It’s not every day you see audience members bobbing their heads at a concert of recent art music, but that was the scene at Walter Hall on Monday evening as the Gryphon Trio and Penderecki String Quartet celebrated the 60th birthday of Christos Hatzis with a programme of his music.
University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music had organized a concert to mark the composition professor’s 60th birthday with two chamber ensembles who have championed his work.
The Gryphons and Pendereckis are among a growing number of perfomers — including violinist Hilary Hahn and pop singer Sarah Slean — to be seduced by Hatzis’s creations. His bio says there is even a full-length ballet score in the works for the Royal Winnipeg Ballet.
Hatzis’s music is about placing one’s heart prominently on the sleeve, where the transmission of clear emotional messages never takes second place to intellectual constructs.
Make no mistake, Hatzis’s music is clever and, in many instances, difficult to perform, but its impact and message do not have to be filtered through a layer of analysis or understanding.
It is tonal music that borrows from a variety of cultural influences, with a hint of tango here and an exotic wobble of chant from the Levant there.
After listening to the Gryphon Trio eloquently perform three excerpts from the 90-minute multimedia work Constantinople and the Penderecki’s intensely portrayed the roiling sonic worlds of Hatzis’s String Quartet No. 2 (The Gathering), I’m seriously wondering if Hatzis also hasn’t captured the essence of what it means to create music in the 21st century urban core, where global influences mix freely and easily on the subway, at the restaurant and, one hopes, the concert hall.
The graceful way in which Hatzis uses and varies repeated melodic cells, allows his pieces to gracefully range across styles, influences and emotional content. There’s absolutely nothing easy about this, but this composer has mastered the art of making the sounds so palatable, that we are easily fooled.
There was also On a Whim, a work not by Hatzis but from one of his students, Laura Silberberg, that was the icing on the evening’s musical birthday cake.
As Hatzis explained from the stage, Silberberg, currently a PhD student in composition at the University of Toronto, first encountered the Gryphon Trio as a high school student at the Claude Watson School of the Arts, where the trio has long mentored teenagers. Silberberg studied piano with the Gyphons’ Jamie Parker, and then went on to study composition with Hatzis.
The Whim part of the title translated into abrumpt and unpredictable changes in tonal centre, which gave the pop-influenced piece for piano trio a distinctly off-kilter personality.
A seed planted in collaboration was bearing fruit pointing in yet another stylistic direction, and it was touching to have it included in a celebration of a thriving composition career that is clearly inspiring a new generation of creators.
John Terauds