Thursday 30 July 2015

Festival of the Sound 2015 # 9: Travelling With Music

Those who know me well also know that I love my music when travelling. I listen to recordings in the car, and elsewhere I make good use of my sound-cancelling headphones. In fact, as I write this I'm listening to some lovely flute music in my hotel room, using the headphones so I don't wake up my neighbours at 5:30 in the morning!

Wednesday at the Festival turned into a broad ranging musical tour of a fair part of the world, after the historic Concert at Cafe Zimmermann in the morning (see previous post).

The afternoon concert brought the welcome return of the Cheng²Duo, the brother and sister duo on cello and piano who made such a big impression on the Parry Sound audience last summer -- and on me. (read about last year's concert here: Performers or Musicians? )

This year the Cheng²Duo raised the stakes considerably with a neatly-planned programme making effective use of multimedia projections and voice-overs to narrate through the years. The theme was French music. The programme opened with a five-movement sonata by François Francoeur, a court composer to King Louis XV. This was a good example of French Baroque virtuoso style, neatly played and pleasant to the ear. Bryan Cheng took a moment to demonstrate effectively the difference between the playing style that would have been used in a royal salon of the seventeenth century and the playing style used in a concert hall today. The piece was then presented in a twenty-first century style of performance, and very effectively.

They followed on with a group of three pieces by Gabriel Fauré, one of the truly great composers of the French Romantic era. Après un rève was an effective transcription of one of Faure's most famous art songs. Sicilienne is a lovely lyrical movement, a dance as the title indicates, written as part of a suite of pieces for a performance of Maeterlinck's play Pelleas et Melisande. Originally for cello and orchestra, it makes also a fine effect with the orchestral part arranged for piano, as here. The third piece was the lovely Elegie, the one work in the group originally composed for the cello and piano (but later orchestrated). It reminds me of other works going by this title, especially Parry's Elegy for Brahms, in the way it presents not only the sadness of mourning but also some of the anger which can be so much a part of the experience of coping with death.

In all these pieces, the key requirement is clarity of line -- an aspect of music much promoted by Fauré in his teaching -- and both Bryan and Silvie Cheng certainly understood this, fully re-creating the long singing lines so characteristic of the music of Fauré. 

The main part of the programme was given over to the monumental Sonata in A Major by César Franck. Strictly speaking, Franck was Belgian by birth but since he became Parisian by residence the description of his music as "French" can certainly stand. This Sonata is one of the truly great monuments of the chamber music repertoire. Originally composed for violin and piano, it was later arranged for cello by the cellist Jules Delsart -- with the approval of Franck himself.

The Cheng²Duo played most effectively in the first movement, whose harmonies could be by no other composer but Franck. Bryan Cheng's legato in the long winding cello melodies was beautifully presented, while Silvie Cheng at the piano did fine work with the rippling accompanying figures. The stormy central allegro challenged both to virtuoso fireworks, with the need to simultaneously maintain the forward line and momentum of the music. 

The third movement, a sometimes cryptic Recitativo-Fantasia brought beautiful, quiet lyricism from both artists, not least in the gentle recall of the opening moments of the work, before leading on to a nicely paced account of the canonic finale. Here the balance of the two players is of the essence in order for both cello and piano to be clearly heard in the playing of the long melody of the canon. It's interesting that the piano leads the canon in four of its five occurrences. The cello leads only in the third appearance of the theme. In each case, piano and cello were ideally balanced in relation to each other, particularly challenging at moments when Franck's piano writing gets dense. The original for violin gave the solo instrument a much more natural advantage since the solo tone would ride out on top of the piano sound at such places, where the cello is more at risk of becoming buried in the centre of Franck's rich harmonies. Certainly there was no such problem with this performance.

Indeed, I can only recall one moment when the piano overwhelmed the cello -- in the first movement -- and that only lasted for a second or two before Silvie Cheng re-adjusted her scale of tone.

This Sonata is played by artists of all ages, but it is after all the work of a very mature composer and has about it something of that air. Definitely it's not a composition by a young man, all flash and dash and little or no depth. Silvie and Bryan Cheng already seem to grasp some of that wisdom of age in their reading of the piece. It will be fascinating to hear the additional depth and insight that will undoubtedly emerge as they continue to live with this music in future years.

