A Thinking Person's Reintroduction to Classical Music Part 2

In the last post I left you with a movement from one of J.S. Bach's Brandenburg Concertos. Bach didn't get the job for which he was applying when he sent the Duke of Brandenburg the music. He didn't actually say outright that he was applying for the job but we have his letter to the Duke of Brandenburg, who kept the music. Bach spent much of his career writing and performing in court chapels before settling in Leipzig where he ran the St. Thomas School (a choir school) and provided music and direction for 4 churches. He was otherwise occupied fathering no fewer than 21 children.

Bach never met George Fredrich Händel whom he admired. The two were not rivals as Bach wrote mostly church music and Händel was a successful composer of Italian language operas. Händel was Court Musician to the Prince George Ludwig, Elector of Hanover in Germany. The Electors were princes who elected the King of Germany who was then crowned Holy Roman Emperor. In 1714 Queen Anne died and George Ludwig was next in line to become King of England. He moved to London and took Händel with him.

Fortunately for Händel, Italian opera was all the rage in London, a city with lots of rich people and a flourishing middle class. He wrote more than 40 operas and founded 3 commercial opera companies while at the same time being the King's court composer writing music like Water Music and Music for the Royal Fireworks. Italian opera eventually fell out of fashion. It had always became costly to stage and the shrinking audiences put it to bed.

Handel moved on to oratorios, like The Messiah, most of which are religious operas although church figures made it clear costuming and staging them was inappropriate so they were presented as concert works. He also wrote service music for the court. Zadok the Priest, an anthem, has been performed at every British coronation since.

So Bach is remember for comparatively dense and complex choral and organ music and a few orchestral suites like the Brandenburgs. Händel's music is more approachable and less complicated, reflecting the situations and audiences for whom it was performed. 

Here's a little Händel from the 1st Water Music Suite. You might enjoy listening a again to the Bach excerpt in Part 1 again, either before or after listening to this so you can compare them.

A Thinking 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 thinking 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.

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

Aida and Me

My wife and I watched a production of Aida from the Grande Théatre de Genève last week and I have been recalling music from the opera ever since. It is not the worst ear-worm one could have.

I first encountered Aida in a piano-vocal score when I was a student at Althouse College at Western University. I took the score of the opera, which I didn’t know at all, into a room with a piano and discovered that the tenor had an aria within a few pages of the opening of Act I. I banged it out on the piano and sang the opening recitative. Then I tried the aria which wasn’t too hard until it was. I didn’t realize that Radames is a very demanding role even for those who have the specific kind of voice for which Verdi was writing. It was a long time before I fooled around with the aria Celeste Aida again.

I did see two acts of Aida at the Arena di Verona some years later. I remember the tenor broke one of the Bbs in the aria and there were animals in the Triumphal scene. It started to rain mid-way through and, since I was supposed to sing in a competition a few days later, I went back to my hotel and slept.

Indeed it was about a year later that I actually had to sing music from the opera. I was in a production of Il Trovatore at the O’Keefe Centre as a chorister with the Canadian Opera Company. They decided to do a gala concert in which Birgit Nilsson was to be the guest artist. They also decided to do a concert rendition of the Triumphal Scene contracting the principal singers from Trovatore, which was in production at the same time, to sing the solos. I don’t remember how much of it we sang but I think it must only have been the opening which includes the famous march. I do remember being unhappy at having to learn so much music for a single performance especially since we we not paid extra for the concert since we were already under contract. The high point of the concert was Nilsson singing Dich, teure Halle, from Wagner’s Tannhäuser, near the end. It was damned impressive and the only time I ever heard her sing live. 

The Triumphal March in Sarasota Opera’s production of Verdi’s AIDA. (Photo: Rod-Millington)

So I wasn’t looking forward Aida when it was scheduled the next year. There is a lot of chorus singing in Aida. indeed, there’s a lot of everything in Aida: Melodrama, big voices, an orchestra with extra brass and plenty of incidental music for ballet.  Much to my surprise I enjoyed the production enormously. There were extra choristers to sing the prisoners and a bang-up cast including soprano Leona Mitchell and the marvellous mezzo Livia Budai as Amneris. 

I thought that would be the end of Aida and me but I encountered the opera again in a most unlikely way. 

