Some instruments don't take well to certain key signatures

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.

It never ocurred to me to do this, which Gretchen Michelle Helbig posted on Facebook:

Philippe Jaroussky takes us on a thrilling vocal ride at Koerner Hall

My review of Philippe Jaroussky's Toronto début is on the Star's entertainment website this morning. You can check it out here.

To share the pleasure of last night's concert a little more, here is Jaourssky singing his encore aria, "Alto Giove" from the opera Polifemo, by Nicola Porpora, with Ensemble Artaserse in what looks a lot like the royal opera theatre at Versailles:

Nezet-Seguin's take on Bruckner's Fourth Symphony could use a little bit more air

I've reviewed conductor Yannick Nezet-Seguin's recording of Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 4 with the Orchestre Metropolitain du Grand Montreal for today's Star. You can read it here.

Concert review: Gergiev and Mariinsky Orchestra thrill, entertain and provoke at Roy Thomson Hall

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.

 

Salon des oubliés: A Bohemian composer who was more highly regarded than Mozart in their day

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.

+++

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:

Three concerts from this year's BBC Proms coming to a Cineplex theatre near you

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.

Two oboes, eight hands show off the fun side of National Youth Orchestra of Canada's summer activities

The four members of the oboe section made clever merry at the National Youth Orchestra's annual talent show, just before the start of their concert tour on Thursday. (You can read more about it in today's Star.)

The oboists are Véronique Guay (from Montreal's South Shore), Aidan Dugan (Ottawa), Ron Mann (North Vancouver) and Hugo Lee (Toronto):

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

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: