Monday 18 July 2016

Festival of the Sound 2016 # 1: Opening the Season

My favourite time of the summer has come around again!  I'm back in Parry Sound, nestled into my favourite small hotel in the woods outside town, and all set for a couple of weeks packed to the brim with beautiful music!

For those among my readers who are not familiar, the Festival of the Sound has been running every summer in Parry Sound, 2 hours north of Toronto, for nearly 40 years now.  Although the Festival's main focus is "classical chamber music" in all its variety, there are also concerts featuring choral music, opera, piano, and a whole weekend of jazz as part of the mix.  Most of the events take place in the modern concert hall of the Charles W. Stockey Centre on the shores of Georgian Bay.

For several years now, it's been a tradition to preface the official opening with a fundraising dinner concert.  The Stockey Centre was cleverly designed in such a way that the seating can be readily removed, and the raked auditorium converted into a flat-floored banquet hall. 

The Friday night of the "Gala Opening Weekend" was devoted to this dinner event, "Classics by Candlelight", with three concerts interspersed between the three courses of the dinner.

The first performance (after the appetizers) was a Haydn string quartet in D major, Op. 20 No.4, performed by a favourite Festival ensemble, the Penderecki String Quartet.  The standout movement here was the peculiar third movement, Menuetto, allegretto alla zingarese.  I couldn`t detect any particularly gypsy tone in the music as I was too busy trying to figure out where the three-beat pattern of the minuet was hidden among the profusion of 2-, 4-, and 5-beat phrases!  Haydn the irrepressible joker was probably chortling with glee as he wrote this one!  The 3-beat pattern does emerge clearly in the trio, along with a delightful and unusual solo melody for the cellist.  The whole work was given a delightful, lively performance by the quartet.

The second concert was split in two parts, before and after the main course.  This was a song recital by soprano Leslie Fagan, accompanied at the piano by Guy Few.  Anyone who knows these two artists could readily predict that shenanigans would ensue.  What boggles my mind is how Fagan can go straight from an apparently uncontrolled fit of the giggles to a beautifully sustained singing tone in 2.5 seconds flat.  It ought to be impossible, but plainly it isn`t!  The repertoire was a fascinating mix of half a dozen numbers including lieder by Richard Strauss, operetta by Lehar (Vilja from The Merry Widow), Gershwin (Summertime), and opera arias by Puccini and Verdi.  The high point came when Fagan introduced her final number as "Caro Nome from... (pause) some opera...."  Few let out a huge hoot of a laugh and rolled off the piano bench.  For one wild moment I thought we were going to get Victor Borge's classic send-up, complete with the seat belt -- but Fagan and Few then proceeded to perform the aria very well indeed.  For Fagan, this was the high point of her performance, in every way.

After dessert, we then got a number of selections from violinist Moshe Hammer, including several of his favourites.  Guy Few again accompanied.  Leslie Fagan returned for one more number, Gershwin's witty waltz song By Strauss.  The standout final number of the night saw Hammer and Few joined by clarinetist James Campbell for Srul Irving Glick's Klezmer's Wedding, a piece originally composed for the Festival back in the 1990s.  It could almost be described as "duelling klezmers" with the increasingly-complex solo lines tossing back and forth between the violin and clarinet, while the piano keeps the rhythmic drive going with a classic two-step accompaniment.  The performance, perhaps best described as fire-eating, brought the house down.

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Saturday night we moved on to the official Gala Opening Concert, with the hall restored to its normal concert seating configuration.  This programme featured the ever-popular Elmer Iseler Singers under their music director Lydia Adams, with the Penderecki Quartet, clarinetist Campbell, double bass Bob Mills, and Guy Few on trumpet this time as well as piano (to say that he is versatile is something of an understatement!)

The concert opened with a lively Herz und Mund und Tat und Leben from Cantata # 147 by J. S. Bach.  The chamber ensemble of string quintet and trumpet played with great vigour to match the high-energy, joyful singing of the chorus.

Following that we had a trio of Mozart's sacred works.  Two Marian hymns formed the bookends of this musical triptych; a jolly Sancta Maria, mater Dei opened the set and an energetic Regina coeli closed off with its endless chains of "Alleluias".  In between these two upbeat pieces, like a jewel nestled on royal velvet, lay a quiet, prayerful Ave verum corpus.  The key to this well-loved motet is to sing it as simply and gently as possible.  The strings put on their sordines and dropped their tone right down, and the choir sang in very much the quiet end of their range.  It was as beautiful and heartfelt a reading of this simple inspiration from the master as one could possibly ask.

The first half closed with Northern Sketches by Srul Irving Glick, another work composed for the Festival back in the 1990s.  Four poems inspired by the northern woods and waters are set for chorus with violin, cello and piano.  Although the opening phrases for instruments have a questing, experimental feel to them, many lines in the subsequent vocal parts drop into timeless, ancient-yet-modern modal harmonies.  The third movement, Butterflies, was a langorous, limpid waltz, and the final movement, Celebration, a vigorous allegro.

After the intermission followed another Festival commission from earlier years, Shaman Songs by Gary Kulesha.  These seven numbers, including one for strings alone, unfolded in a more challenging contemporary idiom (including non-sung vocalizations) which yet captured the feeling and meaning in the poetry.  Since I had never heard either this cycle or the Glick work, I was pleased that the Iseler Singers here continued the Festival's recent practice of reviving commissioned works from earlier years.

