Like any commodity, the less you have, the more precious it becomes.
Since the music critic's job at the Star went the way of VHS, I've had little time to listen -- I mean listen, not hear -- to music, making the moments when I can have both particularly precious.
Koren-born Canadian pianist Minsoo Sohn's new recording of J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations has been one that I keep returning to and, with each listen since the CD arrived in late August, I come to appreciate some new facet of what he has done here.
There's been a mini rush of Goldberg recordings in the last half-decade and, each time I hear a new interpretation in concert or on disc, it comes with a fresh appreciation of Bach's craft, as well as the tremendous amount of thinking that the pianist has to do about how to make each of the 30 variations sound.
Some performers find an inner lyricism. Others treat the Variations as technical exercises broken by slower passages that allow the pianist to catch their breath during this 80-minute marathon.
The beauty in Sohn's performance comes from its underlying clear-headedness, blended with a very strong grasp of the playful nature of Baroque dance forms Bach inserts.
The music shimmers with playful light. Bach's contrapuntal textures are as clear and sparkling as a Swarowski store window. Sohn also refrains from imposing too much Romantic sweetness on the slow sections, making this a refreshing, enlightening and very welcome addition to my reference collection.
Check out the details as well as track samples in the Multimedia section of the Honens music competition website (Honens, as a gesture of confidence in its laureates, has been issuing Sohn's recordings).
Here is the review I've filed for tomorrow's Star:
It’s nice to have a 229-year history, but the question for Russia’s Mariinsky Orchestra always remains, what can you do for us tonight?
Thrill, entertain and provoke was the answer for an enthusiastic audience at Roy Thomson Hall on Friday evening.
The program represented a deep, sharp sliver of modern history made up of three Russian pieces premiered between 1910 and 1926. The orchestra, led by jet-setting longtime music director, Valery Gergiev, was brilliant. The piano soloist, veteran Russian powerhouse Alexander Toradze, was unorthodox.
Even in a city as richly blessed with symphonic music as Toronto, there are few concerts in a season that open the ears and eyes as widely as this one did.
An all-purpose band that accompanies opera and ballet as well as giving its own concerts, St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre musicians have visited 43 countries on dozens of tours since Gergiev took over in 1988.
This program, representing the core of the 20th century Russian canon, is something these musicians can likely play from memory, but nearly every note left the stage with the clear immediacy of a freshly energized ensemble.
In Igor Stravinsky’s 1919 version of his 1910 ballet suite, The Firebird, Gergiev and his orchestra played up the tension between sensuality and rhythmic drive to great effect.
Equally compelling was Dmitri Shostakovich’s sardonic Symphony No. 1 – an expertly structured piece a then-19-year-old wrote for his conservatory graduation.
The conductor stood on the floor at the orchestra’s focal point, without a podium or a baton. He didn’t keep time. Instead, Gergiev relayed his instructions with gently fluttering hands, more veteran choir director than orchestra leader.
The resulting sound was fluid, transparent and utterly compelling.
Less of a sure thing was the evening’s concerto, the fearsomely difficult Piano Concerto No. 3, a touring showpiece Sergei Prokofiev wrote for himself in 1921.
Toradze marked his performance with exaggerated contrasts. He played the loud, brash passages with extroverted panache, but quieter sections sounded as if he were challenging himself to play the piano as discreetly as possible, to not wake the neighbours during a late-night practice session at home.
(Ironically, Prokofiev himself was kicked out of his Paris apartment for making too much noise at the keyboard.)
Through much of the concerto, Toradze’s piano became just one more shade amidst the orchestral colours, which is not the point of programming a solo showpiece.
It did, however, cast this warhorse of a composition in a new light, and that was worth the price of admission, as well.
I've been hugely enjoying Janina Fialkowska's new Liszt Recital album from ATMA Classique, which is a treat from beginning to end. This is one of the year's definitive tributes to Franz Liszt, whose 200th birth anniversary falls on Oct. 22.
The disc's programme is a mix of fireworks and fireside, with the extravagant Valse-caprice No. 6 and Valse de Faust (a memory of Gounod's opera) bookending Liszt's respectful transcriptions of six Chopin songs, Gretchen (a transcription of the middle movement of his Faust-Symphonie) and Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude.'
