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Toca Loca Takes Residence


by Jason van Eyk

Fledgling new music ensemble Toca Loca takes roost at the Music Gallery in 2006 for a year-long residency. The Music Gallery, Toronto’s internationally recognized home for creative music, has always been committed to providing the environment for new and unusual music to come into its own. This Toca Loca residency is just another positive way in which it is putting that environment to good use. In the words of Toca Loca’s Gregory Oh “This is an ideal vehicle for younger ensembles that have not yet established their funding and resource base.  Having a home, a rehearsal space and a place to play in is an incredibly valuable commodity.”  
 
Formed in 2001, Toca Loca is one of Toronto’s youngest ensembles. “The name is a kind of triple word play in Spanish,” Oh explains. “Toca can mean to touch or strike,  or a kind of hat. So crazy touch, crazy play, crazy hat,... and beyond that it’s just a name with a nice percussive feel - like what we do.”
 
In just a few years Toca Loca  has made some pretty big strides with a handful of notable concerts and a truly different attitude. As Oh says “We try to avoid being too stodgy. We are trying to add a little bit of zest to Canada’s music scene.”
 
Don’t mistake zest for dumbing down, though.  They certainly don’t avoid daring programming, pulling in some of the heavy hitters of new music alongside challenging Canadian works.  Under their belts already: repertoire by Alice Ho, Chris Paul Harman, Claude Vivier, Georges Aperghis, Gyorgy Kurtag, Michael Finnissy, Heinz Holliger, Walter Buczynski, Thomas Kessler, James Rolfe, Jocelyn Morlock, Andrew Staniland, Melissa Hui, Toshio Hosokawa, and Unsuk Chin, just to name a very few.
 
Add to that some significant commissioning, CBC broadcasts, and tours to the USA, and you’ve got a sense of a little powerhouse just ready to explode out on the new music scene in a big way. “We’re never out there just to replicate the recital hall experience, we’re less top-button-done-up than that.” 
 
Toca Loca launches their Music Gallery residency on February 24th with a programme of French spectralist music, including Gerard Grisey’s Vortex Temporum (dubbed ‘the most important chamber work of the late 20th century’) and works by Phillippe Leroux – a composer whom Discoveries editor David Olds has made a personal plea to hear more often in Toronto.
 
“The thing about the spectralists,” Oh says, “is they really believe the human ear has limits and that you should create for those limits rather than always challenging them. To me the music is very exciting, very kinetic, very fluid. In terms of an audience, it’s not the youth we have to worry about, young people are much more tuned to hearing new sounds. It’s the more settled audiences, shall we say, the ones who are already sure they know what they like. We’d really like to say hey, give this a chance.”
 
Future concerts follow in March, September and November. Keep posted to the Music Gallery website (www.musicgallery.org) for future announcements.                              


Robert von Bahr's BIS revisited
 
by Bruce Surtees
 
A quarter of a century ago, I was introduced to Robert von Bahr, founder and owner of Scandinavian record label BIS, and I can still remember so clearly his confidence in the future of his label. We met up again last December at a lunch with WholeNote. Von Bahr’s enthusiasm and confidence was unquenched,  twenty-five years on.
 
When von Bahr founded BIS in 1973, he focused on recording neglected domains of music instead of an established body of familiar music, and this philosophy seems to have stood him well. He talked about the genesis of BIS.
 
“I had long planned to do something, since no one else in my country was. The opportunity came when I was working as a summer step-in cantor in the Cathedral of Stockholm. The organist also ‘did’ the Synagogue and, since I was studying to teach singing, at the Stockholm Conservatory, she told me to go to the Shul to listen to ‘that incredible voice’. I did, was totally bowled over, and took the decision right there to start with recording him, quickly, before he died, since he was about 70 (he died at almost 95 years old, still singing). I persuaded Eric Ericson and his choir to participate, and that was that.”
 
