Sunday, June 21, 2009, Gallery 345, Toronto.

Beethoven’s ten sonatas for piano and violin, over shadowed from the composer’s time until the present by his symphonies, quartets and piano sonatas, are beginning to come into their own with critics as well as performers.

Jacques Israelievitch, veteran concertmaster (now retired) of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra has undertaken the extraordinary initiative of presenting all ten sonatas in one marathon eight hour performance (breaks included). For this performance, and for a repeat performance in Chautauqua N.Y. in July, Mr. Israelievitch has partnered with an outstanding pianist, Kanae Matsumoto. Ms. Matsumoto’s playing was unfailingly crisp, warm and sensitive throughout the fiendishly difficult piano parts of two sonatas of the final set that I was able to attend.

Sonata No.9 in A Major, Op. 47 “Kreutzer”(1803) opens with a feverish movement that inspired Tolstoy to fictionalize it in his story The Kreutzer Sonata as an example of the power music has to release murderous rage in an individual. A slow, brooding, introduction in the violin’s low register creates a mood of raw, earthy passion, edged with a determined harshness. Then the piano rolls in behind the wild flourishes of violin and together they run a furious steeplechase that I found totally exhilarating. Both players bring enough virtuosity to dazzle in the technically demanding parts, complex chords, cadenzic interludes, breaks in rhythm, and changes in tempo.

The Andante that follows opens with a wonderfully lyrical piano passage that feels like a lover calling—like the voice of Echo calling to Narcissus. Beethoven develops this theme in variations ranging through moods of triple metre playfulness, minor key meditation, followed by an airy, ornamental part that resolves into solemnity that itself dissolves in the carefree coda.

The Rondo Finale is a hell-bent-for leather tarantella that recalls the first movement. The raw, gritty, dark-edged vigour of the violin contrasts with the crisp, precise, subtle, lighthearted dance of the piano. It is noticeable that this work from the early Vienna stage of Beethoven’s career (just before the Eroica) shows his innovation in making the violin part equal in importance to the piano.

The Violin Sonata No. 10, Op. 96 (1812) belongs to the post-heroic middle period of the Archduke Trio where Beethoven has shifted the focus of his chamber music away from the sweeping symphonic ideal towards a more pastoral lyricism.  Israelievitch’s tone in the arcadian idyll of the first movement matches more closely the refined warmth of Matsumoto. The players begin to feel like a duo. The music is restorative.

In the elegaic Adagio, repeated patterns of the piano create an obsessive tension over which the breathy bowing of the violin indicate a very human suggestion of grieving a loss, perhaps the loss of certainty that life will go on without interruption. The Scherzo and concluding Poco Allegro provide a kind of toe-tapping release of tension that changes places with moods that include the slow, sombre and the gruff qualities of the earlier Kreutzer Op.47. The concluding measures are a brisk, lightfooted dance.

It is always a privilege to hear chamber music in a space like Gallery 345 which combines the feeling of public concert hall with the up close and personal intimacy of a private room or ‘chamber’.  A space like this works wonders for the imagination during a first rate recital, like this Beethoven Violin Sonata Marathon. Your next chance to hear the duo Israelievitch/Matsumoto perform it is on July 19, in Chautauqua, NY.

Saturday, June 13, 2009,Berkeley Street Theatre, Toronto.

5 O’clock Bells is about the life of Lennie Breau, a prodigy at 6, dead at 43. Guitar legend Chet Atkins said, when he discovered Lennie in a Winnipeg club, “You have replaced me as the greatest guitarist in the world.”

Written and performed as a one man show by Pierre Brault, 5 O’clock Bells (title of the first Lennie Breau tune Brault ever heard) epitomizes the drama of Lennie’s prodigious gift (that his ever loving mother worried he’d “opened too fast”), his two marriages turned disastrous by career conflicts and hard drugs, and Lennie’s ‘untimely’ death—an unsolved homicide (he was found strangled, without water in his lungs, at the bottom of his second wife’s L.A. rooftop swimming pool.)

