Monday 31 December 2012

Concert for New Year's Eve -- sort of....

We always mark New Year's Eve by watching the same live concert, thanks to the miracle of the DVD -- a concert that actually happened almost a quarter-century ago.

The year that the Berlin Wall came down and the long-divided city was reunited, a very special concert was held on Christmas Day in celebration, called the Berlin Freedom Concert.  It involved musicians from West and East Germany, France, Britain, and the United States, and was conducted by Leonard Bernstein, and the program was Beethoven's monumental Symphony No. 9.

We watch the same performance of Beethoven's Ninth every year, simply because it is the grandest, most imposing reading of the work that we've ever encountered.  Obviously, the sense of occasion inspired everyone present, and gave the entire performance a special intensity and fire that can sometimes be missing.

Bernstein, of course, is a big part of that.  He could never conduct a performance without giving it 120% of all that he had.  What makes this particular performance unique was his inspired decision, empowered by the moment (as he put it), the replace the word Freude ("Joy") in the finale with Freiheit ("Freedom") every time it's sung.  Purists would no doubt object, but under the circumstances I think a large degree of the power and glory of the singers comes from the use of this word.

The sizable large children's choir adds considerable heft to the overall sound in full-choir passages.  All the soloists are very good too, Jan-Hendrik Rootering being especially effective in the opening bass solo of the choral finale.

Aside from that, the adagio slow movement is the highlight of the performance.  Bernstein uses a daringly slow tempo, beautifully sustained, that makes every moment of the piece mean something and gives an extraordinary intensity to the whole.  Beethoven called for innigkeit ("inwardness", for lack of a better English equivalent word) and Bernstein gives us all of that and then some.  It's this slow movement that crowns the whole concert and definitely makes this a Ninth for the ages.

Production values and camera work are excellent, even if there's a bit too much close-up of Lenny's overly-emotional face.  But on the whole, I'll put up with that because the visuals overall add so much to the performance.  I already had an audio CD of the concert (from DGG) before getting the DVD release (on EuroArts Music), and the video undoubtedly adds to the powerful effect of the entire performance.

Friday 2 November 2012

A Timon For Our Time

Last night, Timon of Athens (Shakespeare, perhaps aided and abetted by Thomas Middleton) at the Cineplex in the National Theatre Live series. 

I've never seen this play staged before.  It's a rather rare bird, and now I can see why.  The dramatic action of the first half simply dissolves into an impasse in the second half.  Timon, the title and central character, ceases growing or developing, after his great disappointment -- he merely exists until he dies, and all attempts to reinvolve him in the world fail because he has determined to remain permanently outside human society, which has so brutally disappointed him.  This doesn't make for great drama, as Timon has to keep delivering variants on the same bitter rant over and over for more than an hour.

Director Nicholas Hytner has made a brave decision to bring order to a rather disorderly script by setting it in London of 2012.  This isn't the first time the NT has done this in their live-to-cinemas series (Dominic Cooke's Comedy of Errors a good example) but it does seem very much more to the point here.  That is, in part, because of some rewriting to bring the text into line with the modern world, such as updating the amounts of money offered or changing hands.

But mostly, the play works in this form because it can indeed be read as a commentary on our materialistic society, where a person's worth is far too often measured by wealth and by material possessions.  Timon's finds out what his "friends" are worth as friends the hard way, when he runs out of money and nobody can or will help him.  Least of all his friends in this crisis is the selfish and vain young fop, Ventidius, who was rescued from debtors' prison by Timon.  Ventidius makes a joke of his erstwhile benefactor's request;  he is more attached to his wealth than any other character in this staging of the play.

In Hytner's staging, Timon becomes in the second half a street person with a shopping cart full of odds and ends, a suitable modern metaphor for the cave in the wilderness of the original script.  The hidden stash of gold which he uncovers turns up under a sewer grating, another brilliant metaphor for the rottenness at the heart of modern materialistic society.

For me, one of the least satisfactory aspects of the play was the handling of the Alcibiades subplot.  The entire sequence about the killing of a man by one of Alcibiades' junior officers, and the consequent banishment of Alcibiades by the Athenian Senate, disappeared altogether.  While this certainly tightened up an overlong play, it also was done to allow for Hytner's special conceit of recasting Alcibiades as the leader of the play's version of the "Occupy" movement.  Because that background scene was eliminated, this whole aspect of the play appeared to be stuck on, almost as if it involved characters borrowed from another play by the director.  But more on that in a moment.

The stage must be dominated by the man who plays Timon, and the performance of Simon Russell Beale does all of that and then some.  This man is a powerhouse actor, with a large voice and a large stage presence, which he uses to fine effect.  All the same, some of his best moments happened when he became still and silent -- a menacing threat on two feet.  In the long, wearying sequence of misanthropic rants that makes up the second half, he never once became boring, and that's a huge achievement in itself.  Beale has been known to overplay a character by far (Sir Harcourt Courtly in London Assurance comes to mind) but here he remained firmly grounded at all times, convincingly portraying Timon's descent into madness and rage.

Three other actors served as main anchors of the performance.  Deborah Findlay was superb as Flavia, the faithful steward, who continues to return to Timon in his misery.  In this role she was low-key but powerful, her love and admiration for the master always to the forefront of her performance as she wearily fought off the importunities of Timon's creditors.  As the cynical philosopher Apemantus, Paul Higgins provided a worthy foil to Beale's Timon, both in Act I when they fence verbally from opposite points of the compass, and in Act II where they find themselves on the same ground but Timon still refuses to admit their spiritual kinship.  Ciaran McMenamin provided a striking contrast as Alcibiades with his Irish brogue, and created a strong impression in the last powerful moment of the play.

That closing was the one aspect of Hytner's staging that, for me, sent chills down the spine.  Alcibiades and his "Occupiers" gather around a conference table in negotiations with the fearful Athenian senators, in a series of brief scenes like sound bites on the evening news.  In the final scene, Alcibiades takes his seat at the centre of the table, briefly reads out the epitaph on Timon's grave, and then hitches his shoulders as if to say, "Now, let's get on with business."  The revolt has been subsumed and absorbed into the system, and life goes on much as before.  And isn't that what always ends up happening in real life?

I'm no friend of fancy directorial concepts that don't make any kind of sense.  As I've said before, my first directing teacher (David Switzer) said that the essential tool for a director was to be able to recognize when your brilliant intellectual concept isn't getting across to the audience, and then GET RID OF IT!  But this one did work, simply, powerfully, pointedly, and made the whole modern subtext of the play worthwhile.  In retrospect, the whole show took on many additional resonances and dimensions as I thought it over in light of that final moment while driving home.  Now, that's what really great theatre can do for you!

Wednesday 31 October 2012

An Epic Achievement

During the last two seasons of Live at the Met in HD at the Cineplex, I enjoyed three of the four operas in Wagner's Des Ring der Nibelungen (I had to miss Götterdämmerung due to a scheduling conflict).  I was impressed by the versatility of the uniquely modern set in its ability to tell the story in a very traditional manner, and I was simply blown away by the quality of the singing cast.

Now the entire cycle is available on DVD and I've just finished watching it all.  No, not all at one time!  (even I'm not that much of a music nut!)  I watched an act at a time when I had free evenings over the last several weeks.  And I am even more impressed with the sheer strengths of this new Ring on every level.  It's not definitive (what Ring ever is?) but it's about as close to a definitive version as I think I am ever likely to see and hear. 

I've seen live stagings at the Canadian Opera Company of three of the Ring operas, and I've always been disappointed by the sheer weight of psychological symbolism dragged out into the open and rammed down the audience's throat.  Sometimes, the meaning (if any) of the stage director's interpretation is so unclear and the choice of visual images so unhelpful that the staging simply ends up swearing at the music.  A noted directing teacher once told me that a wonderful intellectual concept which doesn't carry across the footlights to the audience needs to be cut right out of the production, and I totally agree!  (rant for the day)

That certainly isn't the case here.  This production, staged and directed by Robert Lepage, simply uses very modern technology to try to show us the Ring as Wagner wrote it.  The main tool is the huge "machine" which dominates the entire Met stage, and the dizzying array of digital projections which appear on its surfaces. 

Right at the outset of Das Rheingold, Lepage's approach gives the most dramatically effective solution I've ever seen to the cursed problem of how to make the Rhinemaidens sing and swim at the same time.  Later on, in Die Walküre, Lepage provides an equally effective solution to the galloping horses of the Valkyries.  Most productions, including the ones I have seen staged, have simply sidestepped the problem by ignoring the horses altogether, even though the eight Valkyries are singing about them. 

And how could I not mention that overwhelming entry of the gods into Valhalla?  For the first time I have ever seen or heard of, a stage director has actually comes up with a staging concept that does full justice to the grandeur and splendour of Wagner's music at this point.  If you haven't seen the show yet, I'm not telling what it is -- the surprise is everything on the first viewing.

These are only a couple of examples of how this unique set becomes almost another character in the performances.  But at the same time, "the machine" does not dominate or control the show.  Indeed, watching on home video, I was less conscious of the set's movements and changes and simply accepted them as part of the total picture.  The same went for the extraordinary projections, and lighting effects.

Aside from all these technical matters, the singing in this production is glorious.  Could there possibly be a more dominant, imposing Wotan than Bryn Terfel?  I think not, at least not in our times.  Jay Hunter Morris is a thoroughly impressive Siegfried, coming across as much younger than his actual age (most tenors struggle to get the young Siegfried down from middle age to 30 or so).  The Brünnhilde of Deborah Voight was splendid throughout.  Most of the remaining roles were cast with singers who are not famous international stars (an obvious difference from the Met's last video Ring of 20 years ago).  All acquitted themselves splendidly. 

What I found especially noteworthy is that there was so little "stand and deliver" singing going on.  These singers can all act as well, and what a terrific difference that makes to the dramatic power of the whole. 