Failkowska achieves something extraordinary in her blend of flawless technique, complete control and a feeling of genuine spontaneiety. Her playing is never strident or showy or, in moments of total reflection, slack. This is much, much more difficult to achieve than it sounds.
Rather than being in the presence of an ego, the album left me with the impression of being in the presence of a (very) good and faithful servant of the composer.
The piece that has affected me the most is Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude, which I listened to a lot as a tween (it was an Angel LP by Georges Cziffra, if I remember properly). Fialkowska's interpretation is positively ethereal.
The piece is one of a set inspired by the 1830 collection, Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, by French poet Alphonse de Lamartine, which, a couple of years later, deeply affected a 22-year-old composer madly in love with the Comtesse d'Agoult. (Liszt wrote the 10 pieces in this set piecemeal, and didn't get them published until 1853.)
The poem goes on (at length) in signature Romantic style how, after great inner turmoil and unhappiness and some time spent savouring the manifold pastoral charms of the countryside, the Grace of God has calmed and comforted the soul. "Un nouvel homme en moi renaît et recommence," writes Lamartine (A new man is reborn in me).
For those of you who can read French, here is the final, breathless, stanza:
Conserve-nous, mon Dieu, ces jours de ta promesse,
Ces labeurs, ces doux soins, cette innocente ivresse
D'un cœur qui flotte en paix sur les vagues du temps,
Comme l'aigle endormi sur l'aile des autans,
Comme un navire en mer qui ne voit qu'une étoile,
Mais où le nautonier chante en paix sous sa voile !
Conserve-nous ces cœurs et ces heures de miel,
Et nous croirons en toi, comme l'oiseau du ciel,
Sans emprunter aux mots leur stérile évidence,
En sentant le printemps croit à ta providence;
Comme le soir doré d'un jour pur et serein
S'endort dans l'espérance et croit au lendemain;
Comme un juste mourant et fier de son supplice
Espère dans la mort et croit à ta justice;
Comme la vertu croit à l'immortalité,
Comme l'œil croit au jour, l'âme à la vérité.
The full magic of Fialkowska's performance comes from being able to earnestly render Liszt's caresses and sighs with a determined energy, and to carefuly dissimulate the technical hurdles (and there are many) with a gauzy, ethereal peace.
(It helps that Fialkowska recorded on one of Canada's finest concert instruments, a Hamburg-built Steinway at the Palais Montcalm in Quebec City.)
Because Fialkowska's performance is not available on YouTube, I listened to many well-known names looking for something that could rival her interpretation, to share here.
The best I could come up with is a 1948 recording by the late, great French pianist Raymond Trouard (1916-2008), on a funky sounding Pleyel grand. Trouard had as one of his teachers Emil von Sauer, a student of Liszt's.
UPDATE, OCT. 14, 2011: Ben Dunham, editor of Early Music America, wrote a complaint to the Star that I had not obtained permission to reproduce a pdf of the article by Christopher Hogwood here. Since the article is intended for members only, and I hadn't asked for permission, I have removed the link. Non-members or non-subsribers should email info@earlymusic.com if they would like to request the article.
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I apologise for the poor quality of the image, of Sun of Composers, a 1799 engraving by Augustus Kollmann published in the German Musical Times (Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung).
It shows J.S. Bach at the centre, surrounded by Haydn, Handel and Graun in a holy trinity. Radiating out in primary and secondary leaves are the lessers, which include Gluck, Mozart, Pleyel and Telemann. Next to Mozart is Leopold Kozeluch (a Germanized form of Kozeluh), someone I had never heard of.
It's a beautiful lesson in how the rankings of today will likely mean nothing at all a century (or two) from now.
Period performance master Christopher Hogwood has written an essay on Kozeluh in the current edition of Early Music America. Born in Bohemia in 1747 and living to the age of 70, Kozeluh's life began in the dying days of the Baroque world, and ended in the stormy musical waters of Beethoven's time.
Hogwood believes that the composer should be better known, if, for nothing else, as a key bridge figure of 18th century music.