This recording, made in September of 1973, became BIS LP-1. This recording was later transferred to compact disc in 1989 as, appropriately, CD-1. The baritone was Leo Rosenblüth with instrumental soloists and the Musikhögskolans Kammarkör conducted by the legendary Eric Ericson. That recording is still available as is every recording ever issued on BIS. That he has never deleted a recording says much for the integrity of Robert von Bahr, a musician who records musicians, and who critically auditions every new recording before it goes into final production.
 
As a matter of interest, the flautist on this first BIS recording, and many others since, is Gunilla von Bahr, Robert’s ex-wife, who is internationally recognized and for whom Einojuhani Rautavaara wrote his concerto for flute and orchestra, Dances with the Winds in 1974-75. His present wife, also one of the current world leaders in flute playing, is Sharon Bezaly, for whom almost a dozen concertos have been written.
 
During those early years, Robert drove to the recording sessions along with his equipment but today BIS dispatches personnel and equipment to venues around the world, producing recordings of the highest artistic and technical excellence.
 
Many of the BIS recordings are unique and significant in the music recording world. The complete Sibelius, for example, is a major undertaking which includes original versions of the composer’s Fifth Symphony, En Saga, Karelia, and others, and the original version of the violin concerto. The Sibelius family allowed BIS to record this longer first version which, because of strict copyright protection, cannot receive a public performance for another 20 years! The soloist for this Sibelius recording is Leonidas Kavakos, who recently performed the final version with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.      
 
Osmo Vänskä, the conductor for the Sibelius orchestral works, is now music director of the Minnesota Orchestra and has embarked on a Beethoven cycle to be recorded by BIS in surround sound. The first disc to appear contains the Fourth and Fifth symphonies [SACD Hybrid 1416]. I had no expectation of hearing anything to challenge or displace the well-known recordings of these pieces, but these are very special performances. There are no extremes of tempi or unusual balances which may impress upon first hearing but become tiresome later. These are two of those all too rare performances that touch the anima of the composer. The sound, both in stereo and surround sound, is totally convincing in timbre and dynamics.
 
Also of interest is the Orchestral Music of Grieg, conducted by Ole Kristian Ruud with the Bergen Philharmonic. The fourth installment is the complete incidental music to Peer Gynt, including dialogue [SACD Hybrid 1441/42]. The recording is in Norwegian but it sounds rather lyrical. The orchestral playing is quite exquisite and the impression of being in the hall is quite realistic, particularly so in a surround sound system.
 
In addition to these three albums, Robert sent along a few recent discs of which he is particularly proud, including Yevgeny Sudbin plays Rachmaninov, which includes the second Sonata, op.36, in a performance based on the Horowitz version, together with the Variations on a Theme of Chopin, op.22. These are powerful performances by an emerging Russian pianist of formidable technique which deserve many re-hearings [SACD Hybrid 1518].
 
Von Bahr is also quite proud of The Swedish Radio Choir directed by Tonu Kaljuste in Schnittke’s Concerto for Choir (1984/5) & Voices of Nature (1972) together with three works by Arvo Part [CD-1157].
 
The TSO’s own Peter Oundjian leading the Amsterdam Sinfonietta in Mozart A major concerto, KV622 with basset clarinet player Martin Frost and Frost with the Vertavo String Quartet playing the Clarinet Quintet in A major, KV581 are two of BIS’s recordings heralded by Robert Von Bahr. In surround sound, these excellent performances are recorded to perfection [SACD Hybrid 1263].
 
Von Bahr also says a must-listen is The Bach Collegium Japan, playing the four Bach Suites, BWV1066-69, directed by Masaaki Suzuki. For many, these are definitive versions of the very popular Bach pieces by the group who is involved in the ongoing project of the complete cantatas. These familiar suites have enjoyed umpteen performances over the years but none more eloquent than these and certainly none so faultlessly recorded [SACD Hybrid 1431, two discs priced as one].
 
The best selling BIS disc ever is Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons played by the Drottningholm Baroque Ensemble [CD-275]. But what about recordings which aesthetically should be made but which will have no, or very little, expectation of recouping costs? Von Bahr thinks they are still worthwhile, and mentioned two recordings in this connection.
 