The excellence of the Met orchestra, whether conducted by James Levine or Fabio Luisi, is clearly heard on the splendid soundtrack.  Even such dense and complex passages as the stormy prelude to Act III of Siegfried come out clearly, every part easily distinguishable and played with immense verve and precision.

I'm also filled with even more admiration than before for the splendid camera work.  Interestingly, the predominance of close-up shots was less disconcerting on a home screen than on the gigantic wall of a Cineplex auditorium!

The box set of DVDs comes with a considerable bonus, the 2-hour documentary Wagner's Dream which takes you right through the process of imagining, planning, staging, and performing this immense new cycle.  It's a fine documentary film in its own right, but also very enlightening in view of having seen the performances in the set.  The filmmakers even include such classic and horrible moments as the failure of the set to move during the entry of the gods into Valhalla at the opening night of Das Rheingold, or the moment when Deborah Voight slipped off the set at her first entry on the opening night of Die Walküre.  But as always, the show must go on, and so indeed it does.

I've always treasured my videos of the early 1990s cycle from the Met, and will certainly return to them.  But on many levels, this new issue is a contender for "best Ring cycle ever on video".  This should be must-viewing for any Wagner fan.

Monday 29 October 2012

Give It A Shot!

I must admit, almost against my will, I enjoyed Opera Atelier's production of Der Freischütz by Weber.  It's the first excursion into the Romantic repertoire for Opera Atelier, but still a good idea simply because live performances of this opera are a rarity in Canada, and it doesn't seem like one that the Canadian Opera Company is likely to tackle!

What concerned me was that OA is apt to take a bit too "joky" of a tone with some of their productions.  For example, I felt their Don Giovanni spent too much time being funny.  Yes, Don G is called by Mozart a dramma giocoso but I just thought the giocoso kept going into scenes where it really wasn't called for by the libretto.

Anyway, Der Freischütz thankfully didn't suffer in this respect.  The funny scenes, especially those involving Agathe's friend Ännchen were great fun indeed.  The serious scenes were played seriously, especially the climactic scene of the casting of the magic bullets.  If some members of the audience were chuckling, I think that was just the reaction aggressive rationalists adopt when confronted with any depiction of supernatural forces.  It was interesting to see how, as the casting of the bullets proceeded, the little giggles gradually died away altogether -- a real tribute to the sheer dramatic power of Weber's music and of the production.

That Wolf's Glen scene made splendid use of digital projection techniques to create a convincingly supernatural atmosphere.  The choreography of the dancers was somewhat helpful, but seemed to me a bit at odds with the staging.  In all other parts of the opera, staging and choreography remained firmly grounded in period.  and, as always, the entire production rested on the firm and secure foundation of the Tafelmusik orchestra, and the thoughtful, accomplished conducting of David Fallis.

The singing was, as always, uniformly strong.  But I felt a couple of singers were not well-suited to their roles.  Gustav Andreassen was just too hale and hearty for the Wise Hermit who provides the reconciliation scene at the end.  Meghan Lindsay sang beautifully, particularly in her quiet but clear high passages, but I found her acting stiff and cold in the role of the heroine, making Agathe into something of a frigid Ice Queen.

Next to her, Carla Huhtanen sparkled and glittered in the comic soubrette role of Ännchen.  Every time I see her play one of these parts, I enjoy her work more and more -- she's a delight!  Vasil Garvanliev's clean, hard-edged characterization of the villainous Kaspar also sparkled, but with demonic fire -- right from his first entry he dominated the stage, moving with the speed and energy of forked lightning. 

In the key role of Max, tenor Krešimir Špicer was solid, able to be powerful and tender by turns.  Of all the cast, he seemed to be most into the ethos of Romanticism, his acting clearly expressing the varied emotions of this tormented man. 

Not a perfect show by any means, but on the whole a very effective one -- and well worth your time if you get a chance to see it this week.  However, I got cold shivers when co-Artistic Director Marshall Pynkoski made a comment about Wagner possibly being on the horizon.  I think that would definitely not be a good place for Opera Atelier to try to go!

Monday 8 October 2012

A Fine Nine

Well, I've been MIA for quite a while, yes?  But here I am again, and only a few weeks late with my account of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony's season opener. 

There were two short modern works to act as curtain-raisers for the main event.  Stewart Goodyear's Count Up and John Estacio's Brio: Toccata and Fantasy for Orchestra both exemplified a welcome trend in recent composition: the rebirth of rhythm.  Too much music composed during the 1960s to the 1990s simply lay there, a series of sound effects and chunks of sound that began nowhere, went nowhere much, and ended from exhaustion in a place that (like their beginning) was nowhere but was different since it was somewhere else (concept borrowed from one of my favourite writers on music, Donald Francis Tovey!).  These two pieces both had strong, clear rhythmic profiles and were clearly bound on a journey.  I've always found this makes music more approachable, even if the harmonies and instrumentation are tough nuts to crack.  The orchestra played very well, and both works got much more enthusiastic response than the polite-applause-barely-long-enough-to-get-the-conductor-off-the-stage which often greets modern works.

That's due in large part to Edwin Outwater, the orchestra's music director, who manages to program a large number of modern pieces that share this key characteristic, and thus tend to go over well with the K-W audience.

The main event was Beethoven's monumental Symphony # 9, the work which gave the entire concert its title of Ode to Joy, Ode to Kitchener.  This by way of being a celebration of the city's 100th birthday.

While everyone who knows the Ninth waits eagerly for the splendid choral variations of the finale, I've always felt that the work stands or falls by the execution of the serene and elevated slow movement.  This needs to be genuinely slow -- too many Ninths are undone by the conductor turning the third movement into a brisk walk in the park.  At the same time, though, it needs to maintain a clear forward impetus.  And finally, the conductor needs to be fearless in letting the tempo breathe, allowing the basic pace to expand and contract at key moments.

Sounds impossible?  Well, the great ones who have led performances throughout their careers can usually get it all right by the time they are seventy or so.  It's a piece that somehow seems to reflect the wisdom of age, and requires the wisdom of age to perform properly.  Or so I used to think.  But Outwater's shaping of the slow movement was so exemplary that it age is clearly not the only criterion!  The music lived and breathed in exactly the right spirit, and set the seal of a fine performance of the Ninth

The choral finale was exemplary too, in another way.  Combining multiple choirs trained by different conductors can sometimes lead to annoying minor glitches.  But in this case, all the singers were very well in tune with one another and with the conductor and the choral sound was tightly unified at all times and very thrilling indeed.

Which leaves the soloists.  Tenor Michael Colvin, a late substitution, was spectacular in the march variation.  Bass Phillip Addis and mezzo-soprano Megan Latham were both effective,and Latham in particular became a solid anchor of the quartet, not simply disappearing into the sound as the mezzo is apt to do.  Soprano Susan Tsagkaris was a relative disappointment, with a pronounced wobble that made it unclear whether she even nailed her high notes accurately.

The dramatic first movement and spectacular giants' dance of the scherzo were also clearly, neatly played, with the obvious advantage of a mid-size orchestra's cleaner sound compensating for the lack of sheer volume that one would get with a full-size body like the Toronto Symphony.

In sum: an exciting concert, with some good solid modern work, a thrilling choral finale, and a beautiful reading of the slow movement that lifted the performers and audience firmly into the heavens, where Beethoven's imagination so clearly took him.

Thursday 30 August 2012

An Electrifying Performance

Sorry, the little guy in red with the horns made me do that baaaaad pun in the title.  I'm referring to the powerful production of Elektra by Sophokles at the Stratford Festival.

Elektra makes you realize that such famous plays as The Trojan Women and Oedipus the King are not typical of all Greek tragedy.  Perhaps those two are performed so often because they come closer to our modern notions of theatre, particularly as both contain strong doses of what today is called  "dramatic action".  Elektra is a much more ritualistic piece in which there is no dramatic action in the modern sense except at the very beginning and the very end.  In between there is an ongoing portrait of stasis.  Elektra, trapped in the household of her mother and stepfather, only grieves the death of her father and looks forward to revenge.  She is confronted by her sister Chrysothemis twice, and continues grieving.  She has a tense debate with her mother, Clytemnestra, and continues grieving.  The entry of the Old Man announcing the (untrue) death of her brother Orestes gives her more to grieve, and she continues grieving.  Only when Orestes finally arrives and executes judgement on Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthos does Elektra move from grieving to exultation, as the play ends.

So how do you make such an apparently motionless play come to life?  Director Thomas Moschopoulos found some very imaginative solutions which were directly rooted in what is known about the performance practice of the ancient Greek theatre.  He had his chorus stay outside the arena for much of the play, putting them very much in contact with the audience.  Their singing depended on short and often-repeated simple melodic tags which took on a hypnotic air.  Chorus and characters often chanted to a strong rhythmic accompaniment, clapped or beaten with hands on tables or feet on floor.  This chanting gave a tremendous variety of tone colour to the play.

Perhaps most powerful of all was the director's insistence that the play is not a melodrama in which good triumphs over evil.  The special genius of this production was that the views pro and con at every step of the road were clearly and fairly presented to us.  We in the audience were left in the end with a feeling that Orestes' revenge murder of his mother and stepfather was as questionable a crime as their murder of Agamemnon, whose murder of his other daughter Iphigenia was in turn equally morally questionable.  No certainties here, except for knowing who died and at whose hand.  Each of us had to make up his or her own mind about which, if any, of these deaths could be accounted as morally justifiable.

What a contrast to our advanced North American ideas where truth and justice always have to declare themselves within the span of an hour-long TV show or a 2 1/2 hour movie!

