Evgeny Kissin and Sir Andrew Davis at the TSO reviewed by Stanley Fefferman

Posted on May 18, 2012 by Stanley Fefferman

May 17, 2012. Roy Thomson Hall, Toronto.

Edvard Grieg was 25 and newly married the summer he composed his one and only Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 16. I remember listening to Eugene Ormandy’s recording with Arthur Rubenstein on my honeymoon in the Laurentians.

The Grieg always speaks to me of young love. Perhaps that is why it is one of the most frequently played piano concertos in the world. And perhaps, because it is such a safe crowd-pleaser, Evgeny Kissin and Sir Andrew Davis decided to take a few chances with their performance of it with the TSO.

Sir Andrew reined in his orchestra to a slower than usual tempo, letting the timpani roll spread without anticipation. Kissin’s entrance was understated, a gentle balance of lyrical and rhythmic values. His runs are crystalline, rising imperceptibly to crescendo and fading to the barest whisper, avoiding sentimentality at every turn. Especially in the climactic first-movement cadenza, it was not the bravura but the ease of his virtuosity that gave most pleasure.

The Adagio brought to mind the word ‘compassion.’ I enjoyed, as if for the first time, the gentle interplay of piano with lyric flute, sustained horn and cello breathing kisses to joy on the wing.

Kissin brought surprising depth and emotion to the folkish dance melodies of the finale, and played with the orchestra to broaden the mood at the Concerto’s anthemic conclusion from lyricism to reverence.

This performance honoured the courage of young love.

Kissin’s encore, Grieg’s Aus dem Karneval, op.19/3, showcased this pianist’s talent in weaving musical lines, thick and thin, opaque and transparent, into melodic forms like flights of larks magically shaped by the wind.

Sir Andrew, a former conductor of the TSO (1975-’88) and currently in Toronto conducting the Canadian Opera Company, balanced the program with 40 minutes of music from the lighter side of Richard Straus: Don Juan, and Suite from Der Rosenkavalier, featuring nice work from TSO soloists, particularly concertmaster Jonathan Crow, and Oboist Sarah Jeffrey.

Davis, Strauss, and the TSO cook up a rare feast of orchestration. Sit down and enjoy it if you can at Saturday evening’s encore. For more details and ticket information, click here.

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Corigliano’s Clarinet Concerto & Holst’s The Planets @ TSO reviewed by Stanley Fefferman

Posted on May 10, 2012 by Stanley Fefferman

May 9, 2012. Roy Thomson Hall, Toronto.

John Corigliano’s Clarinet Concerto generates tremendous excitement. The writing and instrumentation are so original that you cannot anticipate what’s coming; but the changes always surprise by their rightness and beauty. Corigliano consistently delivers the pleasure of the unexpected.

The composer himself must still be excited by this work which premièred in 1977, because he travelled here to introduce Joaquin Valdepeñas performance of it with the TSO, Peter Oundjian conducting.

There are three kinds of homage built into the work. The first movement, entitled “Cadenza,” is an homage to the virtuosity of Stanley Drucker, principal clarinet of the New York Philharmonic whose performance of the opening cadenza—150 notes played with 1 breath—Corigliano compared to the breaking of the 4 minute mile. Valdepeñas accomplished that and every other virtuosic challenge with ease, and also impressed with his extraordinary tone, warm and smooth as human flesh.

The second movement, entitled “Elegy,” is an homage to the composer’s father who was concertmaster of the New York Phil for 26 years. Unaccompanied violins introduce the slow, sad, clarinet solo of exquisite beauty, stirring the lower strings to spread a deep, Brahmsian moan. The music floats and drifts into a dialogue between clarinet and solo violin played by Mark Skazinetsky. The movement concludes by rounding back to its beginning.

The third movement, entitled “Antiphonal Toccata” opens with a quote from a piece by Giovanni Gabrieli (1597). Corigliano drew on Gabrieli’s brilliant use of antiphonal instrumental choirs arranged for effect all around the performance space. Thus onstage conversations between solo clarinet and onstage brass—trumpets and trombones are answered by brass players situated offstage, side, centre, and rear of the hall, echoing and re-echoing lines of a descending canon.

