Tchaikovsky at the HPO

We took in the Hamilton Philharmonic’s first concert of 2015 last night (Sat. Jan. 17) in the Great Hall at Hamilton Place. The second balcony was occupied by students and alumni of McMaster University as the orchestra continues its practice of reaching out to the wider community in an effort to build their audience and subscriber base.

The conductor was Music Director Candidate Theodore Kuchar. He’s presently the Music Director and Conductor of the Fresno Philharmonic and the Reno Chamber Orchestra. He has, in the past, performed the same role for the Janáček Philharmonic (formerly the Czech Radio Orchestra) and the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine. He’s also conducted recordings of more than 90 CDs.

The program was comprised of the overture to Verdi's La Forza Del Destino, Glazunov’s Violin Concerto and Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony. On this occasion there were twenty violins to balance the full orchestral winds and percussion. 

They opened with the Verdi overture. There was good definition in the playing. Verdi’s counterpoint between the sections was clear. However, the brasses and percussion overwhelmed the strings when they played together. The overall effect seemed to lack cohesion and didn’t seem sufficiently lyrical. The oboe solos were handled nicely Jon Peterson.

I’d taken the precaution of listening to the unfamiliar Glazunov piece ahead of time. It’s in four movements but is played without a break. My impression at the end of the performance was the same as I’d had after listening to the recording. It’s sophisticated music, craftsmanly and well worked out, but not very memorable. The influential composer Rimsky-Korsakov was Glazunov’s teacher and Glazunov succeeded him as Principal of the St. Petersburg Conservatory.

Corey Cerovsek

Soloist Corey Cerovsek played beautifully although not as impressively as Blake Pouliot had done with the Mendelssohn concerto a couple of months ago. Some might be troubled by Cerovsek’s pronounced vibrato, although I was not. This concerto includes some marvellous overtone passages and also stretches of impressively executed double stops. 

After the break, the orchestra played Tchaikovsky’s final symphony. I don’t enjoy Tchaikovsky’s music as I did when I was a young person and hadn’t a very wide musical experience. It is ideal music for someone just beginning to listen to serious music. Today I find it overly sentimental and unbearably repetitive. These are precisely the characteristics that appeal to those who love this music.

For all that, the orchestra made a fine sound throughout. The strings produced the lush sound the music requires particularly when the violins played unison lines. First bassoonist Melanie Eyers made the most of her solos. First clarinetist Stephen Pierre played convincingly throughout the concert. 

Some of the audience applauded each movement. This was especially annoying after the third movement march which ends triumphantly and should lead quietly and seamlessly into the tragic Adagio Lamentoso of the finale. I suspect many in the hall thought the symphony had ended. I wonder whether they were surprised or disappointed when the orchestra began to play again.

Altogether this was the least engaging of the four concerts we have heard this season although some of that is attributable to personal taste. Tchaikovsky is back in the next concert with the Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture, much shorter than a symphony and programmatic to boot. There will be a scene from the Berlioz Romeo et Juliette. Finally, they’re playing the First Suite from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet Ballet. It’s a monument, an important work in the 20th Century orchestral repertoire. That, I’m really looking forward to!

Hamilton Philharmonic

Romeo and Juliet

Saturday, February 21, 2015

Great Hall

Hamilton Place 

Brilliance: Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto at the HPO

Brilliance: Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto at the HPO

Midway through the ethereal slow movement of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto Saturday night, a single silver star drifted down from high above the stage and settled amongst the second violins. It was like a celestial comment on the playing of the soloist, Blake Pouliot. He’d have had the audience in the palms of his hands, if they hadn’t been full of violin. 

I hadn’t expect much of this concert built around this overly familiar concerto, a very short Canadian piece and a symphony I’d last heard performed by a student orchestra. 

I couldn’t have been more wrong. 

Pouliot really put on a show and I joined the other members of the audience who spontaneously rose to their feet as he completed the virtuosic arpeggios that bring the concerto’s finale to a close. I’d hoped for an encore but, on this occasion, didn’t get one. 