All the members of the cast and chorus were impeccable, but the one you remember at the end of the performance is Yanna McIntosh as Elektra.  I've seen her give several memorable performances at Stratford in the past, but this one trumps them all.  The sheer variety of tone, expression, and physicality that she brings to 100 minutes of nonstop mourning is a textbook lesson in itself, and the truthfulness with which it all springs from Elektra's desperate situation makes it memorable in the extreme.  This goes to the top end of the shortlist of memorable Greek tragedy performances I have ever seen!

Wednesday 22 August 2012

Dramatic Contrasts

Two more plays at the Shaw Festival this week, two plays that could hardly be more different from each other if they tried!

In the afternoon, Ibsen's masterpiece Hedda Gabler.  Ibsen has a reputation as a very dark, gloomy writer, but this production didn't go all the way down that road.  The stage was set in a heavy style that evoked the Victorian era without duplicating all the massive layers and piles of ornamentation that were typical of well-to-do homes in that time.  But it was brightly lit, and there was more bright light streaming in through the rear wall that was a scrim rather than a solid wall.

Nor did the performance decline into gloom and doom.  The play ends there, yes, but there was plenty of life and energy along the way, with sparks flying in many scenes -- literal sparks as Hedda burned the manuscript.  All the actors contributed plenty of zip and go to the proceedings.  If anything, Patrick McManus as George Tesman was perhaps too bright, positive, energetic for the ineffectual husband that helps to drive Hedda to desperation.  Jim Mezon contributed an powerfully creepy performance as Judge Brack.  But all were dominated, and rightly, by the powerful, nuanced performance of Moya O'Connell as Hedda.

Thanks to the subtle, thoughtful direction of Martha Henry, Hedda often placed herself at a distance from the other characters, emphasizing her emotional distance from the people around her.  The general brightness of O'Connell's manner as Hedda conveyed an impression that she was mad, and becoming more and more insane as the play went on.  I'm not sure this is what was intended by director and actor, because it does effectively change the whole dramatic viewpoint of the playwright.  But it made for a fascinating, powerful performance.

Then, in the evening, Present Laughter by Noel Coward.  This comedy is one of the most typical of Coward's popular work, and one of the most effective.  It's generally agreed, and was once confirmed by Coward himself, that the hero (Garry Essendine) is Noel Coward.  For sure, Essendine gets all the best drama-queen moments in the show (or almost all) and therefore gets a fair share of the laughs.  But it's really important to remember that this is very much an ensemble piece, and that many of the laughs depend on the others scoring points off Garry.

With one exception, all of the company played together very effectively as an ensemble, and everyone got his or her fair share of the laughs.  Especially effective was the deadpan comic timing of Mary Haney's comebacks as Garry's secretary, Monica.  Corrine Koslo as Miss Erikson (the housekeeper) was a bit hard to understand (due to her very realistic Scandinavian accent) but her facial expressions and body language more than made up for it.  Claire Jullien as Liz, Garry's estranged wife, also did a splendid job of neatly shooting holes in Garry's pretensions and trimming him down a notch at a time with surgical precision.

In that pivotal central role of Garry, Steven Sutcliffe gave a magnificent account of the aging matinee idol whose every moment is lived so stagily that he has totally lost his grasp on reality.  Sutcliffe was always just one notch below "too much", a distinction which many other actors have failed to observe in this role.

The exception: somewhere between director David Schurmann and actor Jonathan Tan, the decision was made for Tan to play the aspiring playwright, Roland Maule, as a maniacal dervish running nonstop at approximately 500 rpm.  Some of the confrontational nature of the interviews between Roland and Garry was substantially altered as Garry was no longer trying to rid himself of an accusing voice of conscience but merely to escape unharmed from a pre-homicidal lunatic.  It created a certain amount of fun for the audience, but quickly became tiresome, and I don't feel it served the rest of the company well.

The art-deco set was magnificent, and so were the costumes -- half the fun of this play is to see all the different dressing gowns the designer can put Garry into!

So there you have: one intense drama, with a fair number of comic moments, and one zany comedy with a few serious moments.  Both effectively directed, both finely acted, and both definitely classics of twentieth century theatre.  Gotta love the Shaw Festival!

Sunday 19 August 2012

Three Utterly Different "Conventional" Plays

If you haven't caught on yet, then I have to tell you bluntly that I prefer a classic play to almost anything experimental, and I would rather hear a well-turned phrase than any amount of gutter language.  These are matters of purely personal taste, and hence very unprofitable for argument.

To put it even more clearly, George Bernard Shaw is one of my favourite playwrights.  I've now put myself thoroughly to the bad with a large portion of the theatre community, and the theatre-going public, because Shaw has become very unfashionable in both camps!

At any rate, for those with the courage and perseverance to dig a bit, Shaw still possesses ample rewards.  Yes, his plays are very talky -- that's unarguable.  But in all that talk lies concealed the real reason for my admiration: Shaw was the unexcelled master of all masters at creating humour by demolishing the expected outcome of any situation.

So, while many dismiss him as a "conventional" playwright, that term should be handled with much more caution because Shaw's primary purpose is always the undermining of "conventionality" in all its forms.

That's my preamble.  This post deals with the first three plays I saw at the Shaw Festival this year:

[1]  The Millionairess (George Bernard Shaw)
[2]  French Without Tears (Terence Rattigan)
[3]  Misalliance (George Bernard Shaw)

All three will be dismissed by many as conventional.  But, in my opinion, only the Rattigan play is truly so.  In a way, it plays like a forerunner of Neil Simon.  The author takes a situation involving relatively normal everyday people and milks it for comedic effect by highlighting differences among the characters' personalities.  It's funny. But it's a bit slow to lift off the ground in the first act (a flaw in the writing, it is the work of a young and relatively undeveloped writer) and the best of the fun comes after the intermission.  The dependably strong and tight company of the Shaw Festival perhaps worked a bit too hard at trying to make Act 1 "go" but later settled in and gave a fine ensemble performance in which everyone's contribution was essential, and the whole in the end was certainly greater than the sum of its parts.  Fluff, to be sure, but amusing and well-executed fluff all the same.

Misalliance is an earlier Shaw play (1909) and he was still more than half a political pamphleteer at this stage of his career.  Alas, this is one of the plays where the dramatist didn't keep the orator under enough control.  Polemics take over from dramatic action from time to time.  But when the dramatist got into the saddle, the fine art of undermining expectations was going full throttle.  All the best laughs in Misalliance (and there are many) come from this kind of reversal of convention.  With the setting of the play brought forward into the 1960s, the company exploited these opportunities to the full.  Only Ben Sanders I felt overplayed his part.  In his hands the effete aristocrat Bentley Summerhays became a shrieking drama queen, too far over the top for the rest of the show's good.

The most successful for me were the women.  Catherine McGregor as Mrs. Tarleton was the conventional nouveau-riche wife of the Sixties to perfection, so when her reversals came she managed the considerable feat of undermining her entire character without stepping out of it.  As the dangerous and seductive Hypatia Tarleton, Krista Colosimo struck a wide variety of emotional and dramatic notes.  And Tara Rosling as Lina Szczepanowska was simply magnetic in the role of the mysterious woman who drops into the life of the Tarleton family with shattering impact (this is a multi-level pun for those who haven't seen the play; after you go you'll get it!)  Her every line was punched out with a mittel-Europa accent that in no way obscured her words or her feelings.

This brings me to The Millionairess, which I thought the most successful by far of the three.  As a script, it is unquestionably that.  It was 25 years since Misalliance and Shaw had successfully dismissed the pamphleteer.  He'd also learned to dispense with a long introductory exposition scene.  The Millionairess hits the ground running, and keeps right on going nonstop.  The other two plays are very much ensemble pieces, but this one stands or falls by the title character.  And I would simply say that Nicole Underhay was born to play this role.  I couldn't have wished for a more effective interpreter of the complex and multi-faceted richest woman in the world, Epifania Ognisanti di Parerga Fitzfassenden.  (How in heaven's name did Shaw dream up these names????)  Underhay was abrasive (very), abrupt, energetic, articulate, elegant, and vulnerable by turns -- and yes, the script does call for all of these qualities and more besides.  She also manages to make ever-new the resounding delivery of her 13-syllable name each time she introduces herself to a new character (she always omits "Fitzfassenden" because she hates her husband). 

The real amazement is that she makes you care for her, and care about what happens to her.  How can this be possible when Epifania (etc. etc.) is on the face of it such a disagreeable person?  The simple answer is the masterly way Shaw shows us how all the other people in her life, one way or another, are simply not adequate to keep up with her immense physical and psychological energy (until the Egyptian doctor appears).  As she expresses her continual frustration at being trapped among people who are not her equals, Underhay's performance is a genuine tour de force.  Although all the rest of the cast were equally effective, I have to mention the wonderful parade of bemused looks on the face of solicitor Julius Sagamore (played by Kevin Bundy) when this tornado comes roaring into his life in the opening 30 seconds of the play.  Every time she undercuts his expectations, he comes up with another splendid variation -- a textbook display of "101 faces that express puzzlement".

So: three very good productions of three very entertaining scripts, one of which is (for my money) truly a great play.  Two more from the Shaw coming in a few days, and then I'm taking a bit of a layoff (unless I find something else to take in....)

Thursday 16 August 2012

Breathtaking Final Weekend Part 2

Saturday night at the Festival of the Sound: it used to be the height of rarity for the Festival to do a concert with orchestra, but it's becoming a little more common.  You can fit a chamber orchestra of 25 or so players onto the stage of the Stockey Centre without undue cramping!

This one started with Bach's D Minor Concerto for two violins, with Moshe Hammer and Yehonatan Berick as the two soloists.  Both of them played magnificently at brisk speeds, with Hammer sounding a touch more romantic in his use of vibrato.  In itself this is not a bad thing (to me), but when combined with an ensemble playing mostly without vibrato it can sound a bit odd -- but only a bit, this is not a big deal except to the Great Experts who have anointed and sainted Authentic Performance so that no other form is permissible.  I have a word of advice for them, but I'm far too polite to put it in print!