The effect is an exuberant pandemonium, with the conductor at its centre, going all Prospero, stabbing his wand into the air towards a circle of minions in the space above him who release sonic bursts at his command.  The audience, roused by the challenge of this music, rose repeatedly to its feet to offer ovations.

The music after intermission offered comfort after the earlier challenge: The Planets, by Gustave Holst (1920), recently recorded by Oundjian and the TSO. This is program music, fun to follow: fanfares and martial airs develop into menacing assault of drums—the planet Mars; a horn theme rippling out ever expanding liquid rings of warmth—the planet Venus (with lovely work from cello and celeste); Mercury, jaunty and fleet as Morse code, sets pulses running; Jovial Jupiter, a parade of clowns swelling into a much repeated anthem to collective joys; the low groans and tolling chimes of Saturn, bringer of sour old age; the urban swagger of streetwise Uranus the Magician; and twilight zone tones of Neptune, the Mystic.

To go back to the very beginning of the concert for the evening’s most memorable single moment, that would be when the stage-lights and house-lights dimmed out the orchestra and all the patrons. Spotlights above the stage revealed 8 brassplayers, 4 in each choirloft stage-right and stage-left. They performed Gabrieli’s Canzon per sonare No. 27, an antiphonal work redolent of antique heraldry. Very tonic.

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Yuri Bashmets’ Moscow Soloists and Mischa Maisky reviewed by Stanley Fefferman

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Stanley Fefferman

May 3, 2012. Roy Thomson Hall, Toronto.

Show One Productions presented The Moscow Soloists Chamber Orchestra with their founder, Yuri Bashmet, as conductor and viola soloist. Bashmet conducts with bare hands, frequently raising them open, palms up, and in towards himself as if he were asking the ensemble to fill him with the music. Together they demonstrate remarkable control in shaping dynamics that can swell to ardent fullness and fade away to a barely audible whisper.

They gave deeply satisfying accounts of two specially arranged works: Mahler’s arrangement for chamber orchestra of Schubert’s String Quartet in D, D.810 “Death and the Maiden”; and the Brahms Quintet for Clarinet and Strings No. 1 in B Minor, Opus 115, arranged for viola by the remarkable Mr. Bashmet. Both  are very late works, made when their respective composers were full of intimations of the end of life. The emotional depth in these works was played with unreserved Slavic emotionality that gained extra richness and weight from the Chamber Orchestra format. The cost of this gain was a loss of the sinuous bite you get from a string quartet’s conversation, and the loss of the clarinet’s unique voice as it soars alone among and above the strings, whereas the viola’s timbre, warm and rich as it is in Bashmet’s hands, frequently merges with with the flock.

The legendary cellist Mischa Maisky, currently on this tour with The Moscow Soloists, appeared on a Toronto stage for the first time in nearly  30 years attired in a loose electric blue silk tunic. Everything about Mr. Maisky is markedly expressive, including his animated bodily expressions during rests when he is listening to the orchestra , and his vivid vibrato. I found his work insightful as he brought out the nostalgic smile that lurks behind loss in the melancholy depths of Tchaikovsky’s Nocturne in D for Cello and Orchestra, Op. 19, No. 4.  Mr. Maisky’s approach is passionate, enlivened by a devil-may-care virtuosity, and makes for a persuasive performance.

Bringing his unrestrained approach to the stepwise measures of  Haydn’s Cello Concerto No 1 in C, arranged for strings, Maisky’ cello utters an earthy, low register growl before launching a highly vibratoed singing line towards short cadenzas that stood out as individual and rather romantic. He took legato liberties with the Adagio often joining the light melodic lines. The cello’s imitation of the ensemble’s phrases was stately and graceful as the progress of a swan on tranquil water. The final Allegro Molto was exuberant and showy in a pleasing way. Not much classical restraint—as far as you can get from a performance on traditional instruments—but  all the same, good for the heart.