Pouliot is but 20 years old, as young or younger than the MacMaster footballers whom we watched play in the Vanier Cup. He is tall, with a forelock that falls over his face, like a latter day Paganini. He is completing his training in Los Angeles but began playing concertos with orchestras at the age of 11. A violinist to watch. 

While the Mendelssohn was surely the highlight of the evening, the rest of the program was nearly as exciting.

Conductor Stilian Kirov, who is auditioning for the Hamilton Philharmonic’s Music Director’s position, is a native of Bulgaria but has been the Assistant Conductor of the Seattle Symphony for the last three years. He first led the orchestra in a spirited performance of Canadian Composer Glen Buhr’s short overture Jyotir (Brilliance). It’s already 25 years since Buhr wrote it and deserves to be better known.  It was played, as its title indicates, at breakneck speed, and displays the dexterity of the woodwinds, most notably the piccolo which is exposed at the top of the orchestra. Percussionist Jean-Norman Iadeluca, playing tuned toms and a kick bass, was featured in the penultimate section.

After the break they played Beethoven’s Second Symphony. In spite of its number (he wrote nine symphonies) it is not an early work. Beethoven was 33 and in mid-career when he composed it. While not as familiar or often played as the later ones, it sounds a lot like them, especially the Eroica (#3) and the best known Fifth. This is why so many in the audience, familiar with its style, could so easily appreciate it and the beautiful, sometimes spectacular, playing of our wonderful professional orchestra. 

The orchestra will next play Verdi's Forza del Destino overture, Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony and the Glazunov Violin Concerto. Theodore Kuchar conducts and Corey Cerovsek is the violin soloist. It’s on Saturday, January 17th at 7:30 and tickets are available at the orchestra’s website.

A tale of two composers

Once upon a time, in the years before the First World War, two musicians, sometimes together and sometimes apart, travelled throughout Hungary collecting folksongs and dances. They were ethnomusicologists, although the word hadn’t been coined yet. The subsequent musical direction of each was profoundly affected by their youthful enthusiasms. Their names are Béla Bartók and Zoltan Kodály.

The Hungary of that time was much greater than today’s. The eastern part of the vast Austro-Hungarian Empire, it included some of present day Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia, Ukraine, Romania, Serbia, Bosnia and Poland. Some of Imperial Hungary had even been part of the Ottoman Empire. The folk music was as diverse as languages. 

Bartók went on to become among the greatest composers in the tradition of Western Classical Music. Kodály is best known as the author of a landmark method for teaching music in the schools, but was also a brilliant and accomplished composer whose works are revered in Hungary.

I will share with you two orchestral works which demonstrate the extent to which their travels, collections and studies influenced their music. 

Bartok’s Dance Suite dates from 1923, the middle of his composing career. He has taken material which he collected and transformed for his own purposes. There is always a certain edginess, rawness perhaps, to Bartók’s music and there is plenty of each in evidence here. The tempo and mood of the piece shifts dramatically. Dances are presented, abandoned while contrasting music is played, and then return. Although it isn’t obvious, I have it on good authority that it is also very difficult for the orchestra and conductor. The work owes very little to the Late Romantic Music in which the composer was schooled. It is very much a work of the Twentieth Century.

Dances from Galanta is another orchestral tour de force based upon Eastern European folk tunes, but how different! While clearly a Twentieth Century work, there are echos Brahms and Lizst and Johann Strauss, of Hungarian Rhapsodies and and the Fledermaus Csardas. Kodály, like his colleague, chose and modified dances that fit his musical purpose. The form is similar to Bartók’s Dance Suite but the effect entirely different.

Each work is about 16 minutes in length. If you can listen to them together, I encourage you to do that. If you can’t spare that much time, listening to a few minutes of each will still make my point. 