Next up was the Festival Winds ensemble with the rarely-heard but beautiful Wind Serenade by Dvorak.  This is one of the last, and surely one of the greatest, works composed specifically for the "harmonie", the German name for an ensemble of 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, and double bass.  To this basic group Dvorak added a 3rd horn, and a cello, giving a warmer sound to the overall group.  And there were few things Dvorak loved more than writing glorious chordal passages for horns in 3 parts, so he obviously put the third horn in with that possibility in mind too!  Since it was the Festival Winds, there's no real need to comment on the quality of the performance -- these gents have been playing together for so many years that everything they do meshes seamlessly and is played with great flair and musicality.

After the intermission, there came several presentations to retiring Executive Director Margie Boyd.  The 25-piece orchestra then took over the stage, with Jamie Sommerville conducting, for the magical 40th Symphony (G Minor) of Mozart.

When Liszt proclaimed that any work of the orchestra could be completely reduced, in all its essentials except assorted tone colours of instruments, to the piano, Mendelssohn immediately set him straight by saying, "Well, if he can play the opening of Mozart's G Minor Symphony on the piano the way it sounds in the orchestra, then I'll believe him!"  Mendelssohn was absolutely correct.  The Symphony has a string-dominated opening that sounds at once nervous and quietly apprehensive, but on a piano the rapidly repeated pairs of notes would simply sound overwhelmingly angry.

Sommerville's entire performance was edgy without being tense, and fast without being rushed, and full of subtle nuances that rightly brought the entire audience to their feet at the close.

Sunday afternoon's concert was a musical party in honour of Margie Boyd.  Like any good party, it was free (all the musicians donated their services in her honour) and like any good party it went on and on, with a great variety of music to be heard.  I'm sorry I had to slide out at the second intermission to begin the long trek home to Woodstock -- I'm sure I missed some great stuff!  But what I did hear was all terrific, from Denis Brott's Beethoven Cello Sonata to Russell Braun's Largo al factotum and on from there to Pirates of Penzance excerpts rewritten for the occasion and sung (?) by the inimitable Mary Lou Fallis and Peter McGillivray.  Nor would it do to forget the lovable jazz meister duo of Gene di Novi and Dave Young.  But there was so much more that I could never do justice to all of it.

All I can say is that if you love classical music and you've never been to the Festival of the Sound you are missing a real treat!

Next up: quick switch to theatre, I'm seeing 5 plays at the Shaw Festival in the next week, starting this afternoon!

Tuesday 14 August 2012

Breathtaking final weekend Part 1

Sorry about the long absence, dear readers!  The final weekend of the Festival of the Sound for 2012 was everything you could have wished (except for lack of sun) and more.

Friday was a typical Festival weekday with three concerts, but "typical" ended right there as the quality of these three performances was superlative even by Festival standards!  At noon we got a supremely musical reading of the Sonata in G, D.894.  I dearly love the Schubert Sonatas and wish we could hear more of them, more often.  Janina Fialkowska was perhaps a shade too brisk for my liking in the finale, but otherwise her choices of tempo were ideal.  With all four movements of this "symphony for the piano" containing marvellous Schubertian melodies, the need to make the piano sing is paramount.  Many pianists have trouble doing this, but Fialkowska's playing had the singing quality in spades!

Also on hand were the Festival Winds, up to their usual standards in Mozart's Wind Serenade KV.388 -- lovely, relaxing Mozart, not highly dramatic, but very enjoyable indeed.

In the afternoon we heard Trio Hochelaga in two works.  Rachmaninoff's Trio Elegiaque # 1 is certainly the work of an 18-year old prodigy, but just as certainly it works -- the passionate climax hits me right in the emotional gut every time I hear it.  He may have been emulating his mentor Tchaikovsky's Piano Trio, but Rachmaninoff went one better in the heavy use of the low strings and the bottom half of the keyboard -- the dark, brooding sound of this music is unforgettable.

Trio Hochelaga then went on to a sunny, warm-hearted reading of Schubert's magnificent Piano Trio in B flat Major, D. 898.  Every second of this delightful piece came beautifully to life in their able hands.

The evening concert featured the Elmer Iseler Singers, frequent visitors to the Festival, actor R. H. Thomson as narrator, and Gene di Novi and Dave Young in a jazz segment that ended the program.  As always, when diNovi and Young are at hand, you know you're going to have fun.  These two veteran jazz-meisters, with their infectious grins and schoolboy sense of fun, inevitably make an audience fall in love with them and with their music-making!  The Iseler Singers were plainly having fun working with them too!

In the earlier part of the program, there were some striking modern works, but for me these faded into insignificance beside the ineffable beauty of Healey Willan's Our Lady Motets.  These unaccompanied choral masterpieces are plainly of the 20th century, yet at the same time they have a timeless quality that places them firmly in the line of choral singing stretching clear back to Gregorian chant.

And finally, the opening work on the program was the rarest bird of all.  It's not often that you get a chance to hear Vaughan Williams' Serenade to Music in its original form for 16 vocal soloists.  The Iselers are one of the very few choirs in Canada that could dare this feat and pull it off, since the music demands nothing less than 16 professional singers of the highest ability (a perfect description of the group who sang the first performance in 1938).  The Serenade has to be accounted one of the most perfect marriages of Shakespearean poetry with music, and to hear it this way -- with the sensitive piano accompaniment of director Lydia Adams adequately compensating for the missing orchestra -- was a beautiful privilege.

I'll have to continue later with the concerts of Saturday and Sunday -- this post is getting totally out of control!

Sunday 29 July 2012

A Week to Remember

Okay, Week One of the Festival of the Sound for this year is now history, and I'm exhausted!  Going to three concerts a day for several days in a row is exhilarating but also tiring -- and somewhere along the line, someone gave me a nasty cold which took out much of the remaining zip and go.

But never mind.  It was a spectacular week from start to finish.  Altogether we got three Beethoven sonatas and two major chamber works from pianist Martin Roscoe, and I am just as baffled as before about why an artist of this calibre has never appeared in Canada before!  That said, I hope he comes back soon and often.  His Waldstein and Tempest sonatas fully lived up to the previously reported Pathetique, and if the Dvorak Piano Quintet # 2 was somewhat heavier and more emphatic than the Brahms Piano Quartet already described, that lies as much with the high-energy playing of the Afiara Quartet as with the pianist! 

Another fascinating concert featured harpist Lori Gemmell and storyteller Tom Allen in two works inspired by Greek myth.  Allen's humourous recitations set the scene beautifully.  Gemmell's playing was lovely and lyrical when traditional harp style was expected, in Marjan Mozetich's Songs of Nymphs.  When it came to Murray Schafer's The Crown of Ariadne, she turned into a one-woman band (literally) as she used multiple unconventional ways of getting sound out of her harp as well as a half dozen added percussion instruments.  This score gives a new meaning to the word "virtuoso"!

Another evening brought a rare performance of Sibelius' late quartet, Voces intimae.  I confess I found this one a bit of a tough nut to crack at first hearing, but I'm sure it will repay repeated listening. 

I think one of my major highlights of the week came Friday afternoon, when Luba Dubinsky and the Cecilia Quartet gave a powerful performance of the Shostakovich Piano Quintet.  The dark shadows in this piece were unmistakable, but so was the raucous irony of the middle scherzo movement.  Dubinsky has played this piece for half a century, and even performed it once for Shostakovich himself, so I'd say the authenticity of the playing could be taken for granted.

It's too bad I won't be back at the Festival till the closing weekend.  Some day maybe I'll manage to take in the whole thing (or at least get close to it).

Thursday 26 July 2012

A Footnote to Yesterday's Rant

Last night the Festival of the Sound gave us the Canadian debut of the distinguished British pianist Martin Roscoe.  He chose to play Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata, another warhorse that often gets abused by the lesser creation who try to play it.

Like me.  I'm the first one to admit that I would have no business trying to play this one in public, with my piano skills (?) in their present state of disrepair and neglect.  But I've worked my way through the score enough to know what all the notes are that ought to be there.

Martin Roscoe nailed every single one, as far as I could tell.  He played fast, yes, but at a speed where the music remained perfectly under his control and entirely musical.  Phrase shaping, dynamics, and touch were impeccable.  Like Wilhelm Kempff, he used a very discreet application of the sustain pedal, instead of massive leaning on the pedal to cover the faults.  The singing tone of the major key episodes in the finale acted as a lovely contrast to the energy that surrounds them. 

This was Beethoven playing of the true first order. 

And as if that wasn't enough, the second half brought him back with three members of the wonderful New Zealand Quartet for a performance of the Piano Quartet in A, Op. 26, by Brahms.  I don't expect ever to hear a more perfectly beautiful, powerful, musical rendering of this masterpiece anywhere this side of heaven.  And that says it all.

Wednesday 25 July 2012

World Music and Classical Piano, Back to Back

Amazing contrasts in programming at the Festival of the Sound today.  At noon, a concert of three works where the musical traditions of China and India intersected with the traditional instruments of European chamber music -- a string quartet, a piano, and a double bass.

The Chinese work used the quartet to make sounds reminiscent of traditional Chinese music and instruments, very effectively.  The next two works came from a young composer-in-residence, Dinuk Wijeratne, originally from Sri Lanka, who has lived and worked in a whole range of different countries with very different cultural traditions.  His home tradition was represented by the Indian tabla, the tuned drums (to describe them very loosely) which are at the heart of a special and complicated musical tradition unique to them.  Wijeratne's special achievement was to combine this complex hierarchy of sounds with the European instruments into works which planted a foot in both worlds simultaneously.  If there's any better definition of the term "world music", I can't imagine what it might be. 

