Forget about being casual or lightening up the music, or populating the stage with multimedia experiments. Music Toronto’s recitals are all about the artist and their art.
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
On Tuesday night, the stars of the Jane Mallett Theatre stage were Toronto pianist Eve Egoyan, smartly dressed in black, and a big, black Steinway concert grand piano.
They looked like they meant business.
The programme was a selection of recent solo works with which Egoyan feels a special affinity. These were substantial pieces that required their interpreter to draw from two distinct wells: of pianistic show and the art of speaking softly but persuasively.
Despite the deep as well as wide pool of pianists young and old out there, few have the dual attributes of iron-willed determination and delicate execution that mark Egoyan’s relationship with the keyboard.
She proved this yet again in a programme that consisted of four compositions: To Weave (a meditation), written in 2003 for Egoyan by the late American composer James Tenney; Piani, Latebre a 2010 work by British composer Piers Hellawell; the 12-year-old Underfolding by Torontonian Linda Catlin Smith (who also acted as Egoyan’s page-turner throughout the recital); and Folklore, Section 2 completed in 1992 by Briton Michael Finnissy.
All of the pieces came from the more abstract end of the sound spectrum that lies between serialist and tonal writing and most relied on the piano’s natural harmonics to make fuller the basic sound of hammer striking strings. Egoyan’s triumph was in giving the music a human heart, of carefully shaping and balancing musical figures to give even the most abstract passages the flow of some sort of narrative purpose.
Even the most still pieces, like Tenney’s and Smith’s, which encouraged us to suspend our usual relationship to the passage of time, never lost their inner thread of forward motion.
Hellawell’s contribution was the most obviously virtuosic, and Finnissy’s broken-up folksongs also added the element of a musical treasure hunt, which included clear bits of the traditional spiritual Deep River strewn among the other notes.
Throughout, the relatively small audience was quiet and attentive, putting a lie to the impression left in other venues that Torontonians are unable to sit through a quiet passage of music without coughing up a lung or two.
This was serious music for serious music fans, rewarded by a special encore: a superbly poised performance of the first page of the late Ann Southam’s Simple Lines of Enquiry.
Serious art music is alive and well and living in Toronto — and Eve Egoyan made herself one of their heroines on Tuesday night.
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
