Romeo and Juliet at the Brott Festival

This concert took place in the L.R. Wilson Concert Hall at McMaster University. It's not a concert hall, per se, rather a multi-purpose room with rather dead acoustics and a very high ceiling. It seats about 350 and was about half full last night. I sat in the middle, about 5 rows from the stage and the sound from there was just fine since it goes straight up.

The orchestra was a big one with a full string section to balance the winds and percussion, augmented by guest players and the mentors including HPO Concert Master Stephen Sitarski. The National Academy Orchestra's players, however, took the Concert Master and First Seat roles for the solos.

They opened with Mikhail Glinka's Overture to Ruslan and Ludmilla, conducted by assistant conductor Kelly Lin. She led a very convincing performance of the Barber Adagio in a concert last week and this performance was also very impressive and played at break-neck speed. It brought to mind something composer Michael Torke said about writing successful new music for orchestra, that players practice gestures like scales and arpeggios so when they see them in new orchestral music they recognize them as just part of the vocabulary and just play them. Part of the fun of this overture is that the strings, all of them, play high speed scale passages throughout the piece and they clearly didn't challenge them much. It was a sparkling performance.

Conductor Tania Miller came on stage to conduct the next piece, Brahm's Third Symphony. It's wonderful to see these young players take on the challenges of such cornerstones of the 19th Century orchestral repertoire and for seasoned concert goers to be reacquainted with them. I enjoyed this reading of the piece. Some of the woodwind passages in the first movement were unclear. It was likely a balance issue. I was especially impressed with the ending of the slow movement which was magical. I always wait for third movement's heart aching main theme. Brahm's gives a variety of instruments the opportunity to play it as it returns again and again.

The second half was innovative. Veronica Tennant didn't narrate, rather commented  on Sergei Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet Ballet. She told the audience that Juliet was her first leading role as an 18 years old and her last before her retirement 25 years later. Her comments punctuated a dozen movements, played by the orchestra, from suites the composer assembled from the ballet's score, all conducted by Miller. the titles of the movements were projected on a large screen behind the players. However, when they arrived at The Parting of Romeo and Juliet, a film of the scene from the ballet, with Tennant dancing the role of Juliet, was projected. Miller kept the orchestra in sync with the images and the effect was extraordinary and unique. The two following movements was accompanied by still images of Tennant the ballerina.

All and all it was a very good concert varied and balanced and Tania Miller works very well with this group of near-professions and their mentors. 

There are several concerts left the in the summer season and you can find them here.

As I've said before (and will go on saying) these orchestra concerts are a great value and support, not just the Brott Festival, but the performing arts in Hamilton and the dozens of young, aspiring musicians who participate.

Postcards from the Sky: Brott Festival at Church of the Ascension

Last night I attended the first of 4 Brott Festival concerts I’ll see this season. This one, entitled Postcards from the Sky by Candlelight, was held at the 19th century Church of the Ascension in downtown Hamilton. The pews have been replaced with moveable seating and the venue was full on the main level with, I’d estimate, 200 patrons. 

The conductor was Martin MacDonald who was an apprentice to Boris Brott at this festival some years ago and now leads the Cathedral Bluffs Orchestra in Scarborough and Symphony Nova Scotia. It was a program of music for string orchestra, some of it familiar, all of it very accessible.

They opened with Karl Jenkins’ Palladio  which is a modern take on the Concerto Grosso. The opening movement was famously used in a De Beers diamonds ad on TV some years ago. The music is pleasant and repetitive. MacDonald mentioned that it’s standard repertoire for student string orchestras.

Assistant conductor Kelly Lin then lead the orchestra in a very beautiful reading of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. However many times one hears it, it still tugs the heart strings.

The followed it with Edward Elgar’s Serenade for Strings. In the familiar English late romantic style, It provided a nice contrast to the music that preceded it. MacDonald mentioned that it’s standard repertoire for student string orchestras. I’m guessing all of the musicians had played it before.

The solo turn in the concert was taken by the Academy Orchestra’s oboist Marie-Bianca Lebeault in Gabriel’s Oboe from Ennio Morricone’s score for The Mission. It was nicely played and, again, provided a contrast to the other music in the concert. Morricone, by the way, wrote music for more than 400 films and television shows, and more than 100 concert works. He won numerous industry awards including two Oscars.