The Duo added a substantial and challenging encore at this point, a complete performance of the ten-minute Sonata for Cello and Piano by Debussy. This is one of the composer's later works, and often strikes listeners as rather thorny -- particularly if they come expecting the lyrical style of the earlier Debussy. But this work was composed in 1915 and Debussy certainly did not remain unaffected by the terrific winds of change blowing through the musical world at that time, even though he responded in his own characteristic style to those storms. This piece makes particularly nasty demands on the cellist who has to -- quite frankly -- beat up on his instrument a little in order to achieve the strange, almost savage sounds the composer requires. The contrast from the smooth lyricism of Franck and Fauré could hardly be greater, but again the Cheng²Duo mastered the work's challenges, seemingly without great effort or difficulty.  The enthusiastic standing ovation after this intriguing recital was well-earned indeed!

In the evening, our musical travels continued with a programme entitled Songs and Dances of the Americas -- conceived as a tribute to the Pan Am Games in Toronto.  This programme included music by composers from the U.S.A., Canada, Mexico, Paraguay, Argentina, Brazil, and back to Argentina -- in that order.  The musical styles ranged from the aggressive modernisms of Lowell Liebermann's Gargoyles for solo piano (played with furious efficiency by Annie Zhou) to the dance-based inspirations of Astor Piazzola, with many other styles in between.

Much as I'd love to detail every single piece in this concert, there are simply too many to cover, so I'm going to have to do it with highlights.

The Cheng²Duo appeared again to play Two Pieces for Cello and Piano, composed especially for them by Canadian composer Alexina Louie.  These pieces explored in modern style many of the sound possibilities of the two instruments -- everything from sliding glissandi on the cello to mass string-strumming on the piano, and much else.  It was fascinating considered as a soundscape, considerably abetted by the well-chosen multimedia slides displayed at the same time. 

I guess I'm getting old-fashioned (or maybe I always have been!) but I find this kind of music, basically a succession of sounds and sound effects with little or no sense of a larger form or purpose, begins to wear out very quickly for me.  In a way, it strikes me as a musical equivalent of the "found poetry" so popular in the last century, in that the listener has to struggle to try to impose some sort of order or meaning on what he or she is hearing.  As fine as the performance was -- and as challenging as it became for the players -- this would not be on my short list of music to live with.

Guy Few brought the house down with his high speed rendition of Mexican trumpeter Rafael Mendez' arrangement of the Dance of the Comedians by Smetana.  He also powered his way forcefully through another Mendez arrangement of the traditional matador's song La Virgen de la Macarena.

The second half belonged to guitarist Daniel Bolshoy, whose virtuoso fingerwork and thoughtful interpretation played a part in every work heard after the intermission.  Especially intriguing was the suite La Catedral for solo guitar by Paraguayan composer Agustin Barrios Mangore.  This composer was completely unknown to me, but his music merges a clear melodic sense with some rather quirky harmonic choices that add undoubted spice to the mixture without overpowering it.

Leslie Fagan returned to the stage for a lovely performance of the famous Aria from the Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 by Heitor Villa-Lobos.  This piece, originally for soprano with the unusually rich sound of eight cellos (a sound the composer greatly favoured and used frequently), was given here with a simple guitar accompaniment.  Fagan's voice soared, apparently without effort, in the vocalise that opens the piece, and sustained the long monotone lines of the central narration very well.  Especially moving was the shortened return of the vocalise as a quiet hum, a daunting challenge to bring off while making yourself heard in a hall of any size.  What truly impressed me was Fagan's absolutely rock-steady pitch while humming, in a passage which brings on the wobbles in recordings by some of the world's most distinguished sopranos.  Definitely a desert-island performance, even without the cellos.

The conclusion of the concert was Piazzola's Libertango, a piece which has been presented a few times at the Festival in various guises.  I don't think I've ever heard it given by more than 3 or 4 musicians at a time, but for this grand finale there were twelve!  The arrangement was made by Graham Campbell, and included parts for 3 violins, viola, 2 cellos, clarinet, flute, trumpet, guitar, soprano and piano!  In the 5-minute course of the piece, Campbell contrived to give each performer a distinct part and a clear solo moment, and then brought all the forces together for a rousing, high-energy conclusion.

And what encore could you possibly find for an ensemble of this unique mix of artists?  Nothing else for it, but to repeat the closing pages of the Libertango.  I'm sure no one in the audience was complaining about hearing it again!

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