As I postscript, I note the outstanding solo work by the anonymous concertmaster; the arresting duos of viola and cello in the Allegro of the Brahms, as well as the cello solo in the concluding Con Moto. Finally, how nice it was to end an evening of serious music with smiles and laughter as the Moscow Soloists celebrated their 20th anniversary with  three hilarious variations of “Happy Birthday” played as a Polka, a Tango and a Csárdas. Hey!

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Windermere String Quartet’s Latest on Period Instruments reviewed by Stanley Fefferman

Posted on April 30, 2012 by Stanley Fefferman

Windemere String Quartet (on period instruments): The Golden Age of String Quartets. Pipistrelle Music, 2012.

I listened to this very focused disc with increasing interest.  Persuasive care went into the Windermere’s choice and preparation of classical period quartets they accord “historically informed performance on period instruments.” Haydn’s E-flat Op. 33 No. 2 (The Joke), written as he was freeing himself from noble bondage to the Esterhazy, is a step forward into contrapuntal complexity and subtle instrumental relationships that are much enhanced by period instruments. Mozart’s K465 “Dissonance,” was for him also ground-breaking, blending Bachian counterpoint with dialogues we find later in The Marriage of Figaro. The Beethoven C Minor Op.18, No. 4 shows a comic disregard of formalities, particularly in the backtalk that goes on among all four instruments. Period instrument construction, which favours staccato over legato playing makes the individual voices stand out, as opposed to the modern instrument ensembles that produce a burnished, harmonic blending. So, if you incline towards the gritty, whiney, grainy, breathy, bagpipe-ish sound of gut strings, you will surely recognize the distinctive contribution each player makes to the lively conversations recorded here. The Windermere’s approach has an attractive, earthy honesty most suited to the Haydn: the Mozart and Beethoven, to my mind, enjoy the brilliance provided by modern strings. Well engineered and recorded, this disc will reward repeated listening. The Windermere String Quartet is: Rona Goldensher, violin: Elizabeth Loewen Andrews, violin :Anthony Rapoport, viola: Laura Jones, cello. http://windermere.braveform.com/

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Itzhak Perlman Music Program Debut @ Koerner Hall reviewed by Stanley Fefferman

Posted on April 29, 2012 by Stanley Fefferman

April 29, 2012. Koerner Hall, Toronto.

About this time of year, 225 years ago, when he composed the Viola Quintet in G Minor, K. 516, Mozart said in a letter that he often felt like dying, but that no one ever saw him crying. It is not immediately evident what Itzhak Perlman’s rationale was when he chose this piece to open this concert where he led his Music Program students.

The rationale for the other two pieces finding their way onto a program featuring young players seems easier to fathom. Dimitri Shostakovich composed his Prelude and Scherzo for String Octet, Op. 11 when he was 19, but you’d never know it. Felix Mendelssohn composed his String Octet in E-flat Major, Op. 20, when he was only 16, but you’d never know it either. Both have proven to be works of genius that have transcended their origins  and been accepted into the standard repertoire.

Itzhak led the Mozart and the Mendelssohn from the first violin’s chair, shepherding his students with cues and inspired playing through faultless performances. On the other hand, eight of his students took the Shostakovich on their own, and if they were somebody’s students, you’d never know it. In fact, typically, students like cellist Jia Kim and violinist Sean Lee are already well advanced on an international level in their professional careers, and have students of their own.

On the whole, the afternoon was a succession of delightful surprises, starting with the Mozart which started out with slippery emotional lines fragmenting as they fell downwards towards despair. But as the ensemble carried the work forward through the lyrical Adagio, the sheer pleasure of the players, most visible in Itzhak and Ms. Kim, began to overtake the heaviness, and the Allegro Finale surrenders to Mozart’s brimming lightheartedness.

There were moments during the first movement when the ensemble’s repeats of phrases initiated by the first violin seemed a bit mechanical, but that impression vanished quickly and never returned.

The Shostakovich, with Sean Lee in first chair soloing impressively, was a feast of dire states of mind curling through eerie, shrill dissonances that set your teeth deliciously on edge, till the Scherzo broke in with a wild dance and the ensemble galloped from crescendo to climax.

