haydn's, featuring carefully elaborated musical subjects. The young Jadin was a devotee of Sturm und Drang expression, which was not the French way.
Public performances of chamber music did not really begin to happen until a generation after Jadin's death in 1800, so this was music for private consumption -- yet written for advanced players. This, and the fact that public life in France was a mess during the Directoire (which issued a new decimal-oriented calendar, among other wild things) means that Jadin, a prodigy who was among the first keybaord teachers hired at the founding of the Paris Conservatoire in 1795, was a victim of historical circumstance.
Thank goodness there are people like Quator Franz Joseph to right history's wrong. Click on the bold-face name of the performers at the top of the review to read and hear all about this wonderful album.
Veteran French pianist Jean-Claude Pennetier is a fan of Jadin's piano sonatas. Here he is at a fortepiano playing Sonata No. 4, in F-sharp minor, Op. 4 No. 2, which was published the same year as the three Haydn-dedicated quartets (this is from a Harmonia Mundi disc from the mid-1980s):
Calgary Opera's premiere of The Inventor, an opera by Vancouver Symphony Orchestra music director Bramwell Tovey and librettist John Murrell, gets its broadcast premiere this afternoon on CBC Radio 2's Saturday Afternoon at the Opera.
There's every reason to believe it should make for fine listening. The excellent cast includes veteran Judith Forst, fast-rising Erin Wall and James Westman.
Anyone not watching the final Stanley Cup game should be out tonight:
Violinist Joshua Bell is playing with the Toronto Symphony, Tafelmusik Baroque Summer Institute is hosting its fun Grand Finale concert tonight at Grace Church-on-the-Hill and a New York Philharmonic-fuelled, all-star production of Stephen Sondheim's Company is getting the Cineplex big-screen treatment tonight. There is a wealth of pop choices offered by the NXNE festival.
But, for one of those something-for-everyone picks, I think tonight's treat is going to be a free, open-air performance by the Art of Time Ensemble in David Pecaut Square, part of Luminato's great series of daily under-the-stars presentations. Even the weather promises to be summary today.
The concert starts at 8 p.m. For a bit more information, click here.
Here is Steven Page and the Art of Time Ensemble reinterpreting Radiohead song "Paranoid Android" at Harbourfront's Enwave Theatre last year:
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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