The concluding work was a Canadian piece, Raven and the First Men, by Timothy Corlis.  This was played with the accompaniment of children's paintings inspired by the music, as part of the now-annual tradition of Painted Sound concerts.

The afternoon at 2:30 was a full-length recital by Jamie Parker.  Great selection of classical "night music", which meant a lengthy sequence of slow, mainly quiet music of great subtlety.  Chopin, Schumann and Brahms, Debussy, Linda Smith, Bartok and Schubert -- Parker played all with sensitivity, tonal finesse, and created great variety out of seeming sameness.

And then, the let-down (it's rant time).  Parker chose to finish with Beethoven's complete Moonlight Sonata.  And the finale was simply too damn fast.  I know that's the speed the score suggests.  Maybe it would work better on a fortepiano, although I have my doubts.  All I know is that each mad uprushing arpeggio in this movement ends with two emphatic chords, and in only two of them could I actually hear two chords.  The other times I only heard one.  I was seated a bare twenty feet from the piano so I could hardly have missed those second chords if they had sounded.  And most of the arpeggios were unintelligible.  If Beethoven really wanted nothing but a blur of sound, why didn't he just write a series of glissandi?  He might as well have done, for all the good his careful scoring of arpeggios did here.

I'm not blaming Jamie Parker particularly -- it's a disease of our times, this insane need to "play it exactly the way the composer wrote it, never mind if it's musically feasible or not."  Almost every pianist I have ever heard perform this sonata live has succumbed to this temptation to compete in the "Anything-You-Can-Play-I-Can-Play-Faster" Sweepstakes. 

But now, go back and listen to a recording by one of my favourite pianists: Wilhelm Kempff.  In  his classic DGG cycle of the complete sonatas, this finale sounds intensely hectic just as it ought to sound.  But compare the tempi with almost any of numerous live performances, and you will find that Kempff is just a little slower -- maybe on the order of a 5% difference.  And it works.  You can hear clearly every note of every arpeggio, each of those hammered double chords comes through loud and clear, nothing disappears in a roaring sea of blurry noise.

Please, pianists of the world, remember this advice: 

"Never do your damnedest, if your next-to-damnedest will be better."

I forget who said that, but Wilhelm Kempff obviously knew it -- which is why I'd rather listen to his recording than any live performance of this sonata I have ever heard (and that includes, among others, Anton Kuerti and Maurizio Pollini).

Thursday 19 July 2012

Choral Spectacular

Ever since my sister pulled me to Parry Sound for the first time in 1994, the Festival of the Sound has been a regular feature of my summer.  I've watched it grow from 2 concerts a day to 3 and occasionally even 4, and spread out until it now covers almost 4 weeks.  The most spectacular change of all was the shift, 9 years ago, from an overheated, stuffy high school gym with stacking chairs on the floor to a concert hall which is truly world class in both creature comforts and acoustics!

For those not familiar, the Festival of the Sound focuses on classical chamber music, and does it very well indeed.  But there are also excursions into jazz, Broadway show tunes, Celtic music, orchestral music and choral music.

This year's Gala Opening was a choral concert, featuring the Trinity College Choir of Cambridge (England, not Ontario!).  Put 34 enthusiastic and skilful young singers into the hall of the Charles W. Stockey Centre and you get results which had everyone in a state of breathless excitement in the lobby afterwards!

We were asked ahead of time not to applaud between numbers as the program would proceed throughout without breaks and without intermission.  That turned out to be an understatement.  The choir came on stage, lined up, and sang their first three numbers without a break -- and without a conductor!  None of these pieces were simple, and the third of the sequence was a fiendishly complex piece with fierce stabbing cross-rhythms.  I suspect I wasn't the only person who wondered how they could pull something like this off!

After that, the choir's director, Stephen Layton, came forward and led the ensemble through the rest of the program.  The very next piece, with frequent stops and starts built into the music, basically forced the issue for them, I think.  After that, the concert consisted of an alternation of works by older composers (Bach, Purcell, Schütz, and Mendelssohn) with modern works, many by composers from the Baltic countries.  Of the entire performance, only the Bach was accompanied (on a small chamber organ) until the penultimate number.

A most memorable piece was Sven-David Sandström's "recomposition" of Purcell's anthem Hear My Prayer.  Starting with unadulterated Purcell, Sandström gradually added broken up phrases and bits of the original into a kaleidoscopic musical fresco.  This musical elaboration continued until the 34 voices built up what my sister Kathie aptly called "a wall of sound that made my hair stand on end."  The effect was overwhelming and almost shattering.

The choir had been specifically asked to perform Parry Sound-born composer Eleanor Daley's Paradise: A Song of Georgian Bay.  This was commissioned by the Festival for the opening of the new hall 9 years ago.  The choir performed it as their second-last number, accompanied by piano, and made a lovely job of this repeat performance.

The overpowering volume of sound from Sandström and the gently flowing sounds of Daley were equally well served by the splendid acoustics of the Stockey Centre.  The auditorium's high-pitched steep roof has the same acoustic effect as a tall English cathedral or church, but with a softer, warmer edge as the interior is dressed with wood.  Without the amplifying effect of that unique roof it would have needed a much bigger choir of 60 or more to create the same physical impact on the audience. 

After that concert, it's not hard to see why so many musical artists of all kinds love to be invited back to the Festival of the Sound!

Sunday 15 July 2012

A Respectable Henry V

The Stratford Festival has a powerful show in their brand-new production of Henry V.  Of all the Shakespearean history plays, this is perhaps the easiest one for a modern audience to grasp, as it requires relatively little knowledge of history to understand.

For all that, though, it is (like all the histories) tremendously wordy, and here we have a production which -- with only slight lapses and one major weakness -- made the verbose text travel clearly out to the audience with meaning, intention, and emotion in full measure.

I was pleasantly surprised to see Des McAnuff stage a show that wasn't full to overflowing with technological whimwhams and foobaz.  And the devices that McAnuff did use (the "horses", for instance) all fitted clearly into the period atmosphere.  Last year's Twelfth Night disappointed me precisely because the elaborate stage technology kept stealing the show from the actors. 
This Henry was a different matter altogether.  The set of leaning timber baulks around a huge drawbridge was both massive and visually intriguing, dark and sombre in mood and yet easy to light clearly.  This production stayed firmly grounded in its historical period, with no efforts to make onstage and out-of-synch editorial comments about the universality of war, and that was all to the good.  The presence of onstage trumpeters playing long straight trumpets, which produce a different, more open sound than a normal coiled trumpet, added strongly to the martial and royal elements of the action, as did the gigantic banners which covered the set in certain key scenes.

Now, to the performers.  Instead of assigning the narratives identified as "Chorus" to one actor, as is often done, McAnuff chose to use his entire company in complex choric recitation for the opening speech ("O, for a Muse of Fire...."), with smaller bodies from the company carrying the remainder of the bridging narrations.

The play proper features a large number of relatively small roles grouped around a very few major parts.  Among my favourites were the reliable veteran Stephen Russell as the Earl of Westmorland, the equally reliable veteran James Blendick as the Archbishop of Canterbury, Sophia Walker as the Boy (one of Falstaff's companions), and Deborah Hay in the small but memorable role of Alice, lady-in-waiting to Princess Catherine of France.

Among the larger parts, Ben Carlson was predictably excellent as Captain Fluellen, another of Shakespeare's delightful Welsh caricatures, Juan Chioran both steady and majestic as Montjoy, the French ambassador, and Tom Rooney both memorably comic and darkly tragic, as Ensign Pistol.

Which brings us to Henry.  And there, as Hamlet says, is the rub.  Aaron Krohn looks the part, but has a light-toned voice with too little variety in his delivery.  And this is a very complex role indeed, a boy becoming a man, a soldier becoming a general, a gambler becoming a king and a king who is taking some very daring gambles.  Krohn pulled it off adequately, but no more than that.  He was (for my money) sadly miscast, and the scenes where he lingered long on stage often dragged.

Now, some people would say that this means the show fails.  I disagree.  Henry V is about the king, but there's much more to it than just the king himself.  It's very much an ensemble piece, and as an ensemble this cast was very strong. The scene changes all moved with the speed and precision that we expect from Stratford, the scenic effects supported the show, and the right scenes all moved us deeply and indeed disturbingly.  It's right that this play should make the audience uncomfortable in places as much as it makes them laugh in others, and so indeed it does.  Were it not for the casting of Aaron Krohn, I would rate this production as excellent.  It's still very good, as good a Henry as I have ever seen, but not a truly top-flight presentation of this difficult and complicated play.

Thursday 12 July 2012

Bravo, Cymbeline!

Stratford Festival's production of Shakespeare's rare late "romance play" must truly be called the crown on a very remarkable season.

First production I've ever seen of Cymbeline, and from the moment the play began I had no trouble following all the criss-crossing plot lines of the various characters and their tangled destinies.  That's a big compliment to the director and company right there, as this complex web of stories could easily deteriorate into the confusions so typical of a soap opera.

The staging takes full advantage of the long rectangular arena of the Tom Patterson Theatre, with entrances and exits at both ends on ground level, down the stairs at the rear, and even above the stage level on a lift.

This production has one of the strongest casts I've seen at Stratford for years, with even the smaller roles played by first-rank actors.  Centring the play is the powerful, emotional Innogen (Imogen) of Cara Ricketts.  She always commands the stage as soon as she appears, and makes you care for her very deeply indeed.  No less significant is the servant Pisanio.  As played by Brian Tree, he becomes a key element in the story and one of its focal points.  Innogen's banished husband, Posthumus, is given an equally strong performance by Graham Abbey.

Around these three appear a whole range of strong performances by Geraint Wyn Davies, here proving his tragic mettle as the king Cymbeline.  Yanna McIntosh gives off powerful negative vibes and rouses cold shivers as the smilingly vengeful Queen.  Mike Shara makes the most of both the comedy and the rage in her cloddish son, Cloten.  Equally memorable are John Vickery as the banished courtier Belarius, and Nigel Bennett as the Roman commander Caius Lucius.

