Saturday, May 30, 2009. Enwave Theatre, Toronto

Being in the concert hall while Eve Egoyan plays the 12 movements of Ann Southam’s Simple Lines of Enquiry for solo piano is like being in an art gallery where 12 abstract canvases hang on white walls. The 12 movements of Simple Lines ‘depict’ slight-to-subtle variations of seemingly similar musical lines, hues and tonal materials. And, just as the experience of visual art occurs in a silent gallery, so the experience of this musical event, these sound paintings generate an atmosphere of silence.

Southam’s composition is atonal, minimalist, serial. Typically, you hear Ms. Egoyan play a cluster of 5-10 notes which are allowed to hang in the air, mingle their overtones, and fade away into near silence before she resumes her attack on the next cluster. These tone rows vibrating from the box of the fabulous Fazioli piano are like beads of different sizes, threaded at varying intervals along a continuity of overtones that seems to emerge as a principle subject of the music—a simple line of enquiry.

The melodies, such as they are, involve much repetition, like a lullaby. The end effect is to focus the mind and relax it at the same time, creating a steady state that binds the attack and flux of each note and each cluster together as a thing itself. This results in a kind of melting of the affections, as if Ms. Egoyan’s concentrated discipline develops a musical posture that enables a sense of fluidity to flow towards relaxation and the possibility of bliss.

The initial movements of Southam’s composition takes place more in the middle toward the high end of the keyboard. The later movements move the energy toward the deep end and facilitate that melting. As the piece progresses, there seems to emerge out the monochromatic subtleties of the tone rows, hints of romanticism. Out of the abstract purity of the music, nuances of narrative, passionate and dramatic arise as fleetingly glimpses, then subside into the coolness of abstraction.

As the in title Ms.Southam gave her work, this was the performance of an ‘Enquiry’, rather than a statement of anything. Her openness, and Ms. Egoyan’s daring presentation of the simple black and white of the music, remain appealing and memorable in my mind.

For more information about the Centrediscs recording of Ms. Egoyan’s performance of SIMPLE LINES OF ENQUIRY, please goto
www.centrediscs.ca

May 26, 2009, Factory Studio Theatre, Toronto.

Cowboys and Indians ( A person of colour stuck in the Wild West) deserved all the applause.

Anand Rajaram’s one-person performance was funny, abundantly physical, and very entertaining. But he had help.

Bob Wiseman’s bluesy score and keyboard grooves provided just the right emphasis for this skewed story about cultural identity — Who? and Where? is the Indian?

Many times, it was like watching a silent movie as the rousing piano played to the silent and busy actor on stage.

Dressed in a hat and brown jacket as the Cowboy; or dressed in beige trousers and an East Indian shirt as the Indian, Rajaram approached these mythological roles with a direct and sure sense of physical comedy.

As he mimed scenes from the Wild West — scenes like Indians on the warpath, a Tenderfoot stepping in horse turds, or the classic shoot ‘em up in a Western bar — Rajaram’s face, torso, arms and legs, became the main attraction and occasionally the sense of a story line got lost. This was not necessarily a bad thing.

Based on the ‘fish out of water’ story, Cowboys and Indians played out as an entertaining East-Western show that, all the same, started to feel a little overlong.

But praise for Rajaram’s craft — the silent clown-mime tradition — is absolutely mandatory.

He depicted the loaded cultural myths of the Wild West with energy, humour, charm, and simplicity.

David Fujino is an actor, poet, and musician.

Friday, May 1, 2009, Jane Mallett Theatre, Toronto.

The highlight of Esprit Orchestra’s Mayday celebration was a performance of the late Maki Ishii’s Saidoki (Demon) for solo percussion and orchestra (1992) featuring Ryan Scott. The demands of Ishii’s score kept Mr. Scott, busier than a six-armed demon selecting the right implement to strike/rub/rattle/shake the right instrument. He is pictured here coaxing subtle sonic colours out of a pair of ‘cidelos’, rectangular metal boxes with ornate cuts made in their top surfaces that produce a rich array of pitches when struck. A lot of audience attention went into watching and wondering what Scott would do next and how he could manage the multitude of changes. His virtuosity was warmly rewarded with repeated ovations.

