Thanks to Ludwig Van, you'll have lots of talking points the next time you mingle with the classical music crowd, young and old!

Violist Pemi Paull set up a viola cam during rehearsals for yesterday’s performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion by Ensemble Caprice at the Church of St. Andrew and St. Paul in downtown Montreal.

As someone who moves between a percussion instrument (piano) and a wind instrument (pipe organ), I’ve long been conscious of how our sense of rhythm and tempo is affected by the presence or absence of attack, that split-second moment when a note begins to sound.

Tallis’s music has had a small bump in notoriety over the past couple of years as that motet, Spem in alium, is also part of the soundtrack to amorous adventures in Fifty Shades of Grey.

An evolutionary sketch of how the orchestra came to be, from 16th-century consorts to the modern orchestra we know today.

 

Torontonian Tamara Bernstein explains it all in an essay included in the competition programme, where Banff competition director Barry Schiffman recalls the day when he and fellow St Lawrence String Quartet founding violinist Geoff Nuttall listened to a recording of quartets by Joseph Haydn performed on period instruments by Austrians, the Quatuor Mosaïques.

Classical musicians are taught that, with any piece not attached to a living composer, there is a performance tradition to follow in each act of interpretation. Each composer, style and period imposes certain parameters of  convention and taste — even in instances where all we have are diary entries and broad sketches to provide clues about the practices of yore.

French composer Camille Saint-Saëns, who bridged the Romantic and Modern eras thanks to an 86-year lifespan, was treated as a relic of a bygone age by his obituarists and university lecturers.

The free download offers only 2 minutes of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, but that’s enough to get anyone with more than passing curiosity hooked on a new app from Britain’s Touch Press that brings together four great Deutsche Grammophon recordings of the full work from the last 55 years together with a pile of commentary, background and interactivity.