An Intelligent Person's Reintroduction to Classical Music: Part 1

These days music is playing much of the time. It plays in malls and stores. It plays in elevators and in other public spaces. It is present in all kinds of media. Some of us pipe it into our heads through earbuds while pursuing other activities. It is not ubiquitous, but it is getting there.

In almost all of these instances people don’t actually pay any attention to the music. They are not listening to it.

In public places, it is played to mask noise. In films and video it can be source music, like music playing from a radio or TV, in a scene. It could be the film’s score, music written by a composer to be played during the action. Movie music is often written intentionally in such a way that it is not noticed by the viewer. In some films, the score can be loud and complex and still be drowned out by the action of the movie.

Most of us do listen to music with the intention of actually listening to it. If you don't pay attention to songs, you won't understand the lyrics. If you don't listen to dance music, you'll be unaware of the rhythm.

This brings us to so-called classical music. Quite a lot of it who was written before player pianos and the earliest records. Almost all of it is played on acoustic instruments or is sung. Even though we listen mostly to recordings of it, it is that we are listening to.

Some of the classical music which is still played is dance music, like waltzes by Johann Strauss. Some of them was played while doing other activities, like Telemann’s Tafelmusik, to be played while dining. Of course, most of it was written to be listened to either in halls or more intimate settings.

These days, classical music is almost always approached as art, as something to which one expects to pay attention. We go to galleries to look at Old Masters, to theatres to see Shakespeare’s plays. We can look at reproductions of art on our computers and tablets or watch videos of Shakespeare.

The music that is performed by orchestras, choirs and chamber musicians can be as new as this week’s première of New Music or could have been first performed more than 300 years ago. Simply put, that's a lot of music.

Most of you, I suppose had some experience of "classical music” in school, even if not a very lasting one. So how do I, the mentor, reintroducing you, the intelligent person, to classical music? It is a quandary. No doubt, different people have different starting points. Similarly, different people have a different destination in mind.

Nonetheless,I’m going to suggest jumping in with both feet. The link will take you to the first movement (i.e. section, part) of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto #2. Links to the rest other Brandenburgs will be there on the page. Please listen to just this unless you’re compelled to hear more. 

Many musicians revere J.S. Bach as the greatest composer who ever lived. These concertos are among his most accessible music. This rendition is by Tafelmusik, a Toronto based group and they are playing period instruments, instruments like those played at the time, not their modern adaptations. This music was written about 300 years ago. 

Brandenburg Concerto #2, 1st Movement

Brahms' Symphonies with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe

I have just finished listening to the 4 Brahms Symphonies played the the Chamber Orchestra of Europe conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin. I accomplished this over 4 mornings while practising Yoga. I have been taking a couple of classes each week at a seniors centre with an excellent instructor who, being herself a senior, is sensitive to the needs and individual limitation of her students. In any event, I’ve discovered (duh) that my progress is greater when I practice daily at home. I listen on bluetooth in-the-ear headphones, not Air Pods but like that.  We encountered these versions of the Brahms Symphonies on the Mezzo Channel of which I wrote in my last post. It was a video version of the 3rd Symphony and it was marvellous. The Chamber Orchestra of Europe is a kind of fancy pick-up orchestra run by its members. It doesn’t have a regular conductor or venue but is based in the UK. It does make recordings for Deutsche Grammophon, a very prestigious company. The video is available on YouTube although the audio is compressed so not as good as what we heard. 

I’ve been listening on YouTube Music which has better audio quality than their video channel. 

Music types will know that the 4 Brahms symphonies are among the cornerstones of the Romantic orchestra’s repertoire with, for example Beethoven’s 3rd through 9th or the 6 symphonies Tchaikovsky. (Some will recoil at my mentioning of those two composers in the same metaphorical breath.)

As a youngster, from what I had heard of Brahms’ music, I thought it heavy and stodgy. My understanding of Brahms’ range as a composer came when I performed, with the Tudor Singers of Montréal, both sets of Liebeslieder Waltzer (Love Song Waltzes) and the Ziegeurner Lieder (Gypsy Songs). I got to sing the solos in the latter. These works, for SATB (choir or quartet) are anything but heavy and stodgy and established the composer’s fame and reputation in 19C Vienna.

The Chamber Orchestra of Europe, in this incarnation, is not a small group. There are 8 first violins and the appropriate corresponding number in the other string sections. The winds and percussion are dictated by the score so they’d be the same with more string players but this would, obviously, effect the balance. 

Yannick Nézet-Séguin

The audio take is very, very clear, and not muddied at all by the reverb of the hall, the Festspielhaus in Baden-Baden. Moreover, under Maestro Nézet-Séguin’s direction, the music is presented in extraordinary detail. I’ll have to listen again with the score in front of me to understand how much of what one hears is Brahms’ markings and how much of it is the conductor’s interpretation. The music is alive in a way I’ve rarely heard in listening to recordings of orchestral music.

I wouldn’t recommend Brahms’ symphonies to a novice classical music listener (I’m working on An Intelligent Person’s Reintroduction to Classical Music). Something more straightforward would be more appropriate but I recommend these recordings to anybody, anyway. They really are something special.

Opera on Mezzo Channel

I'm shocked! Shocked to find gambling if going on in here! 

No, wait, sorry. I'm shocked that I haven't written a new post in more than a year. Here goes...

Some time ago we were getting free weeks of the Mezzo Channel on Bell Fibe and recorded some of the things that were interesting to us. I found my way around the Bell site and discovered we could, in fact, subscribe for $5 a month! (Crave would cost us more than $20/month.)

For those interested in concert music, opera, dance and/or jazz it's a great deal.

There are downsides to watching the operas because there are rarely subtitles attached from the original recordings and, when you us the Fibe subtitle feature (which works perfectly well on other channels) the order of words is so garbled it can be hard to make sense of them. Otherwise, full length recordings of opera production from major European opera houses. What's not to like?

We watched Die Fledermaus on 2 consecutive evenings from Opéra Royal de Wallonie-Liège. It was sung in German. There were English subtitles attached from the original recording and singers with substantial European careers in a contemporary setting. A dozen dancers turned up, sometimes as real characters, sometimes as fantasy ones commenting on the text. It was funny. It was the most entertaining Fledermaus I've seen.

We also watched Act 1 of Queen of Spades, an opera with which I was not familiar. The chorus makes it clear that the scene is a park. It's a beautiful day. Toward the end of the scene a storm comes up and everyone runs for shelter. 

In this production there's a dark stage and 6 tables in what is clearly a downmarket casino. That's where the principals play out the act. The chorus appear from the back of the stage and then disappear the way they came. Why would the director of the opera ignore the obvious setting described in the score? It's hardly the first time a stage director has put his/her concept above that of the librettist and composer.

Turandot, from the Vienna State Opera was worse. Aside from four principals everyone, soloists, dancers, supers and chorus, was dressed in identical contemporary suits with silly wigs. I have no idea what the setting was. The stage was often empty. Characters entered and exited through locker doors, a kind of vomitorium and an upstage door to the executioner. Turandot was accompanied by four dancers with huge doll masks. Supers paraded around with, eventually, dozens of boxes containing the heads of decapitated suitors.

The singing was sensational. Asmik Grigorian sang a wonderful Turandot (she also sang in the Queen of Spades, above, from Munich). Jonas Kaufmann was Calaf. Kristine Mkhitaryan was Líu. The Ping, Pang and Pong were great and executed some complex choreography while singing their scenes.

But, again, what was the stage director thinking when it's clear that the opera is set in a timeless ancient China and that it is a kind of fable. 

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.