After intermission, it was the Mendelssohn Octet with Itzhak again in first chair leading the music from a Haydnesque call and response into a wide, rich, flowing river of music that sometimes subsides into the sad, deep breathing of cellos then ramps up swirling eddys of Beethovenian rhythms.

The Andante is a polyphonic elegy, more colourful than shapely. The Scherzo moves staccato but lightly, literally spritely like Shakepeare’s Ariel, only to be blown away by a musical joke. The Presto’s initial moves are oafish. It thunders and stamps its way into a frantic perpetual motion and closes, after a brilliant cadenza, in a long, slow, unbridled symphonic rush.

This musical afternoon that so moved from darkness to light brought the audience to its feet for three bows. Since there was no encore, I will be patient till I can hear more of Itzhak and his Perlman Music program in Toronto.

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Less than Three <3 : Ori Dagan’s second CD reviewed by Stanley Fefferman

Posted on April 29, 2012 by Stanley Fefferman

Ori Dagan’s Less than Three <3, ScatCat Records, features the young crooner’s talents as vocalist, scat-singer, composer and arranger. The setlist includes three originals, two in Hebrew, one in English (“Googleable”) with pianist Mark Kieswetter; covers of tunes associated with Sinatra, Gaga, Elton John, Madonna, and for old time’s sake, “Sweet Georgia Brown.”

Ori’s baritone is syrupy smooth viola-mellow, comfortably seeking the middle register. His phrasing can be daringly improvisational, with a tendency to round off corners to support that smooth effect he’s after. He can scat fast, no doubt about it, and he has a sense of fun. I’m not crazy about smooth, but a direct thing in his approach is attractive.

Less than Three <3 has an all-star musical crew including the aforementioned Mark Kieswetter, piano; Ross MacIntyre, bass; Nick Fraser, drums; Chris Gale, tenor saxophone; with special guest Jane Bunnett on soprano saxophone.

This album, Ori Dagan’s second, is by design less than jazz, more something-for-everyone, especially lovers.

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“Small is Beautiful”: Yoko Hirota’s New Music Concerts recital at Gallery 345 reviewed by Stanley Fefferman

Posted on April 28, 2012 by Stanley Fefferman

April 27, 2012. Gallery 345, Toronto.

Yoko Hirota enjoys the freedom of  not letting her right hand know what her left hand is doing.

She shared her delight  by playing the opening bars of Sungods (2007) by Brian Current, her right hand going in 12/8 time, her left in 4/4. Ms. Hirota’s hands interwove the lyric sonorities of Current’s lines into a dense, lush, rhapsodic, tapestry.

Ms. Hirota demystified the structure of Bruce Mather’s Fantasy (1967) by demonstrating each of its four layers of counterpoint separately and together. She then played the work with great sensitivity to differences in register, dynamics and rhythm, giving us a dreamy, organic, watery piece of music notable for how the high notes skitter like water-flies over darker tones of long duration held till they come to rest. If Fantasy were a jazz tune, it might be “Misty,” or “Tenderly.”

Trinomes (2011), François Morel’s first piano work in nearly 50 years, written for Ms. Hirota, is an imaginative and persuasive work. It opens with gnarly grunts and shifting rhythms, evoking for me, as it develops, the tangled triplex backyard balconies of wintery Old Montreal crossed by clotheslines where billowing bedsheets freeze.

Robert Lemay, who is Morel’s student and Ms. Hirota’s partner, composed the four-part Hiroshima Mon Amour (1998) as an homage to the  1959 film. Lemay’s work builds on the resounding C of the peace bell tolling repeatedly as thuds of disaster fall from the sky onto scenes of panicky beings who scamper away from the doom wafting down in radioactive flutters. The closing tone is a weirdly ruinous hand-plucked harmonic on the peace bell C. This performance got a strong ovation.

Yoko Hirota gave Brian Cherney’s 14′ Nachtstüke: six miniatures for piano (2011) its world première. Each miniature is based on a spacey, mystical piece of literature, and is separated from the others by a repeated one-chord interlude that endures for 45 seconds. This is a high-minded work, inclining towards spirituality, though there is a portentous sameness to the first five pieces. The sixth, based on a passage from James Joyce’s story “The Dead,” stands out for its sensitive tentativeness and a peacefulness that was quite wonderful.