Pierre Breault draws you into his intention and never lets you go, right from the opening scene (image of a spread-eagled silhouette of a body revolving face down in water, projected on a screen behind Breault crouching in a fluid spin that revolves into him as Lennie’s mother with the phone to her ear pleading with Lennie to come home).

Brault morphs successively into: Lennie’s father (who let his eight year old ‘progeny’ into the family country music act and kicked him out when teen aged Lennie discovered jazz); Lennie’s frustrated first wife (“Get off the toilet with that guitar”); Chet Atkins; Don Francks who got Lennie into New York and into drugs (“To help you feel the music”); and Lennie’s second wife, a gospel singer who was suspected of but never prosecuted for finally bringing Lennie to Jesus in her L.A.swimming pool.

Brault’s pallete of vocal intonations accented French-Canadian (mother), faux-Nashville (father), 70’s Toronto hip (Francks), makes engaging music in its own way, and helps him build a texture that maintains its freshness for 75 minutes, assisted by Brian Quirt’s  razor knife direction on Brian Smith’s fine stage, with the telling of Lennie’s story ingeniously cued by Martin Conboy’s lighting. Paul Boudreau, off stage, supplies just enough (never enough) guitar riffs to give us a sense of the kind of music making that this play is all about.

5 O’clock Bells, a Great Canadian Theater Company / Sleeping Dog Theater Company production premiered in Ottawa before coming to the Luminato Festival. A lot of what we know about Lennie Breau is due to the work of his friend and student, Randy Bachman, who nurtured Lennie in life and protects his legacy through the  Guitarchives project.

There is a lot of reverence in the world for the extraordinary life and art of Lennie Breau. No doubt, Pierre Breault will take his tribute on tour. If you have a chance, catch it.

Thursday, June 11, 2009,153 Dufferin Street, Toronto.

R. Murray Schafer’s opera The Children’s Crusade is about entering unknown spaces.

For the audience this means locating the address of a disused warehouse, locating the entrance, and standing in a black cloth walled enclosure not knowing whether the performance will come to us or we walk to it (as turned out to be the case).

For Schafer’s characters, in particular the ‘Holy Child’ played by Jacob Abrahamse, entering the unknown means venturing to believe in a visionary figure who gives him a letter from god that instructs him to gather an army of children. It means seeking permission of the King of France to lead this army (20,000 kids according to historical legends) 600 km., on foot, to Marseilles where they can expect the sea will open and let them walk on dry land to Jerusalem. There, gates will open and admit them to the company of the Muslim and Jewish children who are waiting for them to establish world peace through love.

For the audience, this exercise in open-ness works out pretty well. We surged into a huge darkened industrial space not knowing exactly how to orient ourselves to a platform where spotlights picked out a dozen white robed girls standing in a cage, adjacent to a perch with three musicians. One of the musicians rubs the tubes of a complex TV antenna rig with gloved hands, making weird keening sounds, while his colleague bows a saw, and Ryan Scott bows the metal keys of a vibraphone.

To Schafer’s post-modern celestial music the choir of angels begins a chant in Latin. A boy wearing the clothes he put on this morning to go to school walks from the dark of right field down a long lighted ramp towards the musicians, singing that he is the ‘Holy Child’, and the ‘Magus’ (Diego Matamoros) enlists him in the mission.

The conception of this production is magical. Directed by Tim Albery, designed, lighted and choreographed by Leslie Travers, Thomas Hase and Rebecca Terry respectively, the opera dares to send actors, musicians, choirs, dancers and the audience on repeated migrations through dark and wet places (recreating, for some of us, hints of the discomfort of the children in the historical crusade).

One set the audience walks through is piled with packing cases housing dimly visible streetkids. One set is a red-light infernal brothel-like temptatorium; the court of the king is a fashion show catwalk. Huge choruses of adults and of children enter the audience from any direction and move among us singing. David Houle wearing a suit and yarmulke kicks up red sand dancing in a box where he eventually dies and is covered by his Muslim sister, Maryam Toller.

