One of the joys of this annual summer festival is the chance to encounter works that you've never heard before. Every year produces a few good examples. This season, a whole list of them fitted in around the last days of Week Two.
On Thursday afternoon, Trio Hochelaga offered a beautifully paced and polished reading of Ravel's Piano Trio in A Minor, a work which reflects the pictorial Ravel so well loved from his major masterworks for orchestra. While this is not perhaps truly a rarity, it's not one of the more common works in the repertoire either, so a chance to hear it played live was very welcome.
There followed, though, a true rarity: the "Trapeze Ballet", by Prokofiev, composed for oboe, clarinet, violin, viola and double bass. The composer later adapted a six-movement Quintet, Op. 39, from the eight-movement ballet score. In this case, the players performed the full ballet, and for a truly fascinating reason.
The Festival actually secured a 1970 filmed version of the ballet from Russia, and the five musicians performed the music in synchronization with the film. James MacKay served as conductor to keep the whole performance together, and made some witty comments beforehand about the notes he put into his score (e.g. "left foot DOWN") to help him keep pace with the on-screen action!
This marked the Festival's first foray into live-music-mit-film synchronization, and I felt it worked very well. The film had an interestingly surreal air to it, in which characters seemed to move in and out of the restricted stage space in which they were supposedly performing. The choreography in the film was highly gymnastic, yet also evocative. The circus setting of the story recalls, of course, the most famous circus ballet of all time, Stravinsky's Petrouchka -- yet neither choreography nor music really resembled that famous forerunner.
The musical accompaniment, too, provided all kinds of interesting delights. Prokofiev composed extra-grotesque solos for the various instruments, and the whole score had an air of satire and irony about it which came through very well. A fascinating film-and-music event!
The second concert included three rarities, all from Scandinavia. The first, a little character piece for clarinet, horn, bassoon, cello, and double bass composed by Carl Nielsen, had the intriguing title of Serenata in vano. Yes, that does translate into "in vain". The music depicts a group of strolling musicians who do their level best to attract a lovely young lady out onto her balcony with their serenade. However, she refuses to come so their efforts are in vain -- and the music ends with them marching off to the nearest pub to drown their sorrows. It's a very witty piece, easy on the ear (as was this performance), and the storyline is certainly easy to follow!
The next work was an even rarer Suite for String Trio by Sibelius, a work which the composer never published. It appeared years after his death in a box in someone's attic or closet, and still is not well known. This doesn't surprise me, as it is a rather conventional work from the early end of Sibelius' life. It's pleasant, worth hearing, but not in any sense challenging or dramatic as we might expect from his later output.
The third and largest work here was a Grand Septet in B Flat Major by Franz Berwald. Both the style and the instrumentation make it plain that Berwald was writing under the spell of Beethoven's Septet for similar forces. Despite the title, it's not a heavy duty work at all. This was an early work, written when the composer was in his twenties. Although none of this music is startling in any way, it is certainly both lively and energetic, and the players gave it a lively and energetic performance!
I'm going to break my usual rule, not to review, but simply to mention a rare work performed on Friday afternoon after I had left Parry Sound: a String Quintet by Georges Onslow. Onslow was a French composer, although plainly (as his name shows) of English descent. He composed in a number of genres, but was best known for his chamber works. No less a musician than Robert Schumann declared him equal to Mendelssohn as the only composers to approach Beethoven's mastery of the string quartet form.
Onslow composed quite a few quintets, but after the first few he adopted an instrumentation of violin-violin-viola-cello-cello, and then even allowed for one of the cellos to be replaced by a double bass -- the instrumentation used on this occasion. I've heard a few of Onslow's works in recordings, and I am sorry I didn't get the chance to hear this one in live performance.
No comments:
Post a Comment