Laurie Radford’s Rolling (1997) is accompanied in the program by a piece of his own poetry that describes the work in phrases like: ” …slivers of energy/riding the gusts earthward,/ misshapen mirrors shattering with motor-like precision/into fragments of reflection….”

It builds from an ostinato ‘chopsticks’ rhythm, adding pitches to a staccato morse code message gradually rolling into chords that engage the richness of the entire keyboard. Towards the end, the work develops some imaginative black and white effects like the shadow of tree branches falling across the bars of light shining through metal fence railings.

Mr. Hirota is a Schoenberg specialist, and she opened her recital with Fünfe Klavierstucke (1923),  the set that ends with Schoenberg’s first, revolutionary, 12-note cell of serial music. The work is too well-known to need any comment on it here. However Yoko Hirota’s performance was quite magical.

As she began to develop the pitches of the slow opening melody into variations by moving them to different octaves and changing their shape and rhythm, I happened to glance over the audience and noticed the accordionist Joseph Macerollo. From that moment I began to hear the piano as if it were an accordion. I offer this anecdote as tribute to the special sensitivity of Ms. Hirota’s touch, and the sinuosity of her flow.

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Itzhak Perlman and the TSO’s Beethoven Violin Concerto reviewed by Stanley Fefferman

Posted on April 26, 2012 by Stanley Fefferman

April 25, 2012. Roy Thomson Hall, Toronto

An explosion of brass in waltz-time opened the evening into a Russian grand ballroom, the festive  atmosphere darkened by insidious currents of paranoia. Selections from Aram Khachaturian’s Suite from Masquerade and Spartacus (1944) continued with concertmaster Jonathan Crow’s sweetly nostalgic solo on”Nocturne”, followed by a second orchestral waltz, this one a whirlwind of strings excited by tambourines, xylophone, timpani, cymbals and snares.

Tchaikovsky’s Francesca da Rimini, Symphonic Fantasy after Dante, Op.32 (1876) depicts a whirlwind blowing through the gloom of Hell where Dante meets the adulterous lovers Paulo and Francesca. The TSO’s big brass and percussion sections emit a tumult, deep, richly modulated and perfect in timing that alternates with sad, keening of winds and strings until Maestro Oundjian calls the orchestra to change mood.

Joaquin Valdepeñas’ solo clarinet sings soft and eerie, followed by a succession of flutes, oboes and strings who tell, in the heartbreakingly beautiful melody of the andante cantabile, the lovers’ sorrowful tale. Their recitation is lyrical and lovely, with flutey birds and breezes blowing over pastoral meadows. The orchestral sound is smooth, well-oiled, silky as a lover’s skin. The hellish winds return: the lovers’ music fades and is obliterated by the furious conclusion.

This first half of the program showed how gloriously satisfying it is to ride the big wave of a fine orchestra. After intermission, a leaner orchestra took the stage to partner master fiddler Itzhak Perlman’s recital of Beethoven’s noble Violin Concerto in D minor, Op. 61.

A heartbeat by timpani and basses sculpted by Maestro Oundjian to resound in the space of the hall sets an orchestral ground, over which Mr. Perlman’s smooth, glassy highs trill and swoop like a skylark. The interplay of orchestra and soloist has just the right balance of lyricism, heartbreak, and thunder: virtuosity and order.

The slow movement is a stately procession, notable for the soft breathing of the horns that moves the music into the sublime, and somehow the word ‘holy’ comes to mind. The third movement is a dance of celebration, sprightly but without abandon. The lyrical counterpoint between violin and bassoon, the variations on a hunting theme by Mr. Perlman and orchestra, and his cadenza that follows are all felt strongly, but not too strongly. There is passion, and there is also restraint. There is virtuosity, but without any show at all. It is the classicism of Beethoven we heard.

There was a sanity in the music that lent a kind of elegance to the repeated standing ovations.

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