I was, for 13 years, the conductor-chorus master of an elementary school music program of which, incidentally, I was not the music teacher. I had agreed, in my first year, to conduct an adaptation of the opera. I was very busy learning a new job, in a new school and all the musical preparation was undertaken by the music teacher. When my baton and I arrived at the podium almost none of the participants had ever worked with a conductor before and I spent much of the dress rehearsal and the subsequent performances being ignored by almost all the performers, the eldest of whom we eleven years old. 

During the instrumental music which begins the Triumphal Scene the entire student body, about 200 kids aged six to eleven years old, trooped in surrounding the audience, all in vaguely Egyptian themed costumes including one girl dressed as a pyramid. Three trumpets supplemented the piano accompaniment.  I was sitting on a stool so the public could see over me. As all those children all prepared to sing, one of my own Grade Three eight boys was standing close and directly behind me. There is a long ascending scale that precedes the chorus’ first notes and as I gave the downbeat for the singing to begin he came in singing forte, right in my ear, with the correct rhythm and words but with notes which were a good fifths lower than those Verdi had written and so had nothing to do with the harmony. It was a little unnerving. The kid, incidentally, is now a commercial pilot. His job description doesn't include singing in tune. The Aida and Amneris went on to be leading lights in the Hamilton Children's Choir. The Radames eventually went to seminary and is now a Presbyterian Minister and stand-up. 

When the King of Egypt asked Radames what he wanted as a reward for leading the winning army against the Ethiopians, the boy turned to the audience and announced, "I'd like to hear the Toreador Song from Carmen sung by John Fanning!" Met Opera Singer John Fanning, our special guest,  stepped from the wings and sang it. He was dressed as an elephant with a rubber mask trunk which made him look more like a giant mouse. 

Needless to say, the production was a hit. To be fair, most elementary school shows, regardless of their artistic merits, are considered to be entrancing by audiences made up mostly of the performers’ families.

The Grande Théatre de Genève TV production (Mezzo.TV) with which I began was pretty unconventional. It’s an important opera house, but a small one with fewer that 1000 seats. There were no animals. The chorus and orchestra were relatively small. Acrobats replaced all the dancing. 

All the Egyptians were made up with a blue stripe across their eyes. The King of Egypt’s bald head was painted gold. The costumes were all over the place, stylistically.  Some might have been strangely dressed ancient Egyptians but others wore glitzy quasi-nineteenth century uniforms. In the Nile Scene, Radames, in a leather jacket and dark trousers, might have walked in off the street in Geneva. Some of the female choristers wore headpieces so big they block out the view of performers standing behind them. 

For all that, the staging was pretty conventional. As you would imagine in such a venue, the solo singers were all very good. The Amneris, Anna Smirnova, was sensational with huge, beautiful voice. The Amonasro, Alexey Markov also sang and acted masterfully. I'd spend big money to hear either of them sing live. The normal sized chorus did a fine job.

If you get a chance to see this production on the flat screen, take it. You can spread if out over a couple of nights as we did. 

However it's produced, the Verdi's opera transcends. Nothing diminishes the power of what many regard as Verdi’s greatest opera and is my favourite of all his works. 

Copyright © 2020 David S. Fawcett

Two Devils

We've been getting the Mezzo arts channel on our cable as a free offering for a limited time and have been recording some of the classical offerings. Since they can be hours long it allows one to watch and listen in chunks. We listened, in half hour increments, to a truly spectacular performance of the Monteverdi Vespers from the Royal Chapel at Versailles. If you've never encountered the piece it's an engaging combination of Renaissance and Early Baroque styles, really unlike anything else in the repertoire. And the performers are sensational. You can find another version of it here.

We've also been making out way through Gounod's opera Faust from the Teatro Réal de Madrid. We watched the second act last night, one of the greatest acts in all of opera, with a marvellous cast of international stars.

Edouard de Reszke as Mephistophélès

Years ago, I suggested it as an opera to do (sort of, we always sort of did the operas) with the school program of which I was the conductor. It would have been great! The principal shot it down. It seems an opera including seduction, infanticide and a character, Mephistophélès, who is actually Satan wasn't going to fly as a kiddie opera.

So that's one devil this week.

The other turns up, surprise, surprise, in a Stephen King book.

