|
The Globe and
Mail
Monday, January 31, 2011
by
Colin Eatock
Toronto
certainly doesn't lack for musical organizations dedicated
to contemporary classical music. And while this may be a
good thing in some ways, it can lead to a factional and
competitive environment.
So it was nice to see the Esprit Orchestra team up with the
Elmer Iseler Singers at Koerner Hall. The Iseler Singers are
not, strictly, speaking, a new-music choir, but they're a
professional group that sings lots of contemporary
repertoire. The decision by Esprit's music director, Alex
Pauk, to bring them into the program
opened up some fruitful possibilities.
The first half of the concert offered a selection of shorter
works by Montreal's Jose Evangelista, the late Hungarian
composer Gyorgy Ligeti and Douglas Schmidt, a Canadian
living in Germany. While they were different in many ways,
they were tightly focused on a single, dominating idea.
Brevity itself was the unifying factor in Evangelista's
Symphonie minute of 1994: four short orchestral
movements that deftly compressed symphonic form into
bite-sized pieces. The neoclassical work was modest in
scope, but a pleasantly colourful opening to the concert.
Lydia Adams took the podium to conduct her Elmer Iseler
Singers in Ligeti's Lux Aeterna of 1966 for
unaccompanied choir. This was the only really "atonal" piece
on the program an amorphous cloud of tightly clustered
voices, made famous when Stanley Kubrick used it in 2001:
A Space Odyssey. Under Adams, the piece was more worldly
than ethereal, but impressive nonetheless.
Also highly unified was Schmidt's Discouraged Passion,
composed two years ago. For this piece for choir and
orchestra, Schmidt did double duty as both composer and
accomplished soloist on the bandoneon (the accordion-like
instrument made famous by the Argentinean tango master Astor
Piazzolla).
Conceptually, Schmidt placed his instrument at the centre of
the piece - so much so that the whole orchestra seemed
transformed into a giant bellows, chugging its way through a
relentless series of accompaniment figures. Above it all,
the Iseler Singers sang the text of an old Brazilian popular
song (in Portuguese), about a difficult family relationship.
Here, Schmidt demonstrated a knack for writing effective
rhythms. But if he has any more arrows in his quiver, they
weren't apparent on this occasion.
The second half of the concert was a different matter
altogether. It was entirely taken up by Giya Kancheli's
seven-movement Styx, written in 1988 for orchestra,
chorus and solo viola. Kancheli, a composer from the
Republic of Georgia, evidently shares Gustav Mahler's belief
that a symphony "should contain the universe." Styx
isn't a symphony - but Kancheli's broad yet sparse musical
landscape, marked by sharp contrasts (including a few
Beethovenian outbursts), seems to come from a parallel
universe, arrestingly beautiful and beyond common
experience.
The piece was conceived as a meditation on the mythological
River Styx, separating the realms of the living and dead,
with the viola soloist acting as an intermediary between the
two worlds. The text, in Georgian, is a kind of prayer for
the dead.
The soloist on this occasion was Teng Li, principal viola of
the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Her playing shone with a
clear yet burnished tone, and an unerring sense of phrasing.
Pauk shaped the piece well, giving full weight to the
dramatic silences that punctuate Styx. However, the
big climaxes came with balance problems, as Pauk's large
orchestra tended to swamp the 20-voice Iseler choir.
There's one more thing worth mentioning about this concert:
It contained no world premieres. In the new-music community,
which tends to fetishize the very latest thing at the
expense of everything else, this is rare - and commendable. |
ShowtimeMagazine.ca
Reviewed
by Stanley Fefferman
Sunday, January 30, 2011. Koerner Hall, Toronto.
The melodic lines
of Giya Kancheli’s Styx are long and slow flowing like its
namesake river. Styx opens with two harmonic masses—a
choral chord imitated by the orchestra—threaded by the voice of Teng-Li’s
viola singing a thin cantabile melody, innocent and sad. The music
expands in concentric circles of sound, rhythms that ripple out and
out in nuanced timbral rings suggesting a post-human continuum
beyond time.
Kancheli subjects his calm flow to opposing forces: sound blocks
come to rest in resounding silences, are punctured by deafening
motivic flashes, cadential outbursts, galloping passages that
recall the grotesque ribaldry of Orff’s Carmina Burana.
Binding these contrasts is the fine wire of the viola’s quiet voice.
This strange work—a dirge in memory of two composers—invokes both
the calm of death accepted and the excitement of vivid memories.
Ostinato phrases sparkle in exchanges between brilliantly paired
instruments: piano and celeste, viola and horn, chorus and gong.
Hymns change places with Georgian folk-songs, bits of Shakepearean
dialogue, ritual nonsense, and invocations of the names of the
deceased. There is much beautiful sadness here, no whimpering, and
this 35 minute epic ends with a bang on the word “Joy”.
Keeping in mind that the standard of performance for Styx
(1999) is violist Yuri Bashmet with the Musicians of the Marinsky
Theatre conducted by Valery Gergiev, I was able to enjoy without
distraction Teng-Li’s performance with the Esprit Orchestra and
Elmer Iseler Choir conducted by Alex Pauk.
The evening’s program jumped forward in mood and in time to
Douglas Schmidt’s Discouraged Passion (that Esprit
premièred in 1999). This percussively rhythmic, high-spirited work
is based on a 19th Century Brazilian tango lyric sung by a lover who
is breaking up with his girlfriend because he hates the way her
family abuses him.
Schmidt on his bandoneon, the hand organ traditional in South
American brothels and popularized by Astor Piazzolla, adds a
chuffing virtuosic bounce to the staccato harmonies of the
orchestra and the recitative of the Singers. The pounding pianism of
Stephen Clarke behind some of Schmidt’s descending chords was
specially exciting. This work was fun, but the performance seemed to
lose a bit of steam about halfway through its 15 minutes on stage.
Jose Evangelista’s Symphony Minute (1994) has the 4
traditional movements and accomplishes its mission in 7 minutes.
Like Debussy, Evangelista inclines away from development of his
themes: he gets them out there and it’s done. His movements are
recognizable and very well constructed. There is a delightful
quality to his work—derived in part from the humour connected to
relief at how quickly symphonic time passes here. There are some
enjoyable harmonic passages involving horn and cello in the first
movement, and intriguing Moorish themes by the winds in the slow
movement. Alex Pauk’s conducting was fine, bringing out all the
orchestral textures in noticeable relief, however at times a bit
more forte than I required.
The Elmer Iseler Singers led by Lydia Adams performed Györgi
Ligeti’s 9 minute Lux Aeterna for unaccompanied
sixteen-part mixed choir. With sopranos, altos, tenors and sometimes
even basses singing the same sequence of notes separated by small
time intervals, the focus of the work is mostly on vocal timbres and
textures emerging from and dissolving into a floating harmonic
cloudstream. The phrase
‘choir of angels’ comes easily to mind.
Under Ms. Adams’ direction individual vocal textures were more
distinctly defined and therefore rougher than I am used to hearing:
the soprano tones in particular had very sharp edges which I did not
enjoy, while the prominence of the basses in the final blocks was
grand. Nonetheless, Lux Aeterna held the audience in a
rapture of attention from start to finish. |
