Thursday was a day of extreme contrasts at the Festival, and the day revolved around two separate themes. In the afternoon, we had a brace of concerts entitled "Time Travel," in which we moved backwards from the most recent to the oldest.
The first programme was a collection of four pieces by four different Canadian composers -- the four, whether by chance or design, were all women.
The first of these four works, Katarina Curcin's String Quartet No. 3 was unusual to begin with in being given a generic title rather than a descriptive one. Although the Cecilia Quartet tipped us off ahead of time about descriptive or thematic elements heard in the music, I found the connection too elusive to grasp. I did enjoy Curcin's broad palette of sounds, and especially the way that a diatonic chord would suddenly loom out of a cloud of chromatic or even atonal/polytonal sounds.
The second and third works were tougher. To put it bluntly, both composers vastly over-used the high harmonics of the strings. These notes, achieved by pressing the bow only lightly upon the strings, are challenging to play. When played by a soloist, as was often the case in the nineteenth century, they can be very beautiful but only -- and this is the key -- in small doses for effect. Lengthy continuing use is apt to become squealy like nails on a chalkboard, and tends to generate tension in the hearer. This isn't just me, by the way. It was the consensus of everyone I spoke to after the concert. Curcin used the harmonics too, but she used them more discreetly, and leavened with passages drawn from the instruments' main ranges.
Aside from the harmonics, both these works fell prey to my great bugbear in contemporary music: sound for sound's sake. The composer has the instruments make a sound, or type of sound, for so long, then switch to another one, and then another. The piece ends whenever the composer decides that she/he has written enough -- and there's no clear indication of why this couldn't just as well happen three minutes earlier or five minutes later. There's virtually no sense of structure, of time, of coherence, and certainly not of rhythm.
In a different vein altogether was Kelly Marie Murphy's Postcards From Home, a set of three pieces obviously inspired by her home turf of Alberta. This was a Festival commission in 2000, and well worth reviving. It's a trio for piano, violin, and clarinet. A good deal of the motive energy in first and last movements comes from the piano, and in the slower central movement (Prairie Sunrise) the deep bass notes of the piano create an appropriate atmosphere of a huge, spacious sky in which the violin and clarinet can wander at will. The rowdy final movement, Hoedown, ends with an amusing joke for all three instruments.
The second afternoon concert resumed the journey backwards with Schubert's Death and the Maiden string quartet. One of the three monumental string quartets written by Schubert during the last two years of his life, this masterpiece was performed with considerable elan and power by the Cecilia Quartet. If the slow theme of the second movement variations (the melody of the eponymous song) lacked the last extreme of tension at first, the conclusion of the movement was appropriately dark and bleak, with the players abandoning vibrato. The brief scherzo and trio was strong enough to avoid seeming merely cute, and the finale ended with a true burst of power. A fine performance, if not the last word on one of the great monuments of Romantic music.
This was followed by the Land's End Ensemble in Haydn's Piano Trio No. 43 in C Major. (just think of Haydn's 104 symphonies and 68 string quartets, and let that number 43 sink in for a minute.) Like so many of Haydn's compositions, it's full of life and cheerful energy, imaginative in structure, and not without the odd little musical joke to liven things up. The sparkling finale, in particular, is another one of those guaranteed smile-on-the-face compositions -- and Land's End did the music full justice, from start to finish.
At 5:00 pm, a small audience of forty of us (the ones who rush to buy tickets as soon as they go on sale in April!) joined together at the Station Gallery for tea and biscuits, and an informal talk with Jim Campbell and Suzanne Shulman about their experiences working with Glenn Gould in his television recording projects. Their reminiscences told us much more about this fascinating, complex artist than some of the more public stories which have been current for many years. Equally fascinating were the video clips from these TV programmes which they shared.
In the evening, the Festival's tribute to Glenn Gould was capped by Stewart Goodyear's complete performance of the Goldberg Variations by Bach. This, of course, was Gould's signature work: the first work he ever recorded, and also the last. The two recordings of the Goldberg, as Campbell pointed out, book-ended Gould's career.
Goodyear's Goldberg was nothing like Gould's -- and that's no surprise to anyone who knows Stewart Goodyear's art. Externals first: Goodyear took all the repeats except in the final recurrence of the Aria. (Gould's maddening habit of cherry-picking repeats is the main reason why his recordings drive me crazy!) Right at the outset, Goodyear adopted a faster, more flowing tempo than any other performer I've ever heard in the opening Aria. From then on, he just seemed to get faster and faster. Although some tempo variation did appear later on, he powered through the entire work in just 63 minutes (the complete recordings I have, as well as previous live performances I've heard, all time out somewhere around the 75-minute mark, give or take a bit).
Besides the high speeds, Goodyear's performance was marked by total absorption in the music, and by a truly phenomenal accuracy and precision of playing. The precision was easy to hear because he used almost no sustain pedal, and when he did use it he only touched the pedal lightly -- which would mean that only the bass note would momentarily be sustained. Under those conditions, any erroneous notes would stick out like the proverbial sore thumb. I heard just two. If someone were to film his performance, with a tight close-up on his hands, no harpsichordist would ever dare to proclaim again that the music is impossible to play on the single keyboard of the piano!
And yet (and I hate to say this), I felt something was missing. The unremitting mechanical perfection of the performance threw into high relief the limited amount of expressivity. The long slow variation which falls at the midpoint of the work proved to be the turning point. Up until then, the music was all fast. After that variation, Goodyear selected a more varied range of tempi, and also allowed some slight little nudges in the basic tempo of each variation -- nothing extreme, but just enough to allow the music to breathe and flex a little more. The first half could certainly have benefited from similar treatment.
Goodyear rightly received a standing ovation at the end of his remarkable performance. What I really look forward to is the chance to hear him play the Goldberg Variations again in another 15 to 20 years. It might come out just the same way, but somehow I doubt it. No true artist can hold still and refrain from any artistic growth for that long. And most musicians will agree that Bach is the one composer who continues to grow and change as you do, throughout your entire life, always challenging you in new and different ways.
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