You can read the article in PDF form here -- it is accessibly written and filled with interesting details.
What caught my eye, in particular, was how Kozeluh resolutely held out as a champion of the amateur musician, writing music that enthusiastic part-timers could prepare for their at-homes -- the sort of fans and supporters that went from being the bedrock of music creation and publishing to being totally left behind by anyone considering themselves to be a "serious" composer in the 20th century (I've read more than one disparaging musicological remark about late-19th and early-20th century composers who wrote art music for popular consumption).
Hogwood has just completed editing all 50 of Kozeluh's keyboard sonatas for Bärenreiter. The first volume is out, and the others are forthcoming. No other editions exist, but you can check out some scanned samples i the Petrucci library here.
From what I can see and hear, there's a lot to like.
Here is a very nice example, a Symphony in G minor with an elegant sense of proportion, development and structure, performed by the London Mozart Players, under Matthias Bamert:
I chose "Music for a Sunday Afternoon," for obvious reasons, plus wanting to hear him play Mozart (Sonata No. 13 in B-flat) and Beethoven (Sonata No. 17 in D minor -- the Tempest).
I can't warm up to his interpretations, but I loved his 4-minute introduction, where he explains how he can't possibly say anything original about Beethoven in such a short space of time. He does, however, say something that comes from the core of the interpreter's art.
He speaks of how Beethoven straddled Classicism and Romanticism, paying homage to the past while nodding to the great effusion of personal expression that would mark the 19th century. He call this "the inventor at odds with the museum curator."
This is exactly what anyone interpreting music from the past faces -- as well as anyone trying to judge or appreciate a concert. There is a tradition to honour, and an act of creation to carry through. Both walk arm in arm.
Some performances are the acts of museum curators. We can walk away appreciating their form or the inherent beauty of the music. But the real spark comes when the performer stirs in an act of invention, bringing an immediacy and energy to the score.
Love or hate the interpretations, Gould brought that tension to every note he played, and that's what made him so special.
It was precisely this energy that animated the Toronto's Symphony's season-opening concert a few days ago. It was an energy that reminded me how much I already miss my old job as music critic, but also lifted my mood instantly -- as, I think, it felt like it did for most people sitting in Roy Thomson Hall.
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The CBC has launched a new Gould site full of interesting stuff to check out. You'll find it here.
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To do any job well, one needs to be totally present for it. In my new life as a business reporter, it has meant very limited time to listen, read or play music over the past four weeks.
I can't imagine being able to make a meaningful contribution to the appreciation of music under these circumstances but, I'm realising today, that if I feel sufficiently inspired, I might put a word or two down here once in a while, as long as the Star keeps this blog up on the website.
I'm back from an intense summer trip -- my high school graduating class organized a 30th anniversary reunion.
The visit was also an excuse to drop in on the one person who has done more to influence how I listen to and how I make music today: Vesta Mosher, my old piano teacher from high school.
Through her persistence and cajoling and, yes, grumpy threats, she somehow caught my teenage imagination and opened my sensibilities to the million-and-one ways in which an interpreter can approach a piece of music.
Many teachers give lessons prescriptively, Vesta would sit me down, for hours on end, to analyse music so that I could come up with my own prescription that was true to historical practice, tradition and a sense of musical narrative.
It's only been since I wrote my first concert review for the Star, slightly more than 10 years ago, that the true value of what Vesta imparted came into focus. I feel indescribably lucky in having had a teacher like that.
Vesta was a true mentor, inviting me into a world of ideas that went far beyond music. She spent time with me that no sane teacher would ever dedicate to a passing student.
I've visited with her several times over the years, but this time felt special.
Vesta turns 82 this fall. Four years ago, she fell asleep at the wheel and drove her car off the highway. She spent a long time in hospital and, even though she shouldn't, she continues to live at home, by herself, with severe physical disabilities and a failing memory.
It was my first visit with Vesta since the car accident, and I was very conscious of how this could be the last time that I can still get access to the core of a vibrant, tireless teacher, orchestra conductor, accompanist, music festival organizer and civic pain-in-the-ass.
Of course, Vesta wanted to know what made me think I was qualified to be a critic. She wanted me to tell her what I meant by a musical narrative. She challenged me on the definition of musicality.