Ishii’s music, which employs close to 60 musicians (onstage, below stage, and a big brass band behind the audience) combines Western and traditional Japanese compositional methods. I imagine Saidoki as the music of subatomic quantum spaces, the dance of quantum froth, which is to say, the music is intriguing but enigmatic, till the end, when Scott goes crazy on the tom-toms and the big brass behind blares, and the whole orchestra including 5 other percussionists pull out all the stops, then it’s May Day, May Day May Day.

Erica Goodman is one of the dedicatees of Chris Paul Harman’s Gott Lebet Noch (2008) concerto for harp and orchestra. Harman’s composition is based on a Bach chorale of the same name (eng: God Still Lives). Of his treatment of Bach, Harman says he has done some “reharmonization, fragmentation, chromatic melody alteration, retrogrades of individual phrases, layering of canons, registral displacement and extreme changes in tempi….” Because Harman did not write in extended techniques for the harp, we heard its natural timbral qualities and a sense of Bach mingle with the rarified orchestral dissonances, discords, percussive sonic booms, clangs, jangles, moaning winds and keening strings. The idea occurred that the modern title could be God Still Lives (or Not). Ms. Goodman’s extreme exertions were warmly applauded, and the piece’s other dedicatees, Alex Pauk and the Esprit Orchestra offered a bonus performance of  “Brazil”, a 1944 Academy Award nominated tune by Ary Barroso that was a lot of fun.

The Nathaniel Dett Chorale featured powerfully in Discouraged Passion (2009) by Esprit resident composer Douglas Schmidt. Schmidt’s music, which is percussively rhythmic, high-spirited and engaging, is based on a 19th Century Brazilian tango lyric sung by a lover who is breaking up with his girlfriend because he hates her family. Schmidt on his bandeon, the hand organ popularized in South American brothels, adds virtuosic bounce to the rich harmonies of orchestra and chorus. His music is interesting and entertaining.

Thursday, April 30, 2009, Jane Mallett Theatre, Toronto.

What’s new and exciting? The Tokyo String Quartet playing Beethoven’s early Quartets! These pieces have the energy of a twenty-something Beethoven who was making a name for himself in Vienna as an exciting pianist. They radiate the confidence of a composer who has already published piano and string trios, sonatas for cello and piano (including the “Pathetique”), and who was ready to take a bite at the big apple of string quartets dominated by Haydn and the ghost of Mozart. The Quartets of Op. 18 sing of this radiant energy, and in them there also sounds the retreat, the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,” of Beethoven’s ability to hear the world around him. These are the elements of musical drama that the Tokyo String Quartet makes vivid with the highest standard of fidelity.

Tonight they performed the final three quartet of this Opus. Martin Beaver’s first violin opens the “Allegro” of No. 4 in C Minor with mournful, rising upper register intervals that burn with longing, perhaps for deliverance from the curse of deafness intimated by the unremitting dark strokes of Clive Greensmith’s cello. The richness of this music takes over the mind and one can barely restrain the urge to applaud after the first movement. The second movement, “Andante scherzoso” is a kind of blue tune that works itself out in counterpoint as a canon and has the feeling of laughing just to keep from crying. There is a kind of tense pussy-footing repressed energy interwoven with a ticking-of-time measure that is quite thrilling. The “Menuetto” is colourful and controlled. The “Finale,” a rondo with a gypsy bounce that nods to Haydn, is based on fast and furiously paced fiddling that lifts the spirits and the imagination to a festive scene.

