{"id":25205,"date":"2015-01-30T16:33:38","date_gmt":"2015-01-30T21:33:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/?p=25205"},"modified":"2015-01-31T10:35:09","modified_gmt":"2015-01-31T15:35:09","slug":"concert-review-toy-piano-composers-and-cellophone-are-pleasantly-gritty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/2015\/01\/30\/concert-review-toy-piano-composers-and-cellophone-are-pleasantly-gritty\/","title":{"rendered":"CONCERT REVIEW: Toy Piano Composers and Cellophone are Pleasantly Gritty"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"The
The Toy Piano Composers<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

[Updated: January 31, 2015.]<\/p>\n

In general, I find the best concert-going experiences are when not only the music is excellent but when the experience delivers a revelation. A presumptuous attitude, perhaps, but I feel this is what divides an entertaining experience from an artistic one.<\/p>\n

Last Saturday, the Toy Piano Composers teamed up with cello and saxophone duo Cellophone (Chelsea Shanoff, saxophone, Nadia Klein, cello) to deliver one of the Toy Piano Composers\u2019 most enriching concert experiences in their seven years of existence, subtitled \u201cGrit\u201d. Revelations were abound- some of them positive, and others questionable. This concert reminded me of music\u2019s magical ability to turn the ordinary into something extraordinary, as well as the troubling problem of writing music with extra-musical influences.<\/p>\n

Chris Thornborrow\u2019s opening piece for baritone saxophone and cello, titled \u201cBoats and Balloons\u201d, is based on a painting by Hamilton artist Conrad Furey. The duet opened with a woody, lopsided oom-pah-pah (the only way I can describe the sound of a saxophone and cello duet is \u201cwoody\u201d) and meandered quaintly onward. The piece, like Furey\u2019s painting, was disarmingly na\u00efve and a tad melancholy throughout.<\/p>\n

Nancy Tam\u2019s piece \u201cPentimento\u201d demonstrated what good music has the power to accomplish: turning the ordinary into something extraordinary. Tam used a field recording of air howling through a tunnel and illuminated it with incandescent musical textures and harmonized its rumbles and howls with snatches of melody from the piano, violin, cello, and sax. The result was unpretentious and strangely magical.<\/p>\n

Next was Toronto-based Newfoundlander Bekah Simms\u2019 short, robust piece \u201cJunk\u201d for percussion and saxophone, which aptly lived up to its name and served as a reminder that percussionists, if provoked, will hit anything they can get their hands on.<\/p>\n

The first half of the concert closed uneasily with Monica Pearce\u2019s chamber piece \u201cpassive aggressive- defensive \u2013 contempt \u2013 stonewalling\u201d, a \u201cfour movement work depicting the four destructive emotions that can unravel the delicate framework of relationships.\u201d The music,\u00a0though occasionally evocative of these emotions (such as a solo violin playing \u201ctonelessly\u201d in the fourth movement, \u201cstonewalling\u201d), left me pondering the tenuous connection between concert music and extra-musical influence. If the music fails to conjure these extra-musical ideas in the head of the listener, is the piece a failure? Pierce\u2019s chamber piece left me feeling aptly disconcerted, but its musical language never suggested anything more to me than the general emotional underpinnings one hears in \u201cmodern\u201d sounding music.<\/p>\n

After intermission, a thrilling solo saxophone piece by Colin Labadie kicked off the second half of the programme. Labadie\u2019s piece, \u201cStrata\u201d, is virtuosic in the same way that Bach\u2019s solo cello suites are virtuosic- the performer is required to create the illusion of multiples lines of musical material with only one instrument. Saxophonist Chelsea Shanoff pulled off this stunt without waffling and (seemingly!) without breathing once while doing it. It makes me wonder why Toronto composers don\u2019t celebrate virtuosity more often in their music- and by virtuosity I mean complex, challenging music performed by intelligent, dedicated performers like Shanoff.<\/p>\n

The concert closed with two more pieces, Jos\u00e9 Puello\u2019s work for percussion and flute, which was saved from unremarkability by Sarah Yunji Moon\u2019s gorgeous and piercingly silver flute tone, and a work by Toy Piano Composer member Daniel Brophy. Again, this piece was weighed down by an extra-musical context that failed to materialize inside my head- this time it was philosophical concepts of the Other by Marquis de Sade. Despite this, the piece had a dark, subtle dramatic arc, where Chelsea Shanoff\u2019s saxophone and Nadia Klein\u2019s cello emerged out of obscurity to assume solo roles before fading back into darkness.<\/p>\n

[Correction:\u00a0Nancy Tam’s piece was for piano, violin, cello, and sax, not flute and clarinet as originally stated]<\/p>\n

Tyler Versluis<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In general, I find the best concert-going experiences are when not only the music is excellent but when the experience delivers a revelation. A presumptuous attitude, perhaps, but I feel this is what divides an entertaining experience from an artistic one…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":25206,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[118,19,38,52],"tags":[5272,3369],"yst_prominent_words":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2015\/01\/5464879_orig.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9bakr-6yx","amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25205"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25205"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25205\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25211,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25205\/revisions\/25211"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25206"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25205"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25205"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25205"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ludwig-van.com\/toronto\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=25205"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}