21C Music Festival with Afiara Quartet and Skratch Bastid at Koerner Hall, Saturday, May 24.
[Originally published in the Toronto Star]
It’s funny how much can happen when you’re sleeping – an NDP government can come to power in Alberta, a burglar can break in and steal your rare record collection, a mosquito can drain a pint of blood from your forehead. But last night something extraordinary happened. The RCM’s 21C Music Festival presented one of the most attention-grabbing concerts of the year – a collaboration between a string quartet, a scratch DJ and four emerging composers.
The premise was to syndicate three stages of collaboration between the worlds of classical and turntablism. The first stage involved commissioning new works from composers Kevin Lau, Laura Silberberg, Rob Teehan and Dinuk Wijeratne, to be performed by the Afiara Quartet. The second stage had Skratch Bastid (a.k.a. Paul Murphy) remix each work. The third stage had the composers recompose the works, incorporating Bastid’s remix. In other words, a remix of the remix. Still with me?
All three versions were performed in sequence and intersected with projections, video segments and animated lights.
Highlights were many and included Wijerante’s Two Pop Songs on Antique Poems. The overall texture was loose, like an unfinished seam, and followed a second movement with drawn out harmonics and hints of Germanic romanticism. Bastid’s remix focused on the piece’s atmosphere and pulsed along with a 2/4 beat. The only disappointment was in the cheesy text samples “I myself am heaven and hell,” which probably should have been left out. Nevertheless, it was an astonishing display and had the audience looking about wondering how to respond.
Silberberg’s Transcendence seemed to shine best as the composer’s response. The mood was celebratory, with tightly held textures under a steady tempo that placed the focus on the frequent interchanges between brusque attacks and hocketing pizzicato.
Then there was Teehan’s Infinite Streams II, a charming, three movement work during which first violinist Valerie Li stole the show through a particularly detailed (and fast!) section. But unbeknownst to the audience, it was then that a potential disaster emerged.
During the performance of Teehan’s piece, cellist Adrian Fung had broken his G string (not that kind of G string), potentially stopping the concert in its tracks. Before the next piece, Fung stalled on stage while the other members made a mad dash search for a replacement. Bastid joined Fung to help quell the situation. Luckily, Fung was presented with a new cello, and they were back in business to present Kevin Lau’s String Quartet No. 3.
It was a strong work, but it suffered at times from too many twists and turns. Bastid seemed to counter the unsteadiness with a much more subdued remix that focused on repetition. Lau’s response was the standout and featured a rhapsodic and inventive section, with the quartet tapping their instruments like flamenco guitars.
While most have learned to become somewhat sceptical of the DJ-meets-classical-music concerts, most recognise they present a possibility of amazing results. The trick is getting past the novelty, which can become the thing worth mentioning rather than the actual music, which is the real thing worth mentioning.
And nearly 90 years after Edgard Varèse and John Cage first started exploring the turntable as a musical instrument, it has become one of the most successful agents for dialogue between popular and classical music. Just in the past ten years alone – with artists like cellist Matt Haimovitz, and composers Mason Bates and Gabriel Prokofiev – they have shown how the virtuosic and compatible sound world of the turntables can come out in beautiful ways.
#LUDWIGVAN
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