Chamber Night in Canada. Toronto Summer Music Festival. Walter Hall. July 21.
If we take Toronto Summer Music Festival artistic director Jonathan Crow at his word, we can liken Friday night’s “Chamber Music Night in Canada” recital as a match between two teams: the veteran composers of the Western classical canon facing off against the plucky, underdog Canadians.
The Classicists were well armed with a string quartet by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and the second piano quintet by Antonin Dvořák. The Canadians brought forth a powerful blast from the recent past by Milton Barnes (1931-2001) and the premiere of a new commission from the country’s current it-boy composer, Jordan Pal.
Crow, who should be given a standing ovation for insisting on programming Canadian works at the festival he took over as artistic director this season, assembled a powerful group of players for Friday evening’s concert, mixing seasoned professionals with members of the Festival’s academy of young performers, who arrive with credentials fit for any stage in the world.
The programme opened with Mozart’s String Quartet No. 4 in C Major, K157. Written when Mozart was 16, it is a perfectly proportioned three-movement Classical quartet. Crow took second-violin status, giving Mark Fewer the first chair. Violist David Harding played alongside cellist Antonio Lysy. The seasoned foursome dug into the music in earnest. This was not an elegantly restrained interpretation, but a full-bodied one, rich in colour and texture. It was an approach that marked the concert as a whole.
The closer was Dvořák’s beloved Piano Quintet No. 2 in A Major. Montreal Symphony Orchestra concertmaster Andrew Wan was joined by Fewer, Harding, Lysy, and pianist Stéphane Lemelin (who is, regrettably, rarely heard in Toronto). The musicians went all-out in tackling this rich, late-Romantic score. Their interpretation was particularly notable for its rhythmic clarity and vitality. It also occasionally bordered on dynamic recklessness: the players turned up the volume several times well before the music climaxed, giving themselves very little room to produce a significant crescendo. Lemelin, who is such an elegant and engaged piano collaborator, was brilliant. Overall, this was an edge-of-the seat performance that concluded with a standing ovation of ecstatic audience members.
The Canadian composers received their due in between the classical greats. Barnes’s Lamentations of Jeremiah is a 1959 work inspired by the Biblical prophet Jeremiah’s agony over the destruction of King Solomon’s temple. It is a series of plaintive chants speaking to each other from the upper and lower ranges of a solo string instrument, then joining their voices in challenging double-stopped chords (this is where the player’s bow strikes two strings at the same time). Barnes originally wrote it for the cello, but David Harding performed it on the viola, in a version Barnes adapted for Rivka Golani in the 1980’s.
I think the piece is beautifully suited to the viola, showcasing its ability to sing with violins one minute, and mourn with the cello the next. Barnes’s music is highly evocative, and richly coloured with a middle-eastern aesthetic. Harding’s performance, although technically fine, lacked conviction. He seemed to be especially afraid of silences, and the endings of several phrases felt abbreviated, as if he were keen to move on. Even so, this Barnes work deserves to be heard more often: it is a great evocation of emotion in music, as well as a showcase for the performer’s technical and musical abilities.
Even more significant was Carmine Skies, a piece for string octet by Toronto-based composer Jordan Pal, who is currently composer-in-residence (the official title is RBC Affiliate Composer) with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Being a 25-minute work in three movements automatically earns Carmine Skies bragging rights for significance. Canadians do not get nearly enough commissions for works of this scope, and we need to congratulate Toronto Summer Music for making this commitment. And having eight string parts meant that Crow could include members of the academy alongside their professional mentors.
In the programme notes, Pal wrote that he was inspired by the mix of environmental pollution and natural beauty that gives us particularly colourful sunsets. He effectively translated this unhealthy but beautiful relationship into constant rhythmic tension augmented by competition between assonance and dissonance. Pal’s principal building block was pattern music (where an instrument repeats the same or similar pattern of notes for an extended time). He interwove the patterns with fragments of melody. The first movement laid out its ideas briskly but deliberately. The second movement was almost like a string rhapsody that broke directly into a hard-driving final section.
The score convincingly evoked the beautiful-ugly dichotomy of the scarlet sky, ultimately settling on anger as its closing message. But Pal’s ability to vary the musical building blocks wasn’t quite enough to sustain 25 minutes of music. The final movement would have been much more powerful at half its length, so that it could make its point without multiple repetitions.
Carmine Skies has a much more serious handicap than being 10 minutes too long, though: the performers—as good as any in the world—found the score so challenging that they hired a conductor to lead them through it. Composer and conductor Gary Kulesha—long associated with the Toronto Symphony—was the appointed leader, expertly guiding the eight voices through their 21st-century polyphony and rhythmic complexities. But an octet should not have a conductor; to make one necessary (whether by intention or accident) means that it will hardly ever get performed again in a chamber-music setting, or outside a music school.
So I began to listen to the music for its possibilities with an ensemble that comes with a conductor. I realized that Carmine Skies would be an excellent work for a string orchestra, likely making Pal’s political point even more strongly. I’m even hoping that Kulesha and Crow might be able to convince the Toronto Symphony to put this piece on one of its programmes.
Alright, in the end, the works in the classical canon still came out ahead on Friday night, but the Canadians truly did have reason to be proud.
For more REVIEWS, click HERE.
#LUDWIGVAN
- 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