Classical and Popular Concerts are Two Different Things

Is there a way to attract a wider public to classical concerts? Much has been written about Bandur Brönnimann's response to a Jonny Greenwood interview. Here is my looney's worth.

The audience should feel free to applaud between movements. Because they feel like it? Any semi-literate person can figure out, through a cursory examination of the program, how many individual bits there are in a composition and when it ends. This is probably targeted at concerti, which frequently have showy first movements or symphonies whose movements are often long and have strong endings. What about ballet or dance suites? Song cycles? Do you really want folks applauding every movement? I've been in the audience for amateur performances in which that was exactly the case and the concert went on for-ev-er and it wasn't because the music was too long. All the music that has been written since Mahler began the practice of remaining quiet between movements more than a hundred years ago was composed with the expectation that there would be no applause to break the mood.

Orchestras should tune backstage. The strings, especially, like to tune where they can hear the other players. There'd have to be a big room available backstage. Otherwise it's everyone on his own with an electronic tuner. What about the necessary tuning between the movements of long piece? Will you be going off-stage to do it?

We should be able to use mobile phones (in silent mode). What for? I thought you paid money to listen to live players play live music, not to play with your phone.  The capture from you phone will be crappy anyway and you'll probably never look at it again. And the screen of your phone, in a relatively dark environment, is bright and distracting for everyone (who also paid money etc.) around you. Anyway, this is the opposite of mindfulness. If you really need to use your phone, go out in the hallway.

Programs should be less predictable. Well... You should at least play what you've programmed. If you want to tack a bonus piece onto the end of the first half or at the end of the concert I mightn't mind. But, frankly, I decided to come to this concert on the basis of your publicity. If you don't play the pieces I came to hear I'm not going to be very happy.

You should be able to take your drinks inside the hall. If your concert hall has cup-holders on the seats it's different from ones I've gone to. You're not going to die of thirst. It won't kill you to wait an hour for that lager. Spare the cleaners mopping up dried cola tomorrow or the venue having to have the fabric seats cleaned. Or you your neighbour's suit.

The artists should engage with the audience. That's what they're doing when they play music. There's already too much chatter at classical concerts. Don't give a performer (including, perhaps especially, a conductor) a microphone. Everyone knows what happens. Anything important enough to mention (aside from emergency announcements) can be written in the published program. Shut up, sit down and play.

Orchestras shouldn't play in tail suits. I couldn't care less. As long as they're dressed uniformly, so that no one player sticks out, I'm not interested in how they dress.

Concerts should be more family friendly. Some concerts are. They're called Family Concerts and are specially programmed for an audience that includes children. Otherwise, most children have neither the preparation nor the attention span required to sit through serious performance without fidgeting. And I'm sure your young Nigel has been going to concerts since he was knee-high but he's the exception. Children have to be trained and you can't start doing it at a TSO performance of Verklärte Nacht. Sorry to return to a theme, but other people have spent good money with certain expectations of their experience.

Concert halls should use more cutting edge technology. I expect the author is addressing the situation at his own orchestra's concert hall: big screens, real time video, etc. I'd be surprised if most symphony concert providers aren't looking into or haven't looked into all the suggestions he makes.

Every program should include a contemporary piece. Depends on the context. Speaking as a living, breathing composer, it's hard to have a problem with this. If, however, I went to see the Mozart Requiem or an all-Beethoven program I mightn't be wooed by a shorter-than-ten-minutes piece played first in the program or at the end. Just doesn't fit, somehow.

Have you 30 minutes? You owe it to yourself to listen to this!

Are you a musician or serious music lover? If you don't know this piece and have 30 minutes you owe it to yourself to listen.

I have loved the Rachmaninoff Piano Concertos 2 & 3 and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini since I was a young musician. The music just sounds right to me, has always sounded just right. There's not a note out of place.

Rachmaninoff himself didn't call this a Cello Sonata i.e. a solo cello piece with piano accompaniment. He called it Sonata in G Minor for Cello and Piano, preferring to show the equal partnership of the two players.