I re-read King's masterpiece, The Stand, in the restored full length version. It seems the publisher couldn't do the book as King wrote it back in 1979. They weren't set up to manufacture such a long book. 400 pages had to go. King did the edit himself rather than let someone else do it.

Years later, they restored the passages that had been removed. In paperback it runs to 1149 pages.

I had to request it from the HPL twice as I couldn't manage to finish it in the first 3 weeks.

There are more than a dozen principal character. The plot, which begins with a terrifying, but plausible, medical disaster, ends with the battle between good and evil in the realm of magic and the supernatural.

I enjoyed it (again) but wouldn't recommend it as a place to start in King's enormous oeuvre. Carrie, maybe?

The devil in this case is The Walking Dude, Randall Flagg. As frightening a villain as anyone ever dreamt up. 

Two devils in one week. Do devils always come in threes?

Mozart and Mendelsson at the HPO

We went last night to hear the second concert of the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra’s season at FirstOntario Place, conducted by Music Director Gemma New.

It opened with a world première performance of Alice Pin Yee Ho’s three movement work, Silk Road Fantasy. The composer spoke, briefly, before the piece, thankfully avoiding items that she had already covered in the published notes. 

The work is written for classical orchestra with the addition of a single percussionist. No Chinese instruments were played in this piece (they appear in other of her works). It incorporates musical references from various cultures, some of which were apparent on first listening. 

The quiet middle section was, I thought, most successful, often having the strings play melodies including portamenti up to and away from long notes in the manner of an Erhu, the Chinese two-string violin. This is relatively simple for a soloist (think of pop guitarists bending notes) but must have taken some rehearsal time to get eight or more players to do it in unison. It must be a regular occurence with New Music Orchestras. I heard it used, to different effect, in a Gary Kulesha symphony some years ago.

In the opening and closing sections there is a great deal of very noisy tympani and percussion which often obscured or completely covered whatever else was going on save the trumpets. I noticed the entire string section pizzicato-ing vigorously and completely inaudibly at one point.

Full points to conductor New who kept this unfamiliar piece together through her clear and accurate conducting. 

I’d like to hear the piece again, with the balance corrected, if the effect was, in fact, not what the composer intended.

They lost all but the strings and a pair each of horns and oboes for a performance of the Violin Concerto #5 (Turkish) by W.A. Mozart featuring Canadian violinist Timothy Chooi.

It’s a long and involved concerto by the 19 year old Mozart who, incredibly, wrote three other violin concertos, and who knows what other music, in the year proceeding its composition. It also features a cadenza in each of the movements. 

The 26 year old Chooi is an enormously accomplished  player with a beautiful sound thanks perhaps, in part, to the 1717 Windsor-Weinstein Stradivarius which he plays. His quiet highest notes were exquisitely beautiful. Each of the cadenzas emerged inevitably from the music which proceeded it and was a tiny solo recital in itself. 

It was an enjoyable and satifsying performance by soloist and orchestra.

They finish the first half with the Theme from Schindler’s List by John Williams. It is a simple piece which repeats and varies the poignant melody which is introduced in its first measures. From the hands such an inventive and experience composer it is irresistibly engaging. It is also utterly unlike William’s Star Wars and Superman scores.

The second half was taken up by Mendelssohn’s familiar and popular Fourth Symphony, The Italian. I love this piece and was looking forward to re-engaging with it as each of the theme’s made its first aural appearance.

However Conductor New, microphone in hand, had decided to illustrate her thesis that it is, in response to Beethoven’s symphonies, a programatic and, thus, Romantic work. She had the orchestra play most of the main themes of each of the movement in turn, with commentary. 

So when they finally got around to playing the symphony the introduction of each melody was old news. I’m aware this is a very disparate audience and that there were elementary school students in the audience but the HPO does play educational concerts and I’d rather they only do this sort of thing there.

The performance, by the way, was just fine with up-beat tempos and lots of dynamic variety as there should be. 

Finally, I mentioned that there were some younger concert goers in the hall, although, from where I was sitting I didn’t notice any of them. Unfortunately, a woman sitting directly behind us, with her young teen daughter, brought her very young toddler son who fussed through most of the first piece. He eventually nodded off and she must have understood this wasn’t an appropriate place for such a young child as they decamped at the interval. How they got in past the ushers I can only imagine, since the published policy is to allow no one younger than five.