If there's a relative weakness here (only relative), it's the casting of Tom McCamus as the villainous wannabe seducer, Iachimo.  Maybe the weakness is more a matter of the the way the part is written, but nothing in his performance made me want to feel sorry for him at the end.  He got what he deserved. 

One final note: as the concealed sons of the King, E. B. Smith and Ian Lake seemed a bit unreal and unbelievable, until they reached their funeral hymn which they speak over the "dead" body of the man who (unknown to them) is actually their sister in disguise.  Their faces gaunt with grief, they brought tears to my eyes with these lines:

Fear no more the heat o' the sun,

Nor the furious winter's rages;
Thou thy worldly task hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages:
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

Kudos to all involved, and especially to director Antoni Cimolino.  This production certainly bodes well for the future of Stratford as he assumes the office of Artistic Director this fall.

Sunday 1 July 2012

Daily Double for Canada Day, Part 2

Okay, here's part 2.  Last Sunday afternoon, it was the Bolshoi Ballet of Moscow at the Cineplex with a full-length production of Raymonda, the last of the great classical ballets originally staged by Marius Petipa (famous for his collaboration with Tchaikovsky on Sleeping Beauty and Nutcracker). 

This live-performance simulcast featured splendid dancing, choreography, and staging, along with some very intriguing backstage shots during intermissions of the sets being taken down and put up as the dancers warmed up.  From all these viewpoints it was a terrific afternoon.

But....

(you just knew there had to be a "But...." coming, didn't you?)

Since I am familiar with, and dearly love, Glazunov's music for Raymonda, I have to go off on a little personal rant here.  Far too many choreographers in the "good old days" considered it their privilege to mess around with the music, changing the order of the pieces, cutting sections, adding sections from other works (maybe even from other composers) and all of these things happened here.

Why?

Glazunov was a disciple of Tchaikovsky and learned everything there was to learn from the master about constructing an effective ballet score which is danceable, musically intriguing, and perfectly organized.  Just as in the great Tchaikovsky ballets, there's a clear through line of key sequences and varying tempo and metre which gives the music unending interest and involvement for the audience.

By the time the choreographers got through with it, the key sequence was butchered, several of Glazunov's ripest inspirations had vanished, and the whole had deteriorated into a choppy mess. 

Did they do it so that the composer's strengths wouldn't detract from the dance?  Or were they just so full of themselves that they considered the music only fit to be a carpet for them to walk on?

I notice that modern choreographers are much more respectful.  For instance, Maurice Bejart in Song of a Wayfarer used Mahler's song cycle complete and unaltered.  Even more noteworthy, Kenneth Macmillan in Song of the Earth  gave the same respectful treatment to Das Lied von der Erde -- thank goodness!  Nor did James Kudelka chop up and rearrange Beethoven's Sixth Symphony in his Pastorale, and so forth.

Whenever they mess around with the music, it causes me to cringe every time -- and detracts from my enjoyment of the whole.  The curse of approaching the art of the ballet as a music lover who is already familiar with the score.

But this won't stop me from checking out the Bolshoi on the big screen again -- particularly next year, when they are celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Rite of Spring with a brand-new production choreographed specially for the company by the amazing Christopher Wheeldon -- a must-see if ever there was one!  And I'm betting that he won't try to cut the score!

Daily Double for Canada Day Part 1

Okay, so it's not really a DAILY double!  And yes, I am falling shamefully behind in my duties to the blogosphere.  Anyway, here goes.

Last Saturday (a whole week ago! -- bad, bad bad!!!) I was at Stratford for my fourth show of the season.  Hard to believe I've racked up that many already!  This was a Festival Theatre staging of Much Ado About Nothing, which is one of my favourite Shakespeare plays.  It's either the second or third staging I've seen since meeting the play in 1994 through Kenneth Branagh's landmark film.

That film came into mind as a landmark because it exemplified a noteworthy change in Shakespeare performance.  Before that film came out, it seemed to me that many Shakespeare performers declaimed the text so quickly that the play seemed like a race to the finish line, the words tumbling all over each other at top speed, and this made it hard sometimes to follow what was happening.  In the movie, Branagh favoured a slower, more nuanced, more naturalistic style, which greatly clarified the occasional obscurities of the Bard's language.  He also showed that at times it was possible to edit the text without doing great harm to the forward flow of the story -- indeed, at times, the cuts improved the flow. 

This style has become more prominent of recent years in stage productions too, and this performance was no exception.  I was looking forward to it, because it is directed by one of the great directors of our day, Christopher Newton, for so many years the Artistic Director of the Shaw Festival.  And the production fulfilled my expectations in all ways -- except one. 

The strengths: an elegant, curving staircase sweeps across the upstage area, providing a very flexible acting space, especially with the wide landings near the bottom and at the top.  The action still flows freely around this, but also over it and up and down.  And because the staircase faces towards the audience, it's a much more useful acting space than the back-angled steps of the original balcony on the stage.  Costumes were perfectly attuned to the elegant environment.  This was meant to be Brazil in the late 1800s, but there was nothing to my eye that looked particularly of that time and place.  Maybe this is another way of saying that high-society Brazil was essentially a copy of Europe.  The feeling of "tropics" was certainly there in the plants, but that could also have been Mediterranean, as the script states (Sicily).

The cast included some of the strongest players of the current Festival company, and all were in fine form: Deborah Hay and Ben Carlson striking sparks off each other as Beatrice and Benedick, Juan Chioran strong and firm as the Prince, and James Blendick splendidly emotive as Leonato.  Gareth Potter as Don John was a surprise -- not the actor I would have predicted for that kind of role, but the underplayed menace he brought to the part worked beautifully.

The one disappointment was Richard Binsley in the key comic role of Dogberry.  His performance seemed to be lifted straight out of the bad old days of express-train Shakespeare, and half his words were lost in the rushing blur of sound.  A pity, because the humour of Dogberry is purely verbal humour, the ridiculous malapropisms creating all the laughs -- and he didn't get nearly as many as this character ought to draw.

But aside from that flaw, this was definitely a production to treasure for its many other excellences.

Saturday 16 June 2012

High-Low-High

My June culturefest is finally winding to a temporary pause, with this afternoon's summer mixed programme from the National Ballet of Canada.  The first and last works on the programme were both wonderful in their very, very different ways.  The middle one, alas, did not work at all for me although many others were greatly taken with it.

But, start at the beginning.  Kenneth Macmillan's Elite Syncopations is a crowd pleaser if ever there was one.  With music drawn from the rags of Scott Joplin and his contemporaries, an onstage band dressed in costumes and straw boaters, and the entire dancing cast done up in outrageously coloured hand-painted tights, it's impossible not to smile right from the get-go.  And once Elite Syncopations gets going, it's hard not to laugh outright.  Fortunately, no one expects a Toronto audience to try!

The dancers depict the conventions of a public dance hall of the late 19th century, and each one has a distinct individual character to create.  There's the shy guy, who wants to ask every girl to dance but doesn't know how, the two wallflowers who inevitably end up together, the flirtatious sexy girl who has to get every guy in sight onto the dance floor, the short guy who ends up partnered with the tallest girl in the room, and so on.  Macmillan's choreography is a perfect visual primer on how to create hilarious stage pictures with ridiculous poses.  Not only that, but the comedy artfully conceals the sheer virtuosity of the piece.  Only in the penultimate number, a flashy flying solo danced on this occasion by Keichi Hirano, does the technical flair of the dancing draw attention to itself -- and even then, it is very stylish in keeping with the occasion. 

It was also great to see the former music director of the National Ballet Orchestra, Ormsby Wilkins, back on stage as the conductor and pianist of the dance band -- alternating between the beautifully tuned modern concert grand and a nasally twangy old honky-tonk upright.

The second piece was Maurice Bejart's Song of a Wayfarer, a brooding, intense duet for two men, one of whom acts as a kind of shadow double of the other.  Beautifully as it was danced, I couldn't enjoy it because of the music.  I'm very familiar with Mahler's Songs of a Wayfarer, and the very clear and specific images the poetry conjures up.  When the choreography seems to bear no relationship whatsoever to the poetic and musical imagery, the result for me is a kind of disconnection, in which the two seem to belong in two different performances.  That's one of the perils of coming to the ballet with an extensive background in classical music.

The final work was Wayne McGregor's Chroma, the piece that introduced McGregor to National Ballet audiences -- hard to believe that is still less than two years ago!  My first exposure to Chroma created a sense of shock and awe at the sheer dynamism, power, and energy of both music and dance.  Now, with the lapse of time, and with knowing what to expect, I can pick up more of the subtleties of detail -- and there is a lot of detail flying by very quickly!  While one or two sections have gentler, more lyrical music, there is nothing lyrical about the choreography.  It's spiky, dangerous, dynamic, and bizarre to the nth degree.  Not only do the dancers move with incredible speed and power, but they continually twist their bodies into positions that you aren't even sure you saw right, so impossible do they appear.  More than almost any other contemporary work the National Ballet has done, this one truly stretches dancers beyond the limits, and shows off just what this company is capable of doing, in spades!

Friday 15 June 2012

Overwhelming Grandeur

That is the only possible description of the Toronto Symphony's presentation of Gustav Mahler's Symphony # 8 this week.  What else can you call a piece that assembles an orchestra of 120 players, plus 7 extra brasses, organ, two adult choirs, children's choir, and 8 vocal soloists?  This magnificent late-Romantic outpouring of sound, known colloquially as the "Symphony of a Thousand", is a unique musical experience, and one that simply must be heard live.  Recordings and video (like the 5 CDs and 1 DVD that I own) can capture the beauty of the music but you have to attend a live performance to become immersed in the sheer physical power of this work.  And it definitely does have a physical dimension;  recorded sound cannot transmit the weight on your ears of a deep organ pedal note, a heavily-rolled bass drum, or the sudden addition of 7 extra brass instruments playing from high up on the side of the hall at the final climaxes of each part.

