On summer's hottest day, musical sizzle is counterproductive, so put your headphones on the rocks

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:

xxx

Last night's review of Toronto Summer Music opening concert has left me tormented

Ever since filing my review of Kirill Gerstein's Toronto début recital last night, which opened the 6th Toronto Summer Music festival, I've been tormented by my criticism.

Gerstein played beautifully, but I just couldn't agree with what he was doing. There was nothing musicologically wrong with his interpretations, so my criticism really came down to personal taste. Even though concert reviews are as much about the subjective as anything else, I often worry about taking the subjective too far.

So, to better second-guess myself, I decided to consult some dead 20th century masters on the oh-so-difficult second movement of Beethoven's Op. 111 Sonata. The technical issues are one thing, but the real test of the artist is in figuring out what to do with those piles of notes that seemingly go nowhere.

Among my perusings, I listened to three Mid-century Modern pianists because I get the impression that, at the time, every serious classical musician worried about fidelity to the composer's intentions and would consult new scholarly editions of the score to make sure they were doing the right thing.

One obvious reference is Chilean master Claudio Arrau (1903-1991). His main teacher was Martin Krause, who had been taught by Liszt, who had been taught by Czerny, who had been taught by Beethoven (and, now that we have MP3 players, we have all been taught by Beethoven).

One of my favourite personal references is Solomon (British pianist Solomon Cutner, 1902-1988, who had a massive stroke in 1956 that caught him just as he was recording his hugely respected interpretations of all 32 Beethoven Sonatas).

For contrast, I listened to Russian legend Tatiana Nikolayeva (1924-1993), who represents the bolder side of the spectrum.

After all that listening, I feel better about what I wrote last night. Solomon won, yet again -- mixing an elegant, quiet intimacy with a strong sense of narrative flow. As ever, I continue to shake my head in wonder and admiration at how the same black dots can produce such differing results.

In case, like me, you have too much free time, here are Arrau, Nikolayeva (from the Great Hall in Moscow's Conservatory, in 1984) and Solomon playing Beethoven's C-minor Sonata, Op. 111:

 

CD Review: Nicholas Angelich's new disc of high-contrast Goldberg Variations isn't growing on me

There's been a flurry of fresh interest in Bach's Goldberg Variations since New Yorker Simone Dinnerstein stunned us with her Romantically flavoured recording four years ago. She made them as much her own as Glenn Gould had done a half-century before.

Being music written for harpsichord, the Goldergs leave a pianist open to a wide range of options when able to take advantage of the much, much larger tonal and dynamic palette offered by a modern piano.

Although I love Dinnerstein's interpretation, and have a lot of respect for Gould's original take, my personal gold standard is Russian pianist Evgeni Koroliov. I'm eagerly anticipating Canadian pianist David Jalbert's recently completed recording, which is being released in the fall (we can get a preview of his thinking at the Elora Festival on Jul. 30, when he presents the full Goldbergs in recital at St. John's Church, at 4 p.m.)

This review didn't make it in to today's Star:

NICHOLAS ANGELICH
Goldberg Variations (Virgin)
**1/2 (out of 4)

The gentle “Aria” that begins J.S. Bach’s legendary Goldberg Variations might fool you into thinking this is going to be a soft, seductive journey through a famous keyboard suite that marks the 270^th anniversary of its publication this year.

But American pianist, and occasional Toronto Symphony guest, Nicholas Angelich has exaggerated each variation’s character, creating an 80-minute marathon punctuated by dynamic and stylistic contrasts: Slow variations are slower than usual; fast ones are dizzyingly fleet.

You can marvel at this man’s phenomenal control and technique, but this is one of those journeys that doesn’t improve with each return visit.

+++

Here are four clips: 1. Angelich (Aria), 2. Koroliov (Var. III-VII, 2009) 3. Gould (Var. XII-XIX, 1955), 4. Dinnerstein (Var. XXV):

 

Paul Dateh's little webisodes turn old-fashioned physical comedy into music

Adventurous, 20-something American violinist, singer and composer Paul Dateh has been having a lot of fun for the past year and a half turning classic comedy routines into little musical webisodes.

Since every Monday morning deserves a distraction, here is Dateh going cuckoo with guitarist Ken Belcher. If you like what you see, you can find plenty more episodes of Violince here:

Salon des oubliés: Havergal Brian's Gothic, a true symphony of a thousand, gets rare live performance today

Imagine spending your entire life scraping out a living as a copy editor and music copyist, so you can spend every free moment as a composer who no one is seriously interested in.

That, oversimplified, is the story of English composer Havergal Brian, who died, aged 96, in 1972. (Click on the link for everything you may want to know.) He left behind stacks and stacks of music -- including 32 symphonies -- that not many people could get excited about. An old guard of influential Englsh musical figures, including Proms founder Sir Henry Wood and conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, did their best to champion Brian's work.

Today, the Proms give us a very rare opportunity to hear his most notorious creation: Symphony No. 1, called the Gothic. Brian spent eight years crafting this two-hour behemoth, which calls for a huge main orchestra, organ, four offstage brass bands, a children's choir and an Edwardian choral society-size adult choir and, as you can imagine, a gargantuan stage.

Thank goodness for Royal Albert Hall.

Today's Proms performance, with live streaming audio, features more than 1,000 performers, according to the BBC. After the live stream, the concert will remain available for listening for seven days.

You can find all the details of the concert here.

Havergal completed the work in 1927. It was published in 1932 as his Symphony no. 2, then renumbered by Brian three decades later. Apparently, it made it in to the Guiness Book of World Records as the longest symphony. It didn't have its premiere until 1961.

It's difficult to describe the style of Brian's writing in this symphony; it's so eclectic that it echoes a little bit of everything inside its massive sprawl. It's like a big sonic tapestry where the creator keeps changing the colour and thickness of the yarn, while reinterpreting the design, as the loom chugs along.

That sounds awful, but it isn't, really. It simply demands a different kind of listening. I've imagined myself as a passenger on a long train ride, with the Gothic Symphony a grand succession of unfolding panoramas that come and go as I sit back in wonder.

Here is the first of three sections of a messily exuberant setting of the Te Deum that make up the work's second half. This is from a 1989  Slovak Philharmonic recording -- the first official recording (there was a bootleg LP of a live concert floating around before that):

In a jollier vein, here is a Comic Overture ispired by J.M. Synge's 1909 play, The Tinker's Wedding. The music dates from 1948. The performance is by the late, great Sir Charles Mackerras and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic:

To close, Roger Vigoles accompanying baritone Brian Rayner Cook in Brian's overwrought, 1910 setting of Robert Herrick's poem, "Why Dost Thou Wound and Break My Heart:"

'Your job is not to relax; your job is to inspire people,' composer tells National Youth Orchestra of Canada

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?

+++

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:

 

Web streaming bonanza for classical music fans kicks off today with opening of Verbier Festival and BBC Proms

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.

Eternal sceptics be damned, the fountain of youth never seems to run dry

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.

+++

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.

Deep spatial experiences are ours when we listen from the centre of the musicmaking

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.

As Nobles once wrote in Musicworks magazine about spatial music:

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.

Listen to the concert here.

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.

Members of Canadian Children's Opera Co. making musical memories of a lifetime in Europe

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.

You can follow their dear-diary blog here.

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):