They finished with Hamilton’s own Marjan Mozetich’s three movement Postcards from the Sky. He has a strong individual voice and has adapted the minimalistic approach in a way that makes the music sound quite different from other composers. The music is euphonious, never jarring, and very enjoyable.

The concert, played without an interval, was done in 70 minutes which was a good thing considering how hot it was in the church. The orchestra, as is always the case with this group, was well prepared and played professionally.

All in all, the Brott Festival orchestral concerts are the best “bang for your buck” value to be found in the Southern Ontario classical and pops music landscape.

They’re back on Thursday, July 3 in the Wilson Concert Hall at McMaster, with a concert featuring Brahm’s 3rd Symphony and selections form Prokofiev’s suites from the Romeo and Juliet ballet narrated by Veronica Tennant.

Brott Music Festival at Theatre Aquarius

Thursday evening we took in another of the "classical" concerts by the National Academy Orchestra, this time at Theatre Aquarius in downtown Hamilton. The main theatre seats about 700 and I would estimate that it was half full, a considerably better crowd than the last of their concerts that we attended. For all that, they were selling off admissions for $10 on the day of the show (not the pricier ones, I hope)

The concert was conducted by Jean-Marie Zeitouni who had conducted the HPO at another show we'd attended (Barber Adagio, Copland Appalachian Spring, Raum Violin Concerto). That was part of the audition parade for the new Music Director of that organization. He didn't get the job which I view as unfortunate as he's qualified, very capable and a Canadian. He's also an engaging speaker and a exuberant conductor.

They opened the concert with Pierre Mercure's Pantomime, a short work for winds and percussion. It's a lovely modernist piece and was a remarkable accomplishment for the 21 year old composer. 

This was followed by Ney Rosauro's Marimba Concerto played by one of the NAO's percussionists, Nathaniel Mears. Mears also plays with the Ottawa and Kingston Symphony Orchestras. His performance was impressive. He's a wonderful marimba player (marimbaist?)

The composer is a marimba virtuoso. The work, in four contrasting movements, demonstrates what the instrument can do. Mears played with both 2 and 4 mallets. There were lots of arpeggios and various scale passages played, sometimes while performing other figures with his other hand. By rapidly re-striking a bar without too much  force, Mears was able to approximate sustain while playing melodies on the instrument while simultaneously performing patterns with the other three mallets.

Each movement had its own mood and overall metre so was quite different from the others. The composer was obviously influenced by Brazilian folk music, jazz and polyrhythmic music using each to good effect. 

The first half ended with Ravel's Ma Mère l'Oye (Mother Goose) Suite. Ravel composed the piece for piano-four-hands (1910) for a friend's children and orchestrated it a year later. It is this version that we heard. He then added additional music and turned it into a ballet.

It's an understated piece containing some really lovely melodies and harmonic effects. The second movement Petit Poucet (Tom Thumb) is so short and similar to the first movement Pavane that I missed it entirely. I wasn't bowled over by the performance, though, and will be interested to hear the HPO play it in their 24/25 season. 

The second half made up for that, however. They played Dvořák's Eighth Symphony and it was a spectacular reading. The work is full of dances, lively rhythms and dazzling melodies.  Zeitouni's clear and animated conducting elicited a very energized performance from these mostly young professional players. None of its four movements ever dragged. The third movement waltz was notably lovely. The brasses, which feature in sections of the work, were especially effective. The second oboe (doubling English Horn) played a beautiful solo. 

Next up in the "classical music" list is a concert at 7:30, Thurs. Aug.1 at Mohawk College (easily accessible from The Linc, by the way).  Artistic Director Tania Miller conducts. They're playing Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un Faune, Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream Overture and the ever popular Firebird Suite by Igor Stravinsky.

Cymbelline at Stratford

We made the 80 minute drive to Stratford yesterday to the see Shakespeare’s Cymbeline performed in the new (to us) Tom Patterson Theatre. Patterson was one of the founders of the festival in the early 1950s. Productions were originally staged in a tent (!) and are now presented at 4 venues. 

The theatre was constructed on the same site as the previous theatre which was, out of festival seasons, a curling rink. The thrust stage and purpose built raked seating were thus re-assembled each spring and taken down in the fall when performances concluded. For all that, it worked very well as a theatre, in spite of its shortcomings, and they resolved that the characteristics of the new performing space would be similar.