It was 29 years ago this month that the symphony was performed for the first time in Canada, by the Toronto Symphony at the end of the opening season of Roy Thomson Hall.  I heard it played live then, and again in 2 subsequent remountings.  This marked the first occasion when I heard the work played since the renovation of Roy Thomson Hall, and the difference was striking to say the least.  The addition of substantial amounts of Canadian maple to the upper reaches of the hall (and floors) paid huge dividends as the sound became clearer and more precise.  Loud passages that were simply a roaring wash of sound now permit individual lines to be heard.  That's important especially in the huge double fugue at the heart of Part 1, which may well be the single largest piece of music ever composed according to the contrapuntal linear principle so familiar in Bach's time. 

One other thing I proved to my own satisfaction.  To hear this symphony in its full power, you simply must spend the dollars to get a seat in the prime section as near to the geographic centre of the ground floor as possible.  That gives you the full impact of the built-in stereo of the 2 choirs to either side of you, not to mention the spatial separation of the extra brass group and the Mater Gloriosa.

All the soloists acquitted themselves nobly, and that's a huge challenge because Mahler's massive orchestra calls (with one exception) for solo singers with equally massive voices!  I especially enjoyed Erin Wall's trumpeting high B-flats (there are quite a few of them!) in Part 1 -- all delivered with searing accuracy of pitch.  If Twyla Robinson couldn't quite match her for volume in the passage where they trade the high note right at the end of Part 1, she certainly came into her own in the more lyrical second part, where she was able to give her solo sections with a smooth and easy tone that was a delight to the ear.  Tenor John MacMaster was a late substitution for Richard Margison, and gave such a magnificent account of his extensive part that I didn't miss Margison for a moment.  It helped that MacMaster has sung the role a number of times already.

That brought up an interesting memory.  In my collection I have a CD copy of a legendary live performance given by Jascha Horenstein in the Royal Albert Hall for the BBC back in the late 1950s.  The program notes point out that it was necessary to engage soloists who were prepared to learn the work, and to double cast all roles, because the symphony was so rarely performed in those days.  Now, we've had it mounted 5 times in less than 30 years in Toronto, and you can get (at the last minute) a soloist like MacMaster who has sung the work (according to his bio in the program) in Montreal, Ottawa, Edmonton, Vancouver, Singapore, and can now add Toronto to the list!

One other most critical soloist deserves praise.  Andriana Chuchman's soprano floated down gently from the organ loft in the short 2 phrases of the Mater Gloriosa, near the end of Part 2.  The musical line is both quiet and cruelly high, and she delivered it with spot-on accuracy and no hint of strain at all.

The several adult and children's choirs were all beautifully trained and sang magnificently.  One plus point was that this performance actually used less singers than the previous versions I heard, and that was all gain.  There was still ample volume of sound, but again the individual lines of the choirs came through that much more clearly.  Putting the sopranos out on the wings, and the basses in the centre, allows the audience to hear more clearly the alternations of Choir 1 and Choir 2.  The Toronto Children's Chorus were as wonderful as ever, and I was as ever impressed by their ability to sing the whole of their complex and lengthy contribution from memory.

The orchestra excelled throughout.  Much of Part 2 of this massive symphony actually calls for small chamber-like ensembles of constantly shifting instrumentation, and these episodes were all beautifully balanced.  Supreme praise to conductor Peter Oundjian who was completely in control of the complexities of the score, and held the whole huge performance under his firm control.  Tempo changes become more difficult to pull off as the number of singers and players escalates, but there were no problems with any of the numerous gear shifts in this concert.

This was as memorable a climax as you could possibly wish to the Toronto Symphony Orchestra's 90th Anniversary Season!

Sunday 10 June 2012

Three-In-One Posting -- Music and Theatre!

It's crazy.  So many arts events this June, and here I am falling behind on my blogging.  I have three events to write about today!  Waste not your hour, Ken, and get on with it!

Wednesday night: Toronto Symphony.  Concert began with Green by Toru Takemitsu, a work with links to the TSO, which gave it a premiere recording way back in the 1960s under Seiji Ozawa.  Very strange, like Debussy crossed with Schoenberg, but not in an unpleasant way.  I would want to hear it again. 

Schumann's Piano Concerto, a long-time favourite of mine,  came next with the solo part beautifully played by Jonathan Biss.  However, the orchestra were distinctly getting out of sync with each other at a couple of passages -- I suspect due to lack of rehearsal because "everybody knows it" even though it doesn't get played too often.  Pity, because I really wanted to enjoy this and couldn't quite relax into it. 

Shades of my one and only year in the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir where we didn't even crack our Messiah scores until 2 nights before the first performance, because "everyone knows it" and we were deeply busy with other music.

The "other music" in this case was the Shostakovich Symphony # 11 "The Year 1905".  I missed this when the orchestra did it 4 years ago.  This sprawling, panoramic, almost cinematic piece is actually very quiet for about 70% of its 65-minute length, and the quiet passages were played to perfection -- icy cold and devoid of emotion at all times.  The strings were right on the mark here in the fiendish fugue passage which introduces the scene of the Bloody Sunday massacre, and again in the wild skirling figures of the finale.  Kudos to Peter Oundjian and the orchestra for an incredibly tight, solid, effective performance of a very tricky symphony!

Saturday: two musical shows at the Stratford Festival (what a change of pace!).  In the afternoon, 42nd Street, a new one for me.  I thoroughly enjoyed the performance as a whole, with every member of the acting cast projecting their characters clearly and strongly.  The dancing was simply phenomenal, and the Festival Stage is a wonderful venue to watch tap dancers going at full throttle -- unlike a proscenium stage, you can see every move of the flying feet! 

My only disappointment was in the book.  Okay, I'll assume that the story hews closely to the original 1933 movie which I haven't seen, and to the novel which that was based on.   But the character of Dorothy Brock, the leading lady, comes across as totally bitchy with no redeeming niceness at all.  And unlike the comparable character of Lilli Vanessi in Kiss Me, Kate, she has no equally spiteful male partner to put her in her place and draw out her vulnerable side.  So it's too easy to just hate her -- and that makes her solo bow at the end of the show doubly puzzling, when the show really tells the story of the young Peggy Sawyer who replaces her and becomes a star on merit.  But still, a fabulous couple of hours of singing and high-octane hoofing.

In the evening, an old favourite, The Pirates of Penzance.  As a teenager, I sang chorus in this show (with my brother John as the Pirate King) so I've always enjoyed revisiting it.  Unlike the last turn Stratford took at Pirates, this performance was not full of sheer over-the-top nuttiness.  I loved director Ethan McSweeney's insistence that the fun you need is all written into the script already, and just needs to be drawn out.  He's right -- and his production proves the point, in spades. 

The staging was both mechanistic and "Victorian", in the sense of recalling the theatrical and technological whimwhams of that era.  Choreography was limited but effective, being focused mainly on choreographic pratfalls and a balletic battle scene.  Extra music was effectively provided for these in a style that was half folk, half music hall. 

Singing and acting were again on a high level.  I first thought that Gabrielle Jones was in over her head as Ruth, with unlovely and forced tone production, but at the end of the show when she appeared "transformed" (I'm not saying how!) her voice too changed, becoming much smoother and more beautiful in sound.  Larry Herbert struggled a little with the Major-General's patter song (but who doesn't?  A G & S patter song is a very specialized art form indeed), and drew plenty of laughs with his enactment of the added encore verse.  This, by the way, was almost the only amendment to the text that was used, a far cry indeed from the last Stratford mounting of the show.

Sean Arbuckle was a very effective Pirate King -- it's just too bad that the costume and makeup departments decided he had to be made to look like Johnny Depp playing Jack Sparrow.  Amy Wallis as Mabel was, alas, a little two-dimensional amongst more vividly realized characters, until her Act II solo, Ah, leave me not to pine when she suddenly became a heartbreakingly complete person and drew tears to my eyes.

Star of the show, and of the whole day, was Kyle Blair who captured all the heroics of Frederic with complete seriousness, which of course makes him much funnier.  His marvellous tenor voice put him right on top form in all his many musical numbers.  And that was after having performed a similar leading tenor role in 42nd Street in the afternoon -- how's that for a full day's work?

Both of these shows are great fun, and well worth a trip to Stratford.  Next time I go, I expect to start getting into some Shakespeare!

Saturday 2 June 2012

Hamlet at the National Ballet

What a weekend!  The National Ballet of Canada gave the North American premiere of Kevin O'Day's full length ballet Hamlet and I was there to see it -- twice!!!

It's a unique problem to be sure.  How do you convert one of the most famous of all plays, with more famous quotes than almost any other single work of literature, into music and dance?  Simply put, you have to forget that it is a play and retell the story in a different way.

That doesn't mean changing the story.  Indeed, the only really noticeable changes are (1) the elimination of Hamlet's trip to England and (2) the exposure of the king's murder by two travelling dancers instead of travelling actors.  Otherwise the events of Hamlet are all there, but in severely compressed form.  What dominates this balletic version is the emotional turmoil of Hamlet himself, and the answering turmoil that he gradually stirs up in all the other characters due to his obsession.

The choreography is modern, angular, full of sudden starts and stops and turns and violent lifts and throws.  This is not "pretty" like a traditional classical ballet at all.  The music is a match for the choreography, and includes computerized random sampling and playback of the live instruments, creating a unique series of echoes and repetitions.