It is like being inside an audio-video 7.1 surround system.

Schafer’s music is an eclectic mix of modern atonal, classical, medieval, secular, ecclesiastical and oriental modes played on instruments ancient, electronic, exotic (George Sawa on the ‘Qanum’) and rare (Anders Adin on the hurdy-gurdy). Schafer’s libretto is less convincing and the acting/speaking performances (with the exception of Matamoros) are mostly going through the motions and don’t make it into drama.

The choirs and choruses, the musicians directed by David Fallis, all rank up there with the direction in the satisfying category. The libretto, the acting, the speaking, and Jacob Abrahamse’s singing, forceful and high but without much texture, colour or subtlety, kept me on the outside looking in on the idealistic and tragic material of this story.

At story’s end, the children are all drowned in black waters, brilliantly staged as black clad dancers flattened on the floor who rise in simulation of waves and literally drag the struggling children down to lie still beside them. Thus, ‘the orphans of France are liquidated’ and enter into the unknown attended by a choir of angels singing that they will have eternal joy because they have seen the face of god.

Monday, June 9, 2009, Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Toronto.

The opening night crowd of glitterati cramming the lobby flowed like uncorked bubbly into the theatre (arranged like a cabaret) and gathered in congenial groups at cloth covered tables to rubberneck and drink till the lights went out.

The Art of Time Ensemble’s Andrew Burashko and friends had a table beside Esprit Orchestra’s conductor Alex Pauk with his wife Alexina Louie, one of the evening’s featured composers, and their family. Roman Borys, cellist with The Gryphon Trio (Music Director of the Ottawa Chambermusic Festival) moved around the room chatting. Various ‘Luminaries’—the well heeled sponsors in attendance—were thanked by Luminato CEO Janice Price for helping to make this the third largest multimedia festival in the world.

Ms. Price reminded us that Luminato is about making exciting discoveries. My discovery of the evening was an innovative work by a sadly overlooked French composer, brilliantly performed by the Penderecki Quartet and virtuoso harpist Lori Gemmel.

Andre Caplet (1878-1925) is known, if at all, as the arranger of some of Claude Debussy’s compositions. If not for the ‘Poe theme’ of this Cabaret, we would not likely have discovered his Conte fantastique for harp and string quartet (1908), based on Poe’s story The Masque of the Red Death. The rippling arpeggio’s and distinctive timbres of the harp infused the texture of Penderecki’s strings and entranced the mind to imagine without actors, singers or words, Poe’s parable of ubiquitous plague death entering a place of entertainment somewhat parallel to our own situation this evening.

Again, thanks to Poe, we got to enjoy another performance of music for harp and strings as The Penderecki and Ms. Gemmel performed Alexina Louie’s The Raven, co-commissioned by Luminato and the Ottawa Chamber Music Society. Tom Allen’s earnest reading  made  Poe’s ‘gothic’ post-traumatic love poem sound like Dr. Seuss. The good of it was I had to focus on appreciating the magnetizing drama of Ms. Louie’s music and the wakeful combination of harp and strings.

Beyond seeing the Poe Cabaret as a vehicle for introducing music for string quartet and harp, I can’t say much good for the rest of the evening. First off, Poe is so Vincent Price. Then, the archaic English of his poetry, declaimed in a Canadian accent in the broad manner of Stratford or The Shaw Festival, well, I just couldn’t get into it.

It’s always nice to see and hear Patricia O’Callaghan, that’s for sure. There were promising moments in the musical monologue as Mark Campbell’s libretto based on Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart was ably sung by Tenor Sean Robert Clark to subtly discordant music composed and performed by Lance Horn. Mike Ross as Master of Ceremonies, Director Lorenzo Savoini and his crew went all out to find ways of putting this show across.

But for the music, it was a Poe show. The audience (to quote Bob Dylan) “Started out so fine, but left looking just like a ghost.”

Sunday, June 7, 2009, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto.

