I doesn’t happen often that I sit through a concert swinging wildly between rapture and revulsion the way I did with Toronto’s Eybler Quartet, baritone Brett Polegato and friends at Heliconian Hall on Friday night.
- 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
The big draw on the programme was Eybler Quartet violist Patrick Jordan’s arrangement of the piano part from Robert Schumann’s song cycle Dichterliebe (A Poet’s Loves) for string quartet, double-bass and guitar.
Jordan humbly rose before the performance began to say that any goodness in his arrangement was due to the performers’ creative input and that any deficiencies were his own.
He needn’t have worried. Jordan’s work is good enough to deserve wide performance.
As far as I could tell from this first listen, the success in this arrangement lies in Jordan having carefully laid out the palette of tones and timbres available to him, established some rules of consistency, then treated each song in the cycle as an independent entity. Jordan’s instrumentation reflected the emotional content of the poetry while also highlighting the little dance of life — happy and not — that underlies these songs.
Bass player Joseph Phillips and guitarist Timothy Phelan integrated with Jordan, Eybler violinists Julia Wedman and Aisslinn Nosky, and cellist Margaret Gay as if they had been playing together for years. Their sense of phrasing and balance was impeccable.
Polegato, one of this country’s vocal treasures, approached his interpretation of Schumann’s Poet as a character actor, taking a tighly-wound set early on and not letting Schumann’s occasional rays of major-key sunshine distract him from a life of love-fuelled angst.
The singer shaped the music expertly, doing everything in his (considerable) power to make the sound beautiful as well as compelling.
It was a magnificent way to close the evening.
The rest of the concert’s music left me with more mixed feelings.
Felix Mendelssohn’s teenage Op. 13 String Quartet No. 2 is one of my favourite pieces of chamber music, but I had never heard it played on period instruments, which is the Eybler Quartet’s claim to uniqueness. And I can’t say I would want to hear it played that way again.
The Eybler’s had terrible intonation problems in the first movement. The sound was better as they played through the piece, but there was a raw-edged quality to the interpretation that, for me, detracted from the beauty of Mendelssohn’s music.
The evening’s low point was the premiere of a new work by Martin Arnold, a Torontonian with a long and honourable list of credits and collaborations to his name. The kindest description of under difference, written in 2012, is that it is as inspired as its title.
Each of the four strings instruments gets a different set of musical figures to play, which they do in varying order, much like time-lapse video of changing patterns of commuters crossing a busy city intersection. The effect was interesting for a couple of minutes, but the absence of any real development in the musical material quickly became tedious.
Arnold magnified the thematic poverty of his material by asking the first violin to end the piece with a long, excruciatingly slow descending scale, bow-testing note by bow-testing extended note, at the end. It was so bad it was like a parody of bad composition.
Ultimately, this was a stimulating and provocative evening. It was a concert that stuck its middle finger in the face of a world where all performances are supposed to be quickly rated by a set number of stars.
That in itself makes it worth seeking out the repeat performance of Dichterliebe in the genteel surroundings of the Rodman Arts Centre in St Catharines on Sunday afternoon. Details here.
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Because the music is so beautiful, Mendelssohn’s String Quartet No. 2 is a great excuse to observe a composer stealing from himself in creative ways.
Here is Barbara Bonney singing “Frage” (Question) with Geoffrey Parsons, followed by one of my favourite young quartets, the Calidore, performing the first movement of Op. 13:
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
