February 3, 2013. Betty Oliphant Theatre, Toronto.
The Imagist poet William Carlos Williams wrote “so much depends upon a red wheel barrow”. Modern music composed in Canada “so much depends upon” John Weinzweig, who first brought modern compositional techniques to Canada in the 1940s and taught them to virtually everybody until his passing in 2006. One work from the “Then” category we heard tonight was Weinzweig’s Trio Interplay (1998) – twelve dialogues between the elephantine tuba, the agile piccolo, and the ubiquitous piano. Individual dialogues have titles like: “Clang, Clang!”, “Flippant”, “Soliloquy”, “Repartee”, “Pas-de-deux”, and “Theyʼre off!” Some of their interplay is argumentative, some belligerent, some friendly. All are artful and many, being anthropomorphic, are funny. READ THE FULL REVIEW HERE.