Now the performers:

                                                   Conflict of Interest Alert!!!!
                                       (hee hee -- Robert Stephen is my nephew)

On Friday night Guillaume Cote danced Hamlet, and did so with great passion and energy (an absolute prerequisite for this stamina-challenging monster of a role).  At the same time there was always a hint of a princely veneer, appropriate to be sure, a smoothness which perhaps harked back to the more traditional princes of the classical repertoire.  His Ophelia was Heather Ogden, and her performance showed us Ophelia as a sweet and innocent girl.

Saturday afternoon's Hamlet was Robert Stephen, a late substitution for an injured Naoya Ebe.  Stephen's Hamlet was every bit as powerful as Cote's but a little more raw-edged -- a primal scream where Cote shaped the part into something resembling the powerful poetry of Shakespeare.  This was a minor difference, more a matter of a subtle change of tone than a major interpretive switch.  Stephen's Ophelia, Elena Lobsanova, was likewise more edgy than Ogden to a small degree.  Both did a splendid job in the harrowing scene of Ophelia's madness and death.

Indeed, both casts of leads were tremendous, in their different ways, and all the roles were filled with distinction in both performances.  However, the one other character in the ballet who really stuck in my mind was Queen Gertrude.  In Kevin O'Day's view of Hamlet, the stamp of the father on the son is the critical element, but that doesn't stop his Gertrude from being a major stage presence -- often given a very prominent position and allowed to centre the action.  Her choreography ranges across a wide gamut -- queenly one minute, practically eating fire the next, but never deteriorating into merely a shrew.  This gives her a kind of tragic intensity that most stage productions can't allow her.  Both Stephanie Hutchison (Friday night) and Alejandra Perez-Gomez (Saturday afternoon) rose splendidly to the challenge of this role.

For me, this tremendous production had only one serious drawback.  Staged in front of a severe and limiting black set, it was so dimly lit that it was actually difficult at many times to see the faces and sense the emotional state of the dancers.  Just a little bit more light would have made a huge difference to this problem.  But overall, a stunning example of modern dance drama at its best.  Five stars plus!

Friday 1 June 2012

A Match Made in Heaven

One of the things I love about my current home is that it lies just a 35-minute drive away from Stratford. Where formerly I had to plan lengthy multi-night excursions to see all the plays that interested me, now I can just pick a day, hop in the car and whip over there, and come home the same night. If it's a matinee, I can even make it home for dinner!

So, my first show of Stratford Festival 2012: Thornton Wilder's The Matchmaker. Let me say, right off the bat, that for me this script completely trumps the musicalized version, Hello Dolly! Not surprising, of course. When you take a tightly-written stage play and try to adapt it into a stage musical, some of the tight writing has to go to make room for songs.

My second observation is that the choice of this show was perfectly calculated to show off the comedic acting strengths of the current Stratford company. What a marvellous collection of comic skill, timing, and vocal ability!

The downside right away was the set in Act 1. The second story of the set was totally superfluous, and simply ate up valuable acting space without giving much useful space in return. It was a great period showpiece that plainly set the scene in the country town (as it then was) of Yonkers, but its size and awkward shape cancelled the benefits that an upstairs might have created. That said, the restaurant set of Act 2 was gorgeous and worked beautifully for all the complicated manoeuvrings that have to happen there.

This was the next-to-last preview performance, so the show was tight and ran smoothly throughout with no obvious weaknesses (well, except one). Tom McCamus made a strong and disagreeable Horace Vandergelder ("Horace of the money"), a cranky eccentric millionaire who manages to learn a thing or two by the end of the play. Seana McKenna simply lit up the stage from her first entrance as Dolly Gallagher Levi. The two played marvellous scenes together, as well matched a couple as you could want in those roles.

Equally entertaining were Mike Shara and Josh Epstein as Vandergelder's two browbeaten employees. Their comic shenanigans were believable and never overdone. Laura Condlin gave a radiant performance as Irene Molloy, completely centring her major scenes with Shara and Epstein. Andrea Runge as Minnie Fay, Irene's assistant, was also wonderful.

And then there was Geraint Wyn Davies, giving a magnificent take on the uncommon common man, Malachi Stack.

With so many strong performances (including several I haven't mentioned) it seems a pity to have to inject a complaint, but here goes. Nora McLellan, usually a reliably strong performer, badly overdid her characterization as Miss Flora van Huysen in the last act. Overdressed, over-made-up, and vocally completely over the top, this Miss Flora was simply not believable at all -- and in fact only became increasingly annoying each time she spoke. Definitely not an effective choice.

That was the only blot on this tight well-crafted production of a fine modern American classic that certainly ought to be staged more often in Canada. Director Chris Abraham has come up with a real winner, hilariously funny and thought-provoking at the same time. This show is well worth anyone's time and effort to see!

Sunday 27 May 2012

A Play Like No Other

"It's not a musical!"  That was the disappointed comment of an audience member near me, at the intermission.  Theatregoers in major cities have become so accustomed to musical shows as the main genre they encounter -- a sad comment on the state of the theatre.  And while the "legitimate" theatre (I hate that term almost as much as I hate "straight" theatre) has much to learn from musicals, there are times when the lesson can be too well learned -- the fragmentary nature of scripts in musicals and the excessive reliance on flashy technical whiz-bangs can become ludicrous when actors are trying to create real and believable characters.

None of those things went wrong with the stage production of War Horse, which I saw last night.  Yes, there is a fair bit of flashy technical work with lighting and sound but it is always kept at the service of the play.  Yes, the script is bitty but when the scene changes move so quickly and smoothly that becomes an unimportant issue.  The best learned lesson is that music does indeed heighten the emotions, and here the use of popular songs and music from the early years of the last century in England was carefully used to underscore the key moments.  The singers who took us from scene to scene with their music-as-commentary were completely in key with the concept that their role was to discreetly support the dramatic action, not dominate and control it.

Central to this play is the unique collection of horse puppets whose operators create one of the main central characters of the story.  No pretense that the puppeteers don't exist, they are plainly visible, right in the open, and garbed in period clothes.  But it takes only a few minutes for you to forget them -- or at least lose sight of the connection -- and accept the horses as real, living, breathing creatures.  Once that happens, the story takes wings and begins to soar.

Someone should make use of this concept in staging a realistic Wagner Ring!

The actors playing the human characters were all very good too.  Special props to Alex Furber as the young Albert Narracott, who (like so many of his generation) has to grow up very quickly indeed when war swallows him.  A very telling moment is his return at the end, when his mother at first doesn't recognize him and tells his father that she sees "a man on a horse". 

Brad Rudy and Richard McMillan are both favourite Canadian actors of long standing, and the interplay between them as two brothers was strong, memorable, and totally believable.  It's especially good to see McMillan in a serious role.  He's a great comedian, with marvellous timing, but there's so much more to him than that and here we got to see it, in spades.  Tamara Bernstein Evans was also very memorable as Albert's mother, Rose, a caring mother and wife with a backbone of steel.  Patrick Galligan movingly created the other key character of Friedrich Müller, who reminded us powerfully that human emotional responses to war spread across all borders.

I don't go in for big-ticket commercial productions in Toronto as a rule, but this show is a must-see!


Beethoven in Kitchener

I enjoy going to concerts by the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony.  It's an excellent mid-size orchestra, and while the programs tend to run to "standard repertoire" there's always some unusual feature in every concert.

Friday night we got mainly Beethoven, but the rare feature was a piece of Beethoven which I really enjoy, and rarely get a chance to hear: the Triple Concerto for violin, cello, piano, and orchestra.  Now, the Great Experts (as Anna Russell always called them) have already decreed that the Triple Concerto is second-rate Beethoven.  I beg to differ.  It is unusual Beethoven, but hardly to be judged of poorer quality simply because it doesn't fit neatly into a pigeonhole -- and that seems to be all that some writers have against it. 

Think of it as a concerto for "piano trio and orchestra" and its reference points become clearer.  The use of the term "piano trio" immediately invites a comparison to chamber music, and indeed the solo parts of the piece often function much like a chamber trio.  By the same token, the orchestra necessarily must often accompany at a chamber scale to allow the subtleties of the interplay between the soloists to come through.

Of the small number of recordings of this concerto that exist, many use a roster of soloists.  But on Friday night we got the concerto for piano trio and orchestra played by a real piano trio, and one of the best I know: the Gryphon Trio.  With the solo parts in their hands, excellence of performance and interpretation could be safely taken for granted.  And the playing was excellent, with all three players aptly in scale with each other -- although the violin could get lost in the shuffle as the other two soloists and the orchestra got a little too boisterous at times.  All in all, though, a delightful performance of a concert rarity.

After the intermission, we got the Seventh Symphony.  Like all Beethoven, this is in danger of becoming hackneyed from overuse.  Edwin Outwater and the orchestra avoided that hazard, giving a crisp, clean performance that highlighted interesting features of the writing at many points.  The slow movement began very quietly indeed, forcing the audience to listen closely to what was happening.  The scherzo was nimble, quick but not overly quick, and the repeating trio was well contrasted. 

I just wish I could say the same for the finale.  Outwater succumbed, alas, to the temptation to join the "Beethoven sweepstakes" where the prize is the trophy for winning the "Anything you can play, I can play faster" race.  This contest has been a blot on numerous pianists playing Beethoven, and the same fate, alas, befell this concert.  There are a large number of very effective notes in the finale which deserve to be heard, and have a great deal to tell the listener, but we only could distinguish perhaps 60% of them.  The rest just vanished into a rushing torrent of blurry sound, exacerbated by the rich resonance of the Centre in the Square.  Sometimes it's better not to do your damnedest, if your next-to-damnedest would be more effective, certainly the case here.

Of course the audience leaped instantly to their feet at the end (another bugbear of mine) but then, if the finale of the 7th doesn't lift the audience out of their seats, something is seriously wrong!  For myself, I enjoyed the performance overall but wished I had actually heard all the notes Beethoven had written.