“The first is Kaikoshru Shapurji Sorabji’s 100 Etudes, a trifle about 7-8 hours in duration. Our eminent star pianist Fredrik Ullén, a neurologist who can read scores of any complexity as we mortals read Donald Duck, has just warmed up with the 25 first and easy ones, which will have been released when this goes into print.  The last two etudes are gargantuan mountains of about 50 minutes each and they are seriously difficult...  this collection, while being interesting to listen to, is basically surpassing what is manually possible on a keyboard.”
 
Von Bahr feels the same way about another recording featuring a different solo instrument:  Claude Loyala Allgén’s Solo Violin Sonata.
 
“Just imagine the commission:  ‘you have access to a solo violin, but I want to hear a string orchestra’.  Something like that must have gone on in Allgén’s mind. Ulf Wallin has spent 5 years of his life to learn the piece. The recording started in 2002 and has gone on until 2005, in 5 installments of a good week each. The duration is 170 minutes (but the 3 discs will be priced as 2) and he is basically playing on all 4 strings the whole time.  Why does anyone climb Mount Everest?  “Because it’s there”.  Well, I guess the answer to these two projects would be the same.  Invaluable music, incredibly performed.”
 
When asked about his plans for the future, von Bahr, as expected, has many ideas.
 
“To try to finish off the cycles we have started, before I die...  Sibelius, Bach Cantatas, the Complete Flute Repertoire, small things like that, the van Beethoven project with Osmo Vänskä and Ronald Brautigam, to make sure that Yevgeny Sudbin really gets established as the world class pianist he is.”
 
There are some 1,350 BIS titles available now and another 150 more recorded not yet released. The entire catalogue and artist information can be accessed at www.bis.se


To Market to Market
Petric & Forget's independent twist


by Allan Pulker
 
One of Canada’s unique contributors to the world of classical and contemporary art music is accordionist, Joseph Petric, the only accordionist in the world today who devotes himself solely to concertizing, commissioning, recording, transcribing and writing about the accordion. With twenty-one CDs to his credit and another on the way, he has made a tremendous contribution to the discography of his instrument. Even more significantly, he has commissioned many new works for the accordion, in his words, “to fill gaps in the repertoire.” In the words of the cognoscenti, he has “redefined the accordion canon!”
 
Joseph Petric was introduced to the accordion at the age of five by his father. “Music-making in my family and community was something used for social occasions. It was functional music, so I got my start playing functional music.”
 
With an undergraduate degree in music from Queen’s University and a master’s degree in musicology from the University of Toronto, Petric is no stranger to art music. The aim that informs his music making is to discover the common ground between music as an artistic statement and functional music, regardless of the style or period.
 
“Bach’s music is functional, music written for an occasion, for church or social gatherings. What I have found playing this music on the accordion is the vernacular and dance elements emerge, the harmonies trigger kinetic responses.” The cycle of 5ths in the first movement of Bach’s c-minor suite, he told me, would do Piazzolla proud! Another composition in Petric’s wide-ranging repertoire is Berio’s Sequenza, which incorporates “nothing less than a non-measured prelude.”
 
Petric was fortunate to study for a time with harpsichordist and early music specialist, Colin Tilney, focusing on the challenges of playing baroque repertoire in an artistically convincing way.  “We discovered that the accordion can do interpretive things that are not possible on the harpsichord, adding levels of awareness to repertoire that is considered to be old. ... Recent research suggests that J.S. Bach was a fearless explorer of new sounds. His Goldberg Variations were the longest piece for solo keyboard written in the eighteenth century.” Bach, too, embraced the interchangeability of instruments, which is one reason that Petric is totally comfortable with playing his music on an instrument that did not even exist in his time.
 
The Petric Bach project that prompted this story is the endeavour under way to perform and record Bach’s organ sonatas with Quebec oboist, Normand Forget. Both have similar interests in both new and old music, but their meeting in 2000 was quite accidental, the outcome of both participating in a concert given by