The piano writing is startlingly similar to that of the concerti. It's virtuosic, exploiting the full range or the instrument, technically and expressively.

The cello sometimes plays the role the violins play in the concerti, taking the themes while the piano accompanies. Sometimes it plays the orchestral cello lines, playing countermelodies in the middle register while the piano takes the leading ones. It frequently sings melodies, melodies sometimes chant or folk-like, or those that push forward and upward in repeated rhythms or sequences.

This work captures the same excitement that is to be found in Rachmaninoff's big works for piano and orchestra. Hearing it for the first time is like discovering a work which is strangely like that other piece that you already know yet different and unique.

Here's the sonata with the score for those of you who read music. It's the way I like to listen to music like this.

Enigma Variations, Grieg Piano Concerto at the Brott Festival

It was to be a special occasion, a concert in honour of the Maestro's and pianist's birthdays, each ending with a 0 (zero).

So we went last night (Thurs. July, 24) to the MacIntyre Theatre at Mohawk College to hear  Boris Brott conducting the National Academy Orchestra and to hear Valerie Tryon play the Grieg Piano Concerto.

The audience learned in Jacqui Templeton Muir's introduction, that she and Valerie Tryon (her sister) have been friends with Boris since 1971 when he was the Conductor of the Hamilton Philharmonic. Valerie has since played in each of the 27 seasons of the Brott Music Festival.

Valerie Tryon

Valerie Tryon has had a remarkable performing career performing as a recitalist and as a soloist with major orchestras since her student debut in 1953. She will leave for England shortly to begin yet another recital tour. Her recording of De Falla's Nights in the Gardens of Spain with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra will shortly be released. Since 1971 she has been based in Hamilton and had a long association with MacMaster University.

The National Academy Orchestra was founded by Brott in 1988. This isn't a student orchestra in the usual sense. It is described in the program as a "professional training orchestra", and is made up of advanced students and young professional players who haven't yet got an orchestral job. Judging from the wonderful sound and accuracy of the playing, Maestro Brott must have his choice of the crème de la crème of young Canadian instrumentalists. As well, the principal string seats are occupied by professional players. For example the concertmaster is Alex Read, principal first violinist of the Montréal Symphony.

They opened with a stunning performance of Elgar's Enigma Variations. The work is in 14 variations which are character pieces describing individuals from Elgar's family and inner circle. Whatever they are variations upon was never made clear by Elgar and no theme is ever presented. Apprentice conductor Ben Kepes led the first six sections and then Maestro Brott took over for the next eight.

The slow movements (including the celebrated Nimrod) are built upon a string choir foundation and the sound of the strings of this orchestra was magical. The several viola solos were played beautifully by Kitchener Waterloo Symphony principal Natasha Sharko. There were also passages of tutti brasses which, in this hall, could nearly lift you from your seat.

In the second half, they began with Psalm by Srul Irving Glick. The piece was commissioned by Brott for the HPO in 1971. It has some interesting contrasting passages but their relationship, one to the other, is not clear and the work, in spite of the detailed preparation and clear performance, seemed rather shapeless. Special mention must be made of trumpeter Kathyrn Clarke and hornist Jonathan Astley both of whom soloed to fine effect.

The final scheduled work was the Grieg. It is among Valerie Tryon's favourite concerti and she played beautifully, sometimes delicately and at others times with great panache. The orchestra responding thrillingly in their tutti sections. Principal cellist and Hamiltonian Rachel Mercer played her solos nicely with a fine full sound.

When it was all over and the audience had stood and clapped in unison at Brott's urging, Valerie Tryon returned and played, for her adoring audience, Lizst's Liebestraum #3, perhaps the best known of that master's solo piano works .

If you enjoy music for piano and orchestra, you'll want to hear Ian Parker play Rachmaninoff (The Second Piano Concerto and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.) The orchestra is also performing the Mussorgsky-Ravel Pictures at an Exhibition. That's on Thursday, August 7th at the MacIntyre Theatre. The link in paragraph three will take you to the website.

