Sci-fi Spectacular at the HPO

We went Sat. March 21 to hear the Hamilton Philharmonic play a concert of mostly film music from Sci-fi movies. The orchestra was under the baton of David Martin (who also played trombone) with featured trumpet soloist Larry Larson (who conducted while Martin played).

David Martin

Larry Larson

Both are accomplished soloists and this program is a partnership. Larson is, among other things, the principal trumpet of the KW Symphony. Martin played one season as first trombone of the Montréal Symphony and has a multi-faceted career which includes teaching at the Université de Montréal.

The Hollywood orchestras that record film scores are full of first-rate players who are able to produce super-accurate performances with minimal rehearsal. The original Star Wars music was recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra. The HPO rendered carbon copy versions of the scores and played beautifully throughout. It's especially enjoyable to hear a live performance of music which wasn't originally intended to be heard that way.

Two pieces of standard concert music were played. They began with a performance of the opening of Strauss' Also Sprach Zarathustra (2001: A Space Odyssey) which didn't miss the enormous orchestra and pipe organ the composer intended. They also played Mars from Holst's suite The Planets which is the source of much of the martial music film composers write.

There were two pieces not drawn from films. One was Martin's trombone rendition of When You Wish Upon a Star. He reminded us that John Williams has the orchestra plays the song in long notes at the end of E.T: The Extraterrestrial.

The second was Larry Larson's performance of an arrangement of Hoagy Carmichael's Stardust lifted from Cliff Brown's 1955 album Cliff with Strings.
A bit of a stretch to get to the concert's theme but a very tasty, jazzy piece.

There was lots of John William's music on the program as you'd expect. He's a great composer. He seems to have an inexhaustible ability to imagine catchy, effective and appropriate themes. Does much of the music sound similar?Certainly, but, to the untutored ear so do many Haydn symphonies or Bach organ works. And don't forget, in addition to Star Wars and Indiana Jones he wrote the heart-rending score of Schindler's List.

They even brought Imperial Storm Troopers, Princess Leia and Darth Vader out for the Imperial March. The audience lapped it up. Me, not so much. It just distracted from the music.

An interesting choice was The Chase from Jerry Goldsmith's score to the original Planet of the Apes. It's a twelve-tone work and Martin had the cellos play a pizzicato version of the row for the audience to hear. Some of them even raised their hands when asked if they'd ever heard of Arnold Schoenberg. The piece stands up very well as a concert piece and was an effective contrast to the rest of the music, all of which was very melody driven.

Damn you! God damn you all to hell!

There was a Star Trek medley with music from the various TV series by four different composers. They also played a couple of cues from the original series. One was for a fight between Kirk and Spock and the music was reused in other episodes. Martin confessed something that confirms, in my eyes anyway, his extraordinary musical ability. The "fight" music is not available in written form at all. Martin had  faithfully transcribed the music, orchestration and all, from a recording.

That I don't have the typical listener's ear became very evident at opening of the second half. I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of TV themes but I can sing lots of those that I've heard, some from my childhood. The program told us we'd hear Marius Constant's short pieces that were used as the opening of The Twilight Zone. I knew immediately what to expect.

Apparently, many in the audience didn't. If you aren't old enough to watch TV in the Sixties that's understandable but if you were and watched TV? When the music started the buzz of recognition from audience members nearly drowned out the orchestra. Then, Martin recited Rod Serling's opening monologue so it was impossible to hear the music. Too bad.

The hall was nearly sold out last night, the biggest crowd of the season. For an orchestra struggling to build an audience, it raises a quandary. If a concert like this can be so successful, why not do it more often?

The answer is disturbingly obvious and possible intractable. The audience for pops concerts and the audience for orchestral concert music overlap, but are not identical. Straight serious music concerts don't usually draw the former. It's less clear who amongst the latter group attend pops concerts. Many people who are interested in hearing Brahm's Fourth Symphony, which the HPO will play the next time out, won't pay to hear a crossover vocalist like Basia Bulat (who has sung with the HPO) and aren't going to be tolerant of audience members who pull out their cell phones to take a photo, or talk off and on through the concert.

It'll be very, very interesting to see what the new Artistic Director and Principal Conductor will do to program the next season.

Chapman Stick

I'd hear of the Chapman Stick some time ago and was reminded of it the other day when somebody posted this video of Bob Culbertson's virtuoso performance of While My Guitar Gently Weeps on Facebook. I think you'll agree it's an extraordinary performance.

He demonstrates many of the possibilities of this instrument which integrates the potential for electronic instruments that were becoming available in the Seventies much as Les Paul had done with the electric guitar twenty five-years earlier.

I was interested to learn more about the purely technical aspects and abilities of the instrument. Fortunately Emmett Chapman, the instrument's inventor, is also there on YouTube. He doesn't play it nearly as well as Culbertson but his explanation is clear enough for me, at least.  

A little about composer Michael Torke

Some 25 years ago there was a controversy about a piece of New Music written in the style of Beethoven. I wasn’t listening to much recorded New Music in those pre-internet days. I was writing it and having it performed in live concerts. I never heard the piece which may be just as well since I’ve since read some of its execrable reviews. I’ve searched on-line for a recording, of even an excerpt, but to no avail.

I only realized a few days ago that the composer of that work was none other than Michael Torke. Mass (the piece that apparently sounded like Beethoven) must be one of his rare “misses” (even Beethoven missed with Wellington’s Victory) because most of his music that I have heard is extraordinary.

Torke has a unique musical voice. Whereas many New Music composers are concerned in large part with originality and distinctiveness, Torke takes, as his sources, familiar themes and textures. He then tumbles them up in structures which are not those of the styles of music from which they are drawn, resulting in pieces which are immediately engaging but not necessarily easily understood. He says that initial rehearsals of his music are very calm because the musicians see, on the page in front of them, notation and musical ideas which are familiar to them. 

Critics list his influences. Minimalism is one that I can credit, but, on the surface, Torke’s music shares very little with that of Philip Glass or Steve Reich. Jazz is also cited but, to my ear, his pieces have about as much to do with jazz as Stravinsky’s Ragtime has with Scott Joplin or Debussy’s Golliwog’s Cakewalk with minstrelsy. 

If I have a reservation about Torke’s music it is that, once a piece is launched, the tempo and mood usually remain pretty much the same throughout. This can be tedious at times.

Torke’s best known piece is Javelin which was written for the Atlanta Symphony at the time of the 1996 Olympics. It’s an overture, a ten minute curtain raiser and a pretty good introduction to his music.

But I’m recommending that you listen to Mojave, a sixteen minute concerto for marimba. I’m a big fan of piano concertos and this piece is quite a lot like one. The mallet player, Mike Truesdell, is a real virtuoso and the Brabants Orkest (don’t you love Dutch?) accompanies him wonderfully.

You’ll notice that he seems to have solved the minimalist quandary: How often can I repeat something before it’s too often? He gets it right.

If this piece inspires you, try to find a recording of another wonderful work, Bright Blue Music from Color Music. It was written before Mass and there are certainly echoes of Beethoven and other Nineteenth Century masters in it. 

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.