Simplicity reigned again in a beautiful arrangement of the famous medieval carol Lo, How a Rose for choir and trumpet.  Guy Few's playing here was as quiet and lyrical as it had been virtuosic earlier in the evening.

We then heard Bud Dant's arrangement of the spiritual Just a Closer Walk With Thee for clarinet, jazz bass, piano and choir.  One of my favourite qualities in a good jazz performance is how even a slow, almost lazy tempo can set my feet and fingers tapping, and this was a great example.

The concert then concluded with a wonderful work by Parry Sound-born composer Eleanor Daley, Salutation to the Dawn.  For this piece, a semi-chorus of three sopranos stepped in front to sing their trio passages which led the choir throughout the piece.  It was a fitting end to a concert which blended the works of classic masters with those of several notable Canadian composers.

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The Sunday night concert was billed as an Opera Gala, and the hall was filled almost to capacity with an audience of eager opera lovers.  A programme list was distributed, but was not strictly followed to the letter.  However, we certainly got full measure, with two dozen or so selections lasting for about 3 hours, and covering many well-known classics of the opera, operetta, and Broadway musical repertoire.   As an added attraction, the five soloists were also joined by the 20 voices of the Elmer Iseler Singers.  The programme was carefully planned for contrast of styles and voices from one number to the next.  Piano accompaniment throughout was provided with style and dash by Guy Few.

I'd love to comment on all the selections, but I would not finish before it was time to start my reviews of the next concerts!  So I will have to stick with a few highlights.  Start with the affable chairman of the proceedings, tenor Mark DuBois, whose dry wit led us easily from one number to the next.  DuBois sang several numbers from the musical/operetta end of the continuum, and was especially fine in the selections from The Phantom of the Opera.

Soprano Leslie Fagan sang with precision and power in all her numbers, making her biggest impact in Sempre libera from La Traviata.  Mezzo-soprano Gabrielle Prata used her versatile, dusky voice to great effect and made the most of her acting opportunities in the Habanera from Carmen, and in Orlofsky's Chacun a son gout from Die Fledermaus.

Tenor Colin Ainsworth patiently suffered the slings and arrows of DuBois' dry wit more than his colleagues (DuBois kept playing the "professional jealousy" card) but sang ardently in tenor arias from Romeo et Juliette and La fille du regiment, as well as characterizing strongly in A Wand'ring Minstrel from The Mikado.  Baritone Bruce Kelly gave us a rousing Drinking Song from Ambroise Thomas' Hamlet, and a heartfelt performance of the one and only German selection of the concert, the Evening Star aria from Tannhauser.

Ainsworth and Kelly also partnered with magnificent results in my personal favourite of the entire programme, the beautiful duet from Bizet's The Pearl Fishers.

The Elmer Iseler Singers predictably produced beautiful background and interjections, as needed, and sang with all the power one could ask in Verdi's Anvil Chorus from Il Trovatore and the Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves from Nabucco.  More than this, they triumphed in the impossibly-difficult Humming Chorus from Madam Butterfly, which I think is probably the toughest assignment of anything that we heard in this concert!

All of this and much more besides added up to an uncommonly rewarding operatic anthology, but let us not forget that the cast of performers included several irrepressible jokers.  Sure enough, more comic shenanigans were afoot, already in the first half but more so in the second half.

Right off the bat, there was Mark DuBois starting the wrong selection from Phantom of the Opera, while Leslie Fagan freaked out momentarily ("I thought I was going to have a heart attack!").  Bruce Kelly casually waved a glass of red wine around as he sang the Drinking Song and as casually poured it down the hatch at the end.  Colin Ainsworth, equally casual, flirted with a couple of ladies in the front row in A Wand'ring Minstrel.  And just before the intermission, an actual anvil was unveiled for the Anvil Chorus, and James Campbell was voluntold from his seat in the gallery to play it, alongside DuBois, with a sledgehammer.

And that was just Act One!

(I have to note in passing that there were some "serious" issues with the percussion section here, the tuning of the anvil being suspect, and one of the players failing to cut off in time before throwing in an extra note that was definitely not in the score!)

In Act Two, Gabrielle Prata stole the show with her updated English lyrics and a whole raft of facial expressions and body gestures as Orlofsky.  She also proceeded to go well beyond mere flirtation and into total seductress mode as Carmen, practising her wiles on assorted victims including a page turner, an accompanist and a few audience members, including the one who happened to be seated right behind Guy Few in the stage-side box (I could see it coming, and I don't flummox easily -- although I undoubtedly blushed -- so when she stroked my face I gently captured her hand and kissed it).

Mark DuBois then brought a lady up from the audience to act as his Hanna Glawari while he sang the Merry Widow waltz song and proceeded to waltz with her.

I forget which aria it was but some of the best laughs of the whole evening came when Prata and Fagan kept trying to elbow each other out of the way in a competition for the high notes.

And I'm sure nobody objected to seeing and hearing the anvil-playing team at work again in the encore of the Anvil Chorus which rounded off the evening -- complete with specially-written English words as a tribute to the newly-drafted ex-clarinetist percussion player!

These kinds of comical shenanigans are part and parcel of the fun at the Festival of the Sound, but make no mistake -- the serious side of the music is amply well represented too, and the quality of the performances right across the board on this opening weekend was well up to the high standards which this Festival has always set for itself.

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