The new theatre is spectacular in every way. It is located just metres from the placid Avon River which runs through the city’s downtown and the forecourt is a large garden. The building is fronted by glass curtain walls and contains the well appointed 700 seat theatre, additional public spaces and lounges as well as rehearsal halls.

As for the performance itself, neither of us were familiar with the play. That’s in part why we decided it would be the purpose of our only trip to the festival this year. The play was published in the First Folio of 1623 and is the fifth last that he wrote. It was described then as a tragedy, which it isn’t by any definition, and later as a romance or comedy, both of which it is. The name of the character, Cymbeline is based upon an actual historical king whom Shakespeare discovered in his research and much of the action of the play borrowed from an earlier one.

I won’t get into a synopsis. However, the play employs various devices that will be familiar to anyone who knows Shakespeares oeuvre. There’s a wager regarding the faithfullness of a wife, a woman disguised as a man, mistaken identities, comic characters living in the woods, a potion that makes one appear to be dead, not merely asleep, appearances by the god Jupiter and more.

Moreover, in this production, the king, Cymbeline becomes a queen (played by Lucy Peacock) and his scheming wife becomes a Duke (Rick Roberts). 

There’s a large cast. Standout performances came from Jordin Hall (Posthumus), Tyrone Savage (Lachimo), Christopher Allen (Cloten) and Wahsonntí:io Kirby (Cornelius).

In conclusion, we familiarized ourselves with the play before (and during) the ride to Stratford, always a good policy when attended an unfamiliar classic one (or opera, for that matter). I’m not sure that we’d have gone if we’d known the play at all before we bought the tickets but don’t let that put you off since it was a very entertaining afternoon watching an excellent performance of an outrageous play.

In the end, love conquers all, and they all live happily ever after except for those who die, one of whose headless body plays, in one scene, an important role.

Brott Music Festival at Mac

On Wednesday evening, we attended a performance of the National Academy Orchestra with soloist Ian Parker. They played Rachmaninoff's 2nd Piano Concerto and Brahm's 4th  Symphony as well as Andrew Balfour's Pyotr's Dream for strings. 

We parked on the street, close-by the Sterling Gates, and did not join a throng of other concert goers making their way to the theatre. I'd been forewarned as one of my Facebook friends had been offering comps to the concert. The hall seats 350 and as the concert began, there were might have been 100 people in the audience altogether. This is really quite sad considering what local classical music lovers missed. They will play the same program again tonight, June 27, at the Burlington Performing Arts Center.

The orchestra is comprised of young musicians from across the country but this is not a school orchestra. Many of the players have already graduated and some are pursuing graduate work. I've heard them play some pretty spectacular performances in past years and have a professional calibre live recording of my own F# Minor Piano Concerto with pianist Valerie Tryon.

Tonight they were conducted by this season's Artistic Director Tania Miller and her assistant Emma Colette Moss. 

They opened with the Balfour piece. Coincidentally, the HPO opened their final season concert (Beethoven's 9th) with one of his choral pieces. It was quiet and nicely played and a fitting contrast to the Sturm und Drang that followed. Moss conducted this as well as the first movement of the Rachmaninoff.

I grew up with a recording of the Rachmaninoff concerto played by Van Cliburn. It was so piano-forward that it wasn't until I was in my teens and had a two piano score that I realized that the orchestra, which one could hardly hear, takes the the melodies when the pianist isn't playing them.

Ian Parker must have played this concerto dozens of times. He was certainly comfortable with it and, at times, took the conductor and orchestra along with him. We were 5 rows back, not 25 feet from the keyboard, really a perfect place to watch and hear.

This Steinway has a very percussive sound and the multi-purpose theatre has virtually no ring at all so the performance came off as a little harsh.

As for the orchestra, they coped very well with this warhorse. There were a few miscues and some uneasiness in the winds. The flute soloist has a big beautiful sound and played a couple of gorgeous solos. The strings, as one might expect, don't have the breadth of professional players in spite of the presence of a half dozen pros, the mentors, who played with the youngsters.

The Brahms followed after the interval and it's a big challenge for any orchestra. The first movement went very well as did the second. Miller took the third movement at a surprising clip but everyone kept up. The last movement is the hardest to bring off and didn't seem to hang together as well as the rest of this performance but I'll bet many far more experienced groups have fared far worse.