Unlike the cringing teenaged me, I could now smile, laugh and challenge her right back, knowing that she was just being her Socratic self, enjoying the act of questioning more than coming up with possible answers.
Vesta gets visitors, but few people play for her. She asked repeatedly, so I obliged with something I hoped I wouldn't mangle too badly, one of my favourite Haydn Sonatas.
"That was musical," was her simple reply.
"You were one of my best students, you know."
I asked her why she had never told me that 30 years earlier.
"Because it wouldn't have been good for you," she snapped back.
In my adolescence, Vesta called me a lazy ass, over and over again. She was right, of course.
This morning, fresh from vacation, I found out that I am no longer music critic but a reporter for the business desk at the Star -- a bit of news that still has my head spinning a bit.
So, that's the end of the line for this blog, as well. It really has been fun -- in the same kind of way that my lessons with Vesta were: I got to think and question and listen and wonder every single day.
These are the things that make not only music, but anything in life, worthwhile.
So, what piece of music does one choose for an exit like this? One that contains thought, question and wonder, of course.
Simplicity, in the beautiful, Shaker sense, is also present in Dmitri Shostakovich's Op. 87 Prelude and Fugue in C Major, the key where everything begins and ends, as played by the composer himself. Neither the playing nor the piano are perfect, but that is part of the charm, too:
I came home from my trip to find a yellowed piece of newspaper on the balcony. Someone had torn out the movie and concert ads for late January.
The big movie is Mae West's She Done Him Wrong, which was released in 1933. Two performances in one venue on Jan. 27th means that it was 1934, when this would have been a Saturday. (Sunday was the city's big day off, when, I'm told, Eaton's department store would pull drapes across its window displays so that people walking home from church on Sunday would not be tempted to think of worldly goods.)
Among the options at the Eaton Auditorium, the city's recital hall of record in the day, are: -Onegin "world premiere contralto" on Jan. 25, tickets $1, $1.50 and $2 -English Boy Choristers under conductor Carlton Borrow, Jan. 27 (25 to 75 cents) -Myra Hess "penomenal English pianist" on Jan. 27 ($1 to $2) -Ted Shawn "and Ensemble of Male Dancers" Jan. 29 (50 cents to $1.50) -Dusseau "brilliant soprano" on Jan. 31 ($1-$2)
The world's finest came to Toronto even during the Great Depression. Today, a few days of performing arts programming would include a wide age range among the artists. I was struck how all the grown-up performers from January 1934 were in their mid-40s.
I was also struck by how ephemeral the work of performing artists is. Even though these people lived at a time of reasonably good recording technology, very few people watch or listen to what they left behind.
Even though we think we are recording and archiving today's performing arts for future generations, for the majority of the audience, it naturally is the living artist who holds the greatest appeal.
So, the concert listing turned into an opportunity to sample a ghost's gallery of past greats.
*Let's start with Swedish-born, German contralto Sigrid Onégin (1889-1943), who should have been billed as the world's premier contralto.
Here she is singing the famous aria from Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice:
*The English Boy Choristers were the touring group of the 125-student London Choir School, which supplied the capital city's churches with choristers from 1915 to 1958. It was a brilliant idea, ensuring that every (Anglican) church could have a well-trained treble or two -- someone who would grow up to be an asset among adult singers. The Church of England subsidized the Choristers' world tours.
*Ted Shawn (1891-1972) was a key figure in the modern dance movement in the United States, and the founder of the Jacob's Pillow Dance Festival, which inaugurated its 78th season yesterday. Shawn founded the festival the summer before his troupe's performance at Eaton Auditorium.
Here's a clip of some tame choreography by Ted Shawn: "Choeur Danse," from 1926:
*The reference to the brilliant soprano is for Jeanne Dusseau, born in Scotland in 1893 as Ruth Cleveland. She studied voice, married Quebec baritone Lambert Dusseau in 1919, and spent much time singing in Canada. One of her early accomplishments was being cast as Princesse Ninette/Orange No. 3 in the premiere of Prokofiev's The Love of Three Oranges in Chicago, in Dec. 1921. After retiring from the stage, she taught in New York City and Washington, D.C. I couldn't find a death date.