“Ain’t that a kick in the head!” I said to myself after witnessing the first act of Robert Lepage’s mindblowing epic Lipsynch.

Co-commissioned by Luminato, Lepage’s multimedia/polygenric, theatrical-musical multilingual head-kicking moral entertainment currently touring world capitols blazed through the 9 hours of its Canadian debut at the Bluma Appel Theatre in Toronto last night.

The audience kept up a high frequency buzz during the four intermissions and dinner break, ending the evening shouting, clapping, and stamping their joy through four curtain calls.

Think “Lady Madonna.” In front of a red curtained set, the sad music of Gorecki’s Third Symphony plays while a darkened monumental female figure sings a hymn to her child.

The curtains part to reveal the interior of an aircraft flying from Frankfurt to Montreal. While the flight attendant dispenses drinks, a baby cries in the lap of a teenaged female who never moves, because she is dead. Another passenger, an operatic contralto played by Rebecca Blankenship (who sang the opening Gorecki aria), cradles the baby until the flight lands.

As the story progresses through an awe-inspiring series of tableaux, the ‘opera singer’ finds the baby, adopts him, names him Jeremy, raises him to young manhood, and endures his cruel rejection of her.

Jeremy’s search for the truth about his ‘birth’ mother, the fictional film version of that truth we see him making, his marriage to the film star who resembles his birth mother, and the birth of their child, lead Jeremy (played by Rick Miller) back to his adoptive mother, Ada.

Ada then gives Jeremy a documentary film in which Lupe, his Nicaraguan teenaged mother (played by Nuria Garcia) is given a voice and tells the story (of her sexual enslavement arranged by her uncle and a German pimp) to the French Canadian indie lesbian documentary film-maker who put her on the plane. This is a telling of “Lady Madonna” redeemed from chaos by the love given to the child of her misfortune.

My original “Ain’t that a kick in the head!” feeling came from the awesome virtuosity of the production. Actors switch fluidly from flawless English to German to Spanish and French (accented a la France et Québec). Subtitles appear or not, as needed. All sorts of cool digital enhancements abound.

The sets and scene-changes are unimaginable until you witness them and are uplifted by the imagination that created them. A plane becomes a train becomes a subway car that you step out of into a dining room. Previously invisible stage-hands appear to intrude on one scene then come into the open as the next set morphs into the setup of a movie set where they belong and are managed by a miked stage manager with a Brit accent.

This team’s actors can deliver stunning vocal peformances—Frédéricke Bédard’s free jazz “April in Paris”, Rick Miller’s screaming version of Iron Maiden’s “The Number of the Beast.” Even Sarah Kemp’s low key but flawless lipsynch of “Do You Know the Way to San José?” opens our understanding of how artspeech in the mouth of an ‘ordinary’ person can raise a moment of life closer to an ideal state.

Lipsynch is from a mind in which all boundaries are defining but also are endowed with transparency, flexibility, permeability. It is a questioning, or doubting mind that does not need to be stuck in any category in order to feel real.  Tragic scenes are constructed to crack open into hysterical laughter that engulfs actors and audience alike. The schizoid background buzz of mental patient Michelle’s mind transforms into a voice of sanity that contains affirmative poetry uplifting herself, the other characters in her bookstore, and the audience that is moved to applaud ‘performances’ in the story.

The energy of the laughter released by the audience in this production purges the sadness and bitterness out of the dark truths revealed and leaves us feeling free to enjoy the display of creative talent that is Lipsynch.

And, not all the truths are dark. In the bigger picture, which this 9 hour experience provides, our separate lives are intertwined, are familiar, are part of a family. There are no foreigners, no foreign languages in the world of Lipsynch.

On this stage, the familiar scenes of our life, through repetition, become not boring but ritualized, and therefore sacred. Especially the sounds we make in our speech and our songs connect us through love, and are also sacred. Our lost ancestral voices are present in our own voices.

In a way, everything we say to each other is just us lipsynching the past we loved and thought we lost. Not to worry.

The production continues June 9-11, 13 & 14. Details here.