The Quartet in A. Op. 18, No.5 is said to be modeled on Mozart’s quartet in the same key, K. 464. Mindful of Mozart’s supremacy in blending character and music, you can hear in Beethoven’s work the cadences of a highly ornamented melody telling a story for musical theatre satirizing the encounter of worldly doom that stalks a naïve youth. The darkish emotionality of the poignant second movement sings and dances, while the more restrained third movement, a “Theme and variations” marked ‘Andante cantabile’, sings with a kind of homesick heart that looks ahead to Schubert. The “Finale” opens with a carefree melody but dies away singing a farewell motif.

The opening theme of the 6th quartet in the series has the gaiety of a Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, as the first violin flies over the plodding cello. The second theme is slow and serious, preparing the way for the famous “La Malinconia” movement in the third. The “Adagio” begins slowly in a mood of relaxation induced by the interplay of violins, but the second theme, announced by the groaning cello introduces previously unheard weird harmonies  that darken further as the key goes into minor. From here, the music jerks into a vigorous, rhyming scherzo, celebrating normalcy, as it were, and out of that, without warning, enters the music of sorrow made manifest: “La Malinconia.” Time hanging heavily on it like chains of captive who can barely drag himself along to his doom. The music sounds the rusty hinges of a huge door slowly shutting out life, enclosing weakness and despair.

The drama that follows is signature Beethoven. Light blasts in, darkness dims it; gaiety and dance re-surge, only to collapse into brooding depression. After several of these alternations each mood begins to take on the qualities of the other until a rich harmony becomes clarified. The movement ends in the wild riot of a prestissimo, a flight so rapid it brings in its wake the question, ‘a flight from what?’.

This was a performance that excites the imagination and whets the appetite for next year’s series in Toronto when the Tokyo String Quartet will illuminate the string quartets of Beethoven’s middle period.

Tuesday, April 29, 2009, Roy Thompson Hall, Toronto

Maestro Spivakov’s style of conducting is elegant and flowing as he demonstrates from the podium a full range of emotions. The orchestra follows like a ship before the wind. The string sound has a lustrous beauty; interjections of the winds and horns are perfectly clear; the low-register basses and brass add rich photographic blacks to the musical picture. The program of overly familiar compositions turns out to be full of springlike excitement and fresh insights.

The first of four pieces from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet Suite, “Montagues and Capulets,” is a space in which power circulates like the strutting Boyars entering the feast in Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible. Taking the same theme, the woodwinds manipulate it to introduce the youthful lovers as gentler reflections of their hostile clans. Their playing of the “Death of Tybalt” echoes forward and westward 25 years and predicts the amazing textures, harmonies, and moves of Bernstein’s West Side Story.

Under Spivakov’s baton, this orchestra shows a mastery of transitions, swift yet finely graded, that bring out new understandings of musical dramas. In the last third of Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Fantasy-Overture, as the final statement of the lover’s theme dissolves into the pounding music of clan violence that destroys them, you can hear how the power a family accumulates mutates into pride and how that pride darkens into a walking sense of doom out which, strangely, pours a melting stream of love that gleams for a short time and is overcome.

Denis Matsuev refired the concerto “that was heard ‘round the world”– Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto, Op. 1 (Van Cliburn ‘fired’ it first in Moscow during the height of Cold War and won the International Tchaikovsky Competition). Matsuev took charge of the work with sparkling finger work in the rolling introduction, then got deeply involved with the moody cadenza that soon followed. His Steinway, selected and borrowed for the occasion from Remenyi’s, rang like a bell. The orchestra worked with him bringing spring colours, fresh and vibrant, to Rachmaninoff’s earliest work. Between them, they developed a dramatic interpretation of the rhapsodic themes that was delicate, with a youthful fleetness.

The short slow movement, Chopinesque and Disneyesque, moved without rest into the ‘Allegro scherzando/vivace’. Matsuev, ever the showman, came out of the gate like a rabbit, melted down a bit during the following romantic section (redolent of Grieg), and rebuilt a dazzling pace towards a coherent and satisfying climax. His encore, a kind of black and white Sumi-e heavy ink-brush variation of a theme from Peer Gynt stunned the audience deeper into ecstasy. Spivakov offered three encores of music that danced and made us feel we were at a party and having a really good time.