Roberto Devereux at the COC

We saw Roberto Devereux at the Four Seasons Centre last night (Tues. April 29) and, in the immortal words of Jerry Lee Lewis there was a "whole lotta shoutin' goin' on". Perhaps not actual shouting, but too close for this opera goer.

I hadn't heard or seen this opera before, but with surtitles and a familiar composer (Donizetti) working in a standard form, preparation proved to be unnecessary.

It was presented on a single set, meant to evoke the Globe Theatre. There was a large platform that occupied most of the mid-stage around which most the action took place. This forced the singers to its periphery most of the time, either on the sides or right downstage. There was, as seems usual, some singing while lying down. At one point Devereux, in a duet with Sara, for no reason I could fathom, dragged himself across the platform as if his legs didn't work. In another peculiar choice, Nottingham apparently goes on to rape his wife after the end of their duet. I could also have done without the manikins in display cases during the overture and at the end of the opera.

This is an opera in the bel canto tradition. The phrase means, literally, beautiful singing but refers to much more than that for example, evenness and clarity of sound and articulation and tasteful absence of excess. What we heard in Hercules was bel canto. Much of what we heard last night was more appropriate to Trovatore or dare I say Tosca, far too heavily influenced by the style of singing that became acceptable later in the 19th century. Donizetti may not be Rossini, but he's not Verdi either and is surely not a verismo composer.

The main culprit was the prima donna, soprano Sondra Radvanovsky as Elisabetta. She has spectacular high notes and the ability to project her chest voice. She also has a middle voice which is not as strong. As a result, in a long descending octave scale, the top and bottom were loud while the middle didn't match. Moreover, last night at least, she wasn't able to manage the crispness and accuracy which the frequent coloratura in this repertoire demands. It simply sounded messy.

She is, however, an exceptional actress, and in the last act, when the coloratura pyrotechnics were over and the music was more dramatic, her vocal issues were no longer a problem. Indeed, she did some glorious pianissimo singing. The last scene, artificial and manipulative as it is, and made more so by this production, was truly moving and drew well deserved approval from the audience.

As the Duke of Nottingham, Baritone Russell Braun's singing in the first act suffered from similar problems. At one point, in the midst of some running passages, I actually lost track of what key he was singing in. Again, the runs were not clean and accurate while the highest notes were stentorian. I've heard him sing other repertoire beautifully and he has never sounded like that.

Tenor Leonardo Capalbo sang pretty well the taxing title role sounding like... an Italian tenor. He sings duets with both leading ladies and in ensembles besides, having to maintain a rather high tessitura throughout. He was obviously tiring by his final act scene, and no wonder.

Mezzo Allyson McHardy, as Sara, Duchess of Nottingham, came closer to bel canto than the other principal singers. Her first aria, in particular, was a breath of fresh air after Sondra Radvanovsky's. She did seem to be darkening and pushing on her lower notes as the performance went on and I wondered whether she and Braun felt the need to be louder to match the big sound Ms. Radvanovsky can produce. I think I'd like to hear McHardy as Cenorentola or Rosina in this theatre.

Allyson McHardy and Sondra Radvanovsky

Owen McCausland sang Lord Cecil nicely and Matt Boehler made some of the loveliest sounds of the evening in the few notes he had to sing as Raleigh.

The COC chorus sang well what little was asked of them and the orchestra played beautifully under conductor Corrado Ravaris.

The audience reacted rapturously at the end of the performance and I wondered whether they were wooed by the theatricality of the piece. I am more concerned with musicianship and singing and didn't stand at the end of this one.

Nonetheless, this production of Roberto Devereux should put bums in the seats. Judging by next season's offerings, heavy on the standard rep (Madama Butterfly, Falstaff, Barber of Seville, Don Giovanni) and Bluebeard's Castle, a proven hit, the company must have decided to concentrate on pot-boiling. Gotta pay the bills.