I don't envy Conductor Miller (or her predecessor Alain Trudel who was only here for one year) following in the footsteps of the absent Maestro who had immense experience, was a crowd-pleasing charismatic speaker and spent much of his career mentoring young players, and growing this orchestra after its founding. 

It was a completely enjoyable concert and I have a list of four more to attend before they wrap it all up in August including Stravinsky's Firebird Suite, Dvorak's 8th Symphony and the one for which I can hardly wait when they close the season, Mahler's 5th Symphony. There's lots more on the website.

Hamilton's Duet Club Women of Song Promo in The Spec

 Here's the link to the piece in the Hamilton Spectator re: The Duet Club's Women of Song and their seasonal concert at which they will première my new piece Winter Reverie.

The Link

Fidelio at the COC

I went to see the COC’s Fidelio production yesterday afternoon. I took the GO train to Union Station, accompanying most the the crowd who headed to the Rogers Centre for the final Blue Jays season game.

I should say, at the outset, that I enjoyed the show a lot and even though I’d read a review was surprised by the production. I’d encourage anyone, opera fan or not, to get down to the Four Seasons Centre before Fidelio closes.

We’d PRVed a European production of the opera which I watched about a month ago. It was recorded from the Mezzo network so there were no subtitles but I found a synopsis of the opera on line easily enough. It was traditional, period production and a decent introduction to a staged version of the opera which I had only known previously through excerpts and the overtures.

There are good reasons Fidelio, Beethoven’s only opera, is not produced as often as one might expect with the composer being so high in the pantheon of “classical” composers. The story is a combination of domestic comedy and high melodrama involving truly horrifying torture and murder. The ingenue is unbelievably naive and gormless. The villain is a raving monster. Other operas, however, are more often performed even though they have similar shortcomings.

The problem with Fidelio is that its composer was not a man of the theatre. Many of the numbers in this singspiel are structured like instrumental pieces. Beethoven’s forms are often based upon exposition, repetition and variation. I can imagine the composer playing his music over on the piano and recognizing that, formally, whole sections of the arias and ensembles needed to be repeated. We accept this, expect it, in concert music. 

The problem is that once the text has been covered once or perhaps repeated a couple of times for emphasis its dramatic purpose has been served. However in this opera, even though the theatrical role of the text has already played out, Beethoven’s music hasn’t finished so the music carries on to its formal conclusion.

Stage director Johannes Debus deals with this inherent problem with Fidelio effectively. The set is a huge, square two-level building on a turntable that rotates the sides and back turning to face the stage providing, in effect, four different sets. Moreover, a scene can be playing out above while the music’s drama happens below.

Debus’ jail is a busy place. There are other staff in the office that is the set of most of the first act and they get on with their jobs while the principals play their parts. When the music becomes repetitive there’s other stuff going on elsewhere on the stage, something else to look at while listening to the beautiful music. Only in the second act, set in the dungeon, is all still elsewhere on the stage.

The opera opens with the young tenor (and office manager in this production) repeatedly begging his boss’s daughter, the ingenue, to marrying him. She also works in the office and refuses his appeals over and over again. We learn later in the scene that it isn’t that she doesn’t like him but rather that she likes her father’s assistant better and would rather marry him. 

I expected the ingenue to be a soubrette soprano and the tenor a light lyric but both Anna-Sophie Neher and Josh Lovell have bigger voices than that. Once we encounter the leading singers soprano Miina-Liisa Värelà and tenor Clay Hilley the casting becomes clear. They are both Wagnerian singers with big voices. Värelà has sung Ortrud and Sieglinde. Hilley has sung Siegfried at Bayreuth.

Since there is lots of ensemble singing in Fidelio and all of the voices have to be able to balance those of the leading singers. A regular soubrette or light lyric tenor would be inaudible.

The singers were uniformly excellent. Johannes Martin Kränzle plays an almost cartoonishly evil Don Pizzaro, spot-lit, standing alone on the edge of a staircase on the outside of the stage in a white shirt and tie, raving and singing up a storm.  

The big chorus was very impressive and, with the addition of numerous supernumeraries, filled the stage in the crowd scenes. There are also big TVs in the set, projections and effects that bathe the players and sometimes the audience in light.

There are five more performance. https://my.coc.ca/overview/2066