Here is one of only two pieces of music she ever recorded commercially, the "Easter Hymn" from Pietro Mascagni's Cavalleria Rusticana, in 1939:
*The last performances goes to British pianist Myra Hess (1890-1965). There is a simplicity to her interpretations that makes her deep, deep artistry seem effortless.
The first piece is a clip with conductor Humphrey Jennings from a World War II film that includes one of her many morale-boosting performances at the National Gallery in London. I've followed it with a moving live performance of Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 2 with Bruno Walter and the New York Philharmonic in 1951 (note how noisy the audience is during the opening minute and in the final movement).
The closing clip is of her own transcriptions of Bach and Scarlatti, recorded in 1958.
Glossy German newsmagazine Der Spiegel has published an interview with Nike Wagner, one of Richard Wagner's great-granddaughters, and one of the many family members who, at one time or another, has vied to head the Bayreuth Festival.
Among the many things that get touched upon in the interview, which includes candour about the family's closeness with Hitler (they wouldn't go to be on New year's eve until the Fuehrer had called with his wishes), is an admission that Richard Wagner didn't think much of his father-in-law, disdaining his music as well as his showmanship.
For anyone curious about the personal side of the music world, the article is worth a read in translation here.
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Because this is the 200th anniversary year of Franz Liszt's birth, I've been hearing far more of his B Minor Piano Sonata than I would care to. It's a wonderful piece that is about far more than mere show, but Liszt left stacks and stacks of music that we are not hearing.
But there's a reason that the Sonata is on everyone's fingers. And I don't think that, among this year's recordings or concerts, I've heard as cleanly laid-out an interpretation as from Haiou Zhang, a young Chinese pianist of Lang Lang's vintage who left the Beijing Central Conservatory for northern Germany rather than the United States.
Zhang's career has been thriving in Europe. We've had three tastes of him in Toronto thanks for the enthusiastic support of conductor Kerry Stratton. And his new Liszt album is well worth checking out. There are four other pieces on it, besides the Sonata, providing an overview of Liszt's styles and proclivities.
Rather than some Liszt, here is Zhang in a live performance Venetian Boat Song from Felix Mendelssohn's Songs Without Words in Spandau last November (Mendelssohn was only two years older than Liszt -- and his music was the object of Richard Wagner's multiple anti-Semitic tirades):
For all of our astounding technilogical sophistication, the mysteries of wood still somehow seem beyond us.
Every few years, a news item flashes by announcing that a scientist has formulated a molecular explanation for the magic sound of Stradivarius violins. A deeper reading usually reveals that some part of the mystery has not been explained, usually because we're missing some secret ingredient in the varnish, or that there are no old-growth spruces left in that Val di Fiemme woods where the old masters sought their materials.
I bring this up because Le Figaro in France today published a short profile of La Roque d'Anthéron music festival master piano technician, Belgian Denijs de Winter, calling him "the piano whisperer." (The festival begins today, running to Aug. 21.)
In the article, de Winter says that one of his great accidental discoveries, many years ago, was that, contrary to all of the accepted wisdom in the piano world, exposing the wood of a piano to repeated changes in humidity levels is actually good for its sound, because it allows the soundboard to loosen-up, thereby improving its ability to transmit vibrations from the strings.
He went so far as to build a climate-controlled room in his Brussels piano-rebuilding workshop to observe this more closely.
If you can read French, you'll find the article here.
So, this is a long, roundabout way of suggesting that we poor little humans, instead of working against nature, as is our wont, might remind ourselves to accept her into our plans and calculations.
It's just really hard to quantify in scientific language.
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JAN LISIECKI ON A ROLL
Young Canadian sensation Jan Lisiecki is a guest of the La Roque d'Anthéron festival tomorrow -- same day as Yuja Wang.
Today, he has just finished giving a recital at the Verbier Festival in Switzerland -- a recital that should be available for free streaming at www.medici.tv by Sunday.
It's part of an amazing summer for him, which has put him in the big leagues. We're lucky that Stratford Summer Music has managed to snag him for three days of recitals: Aug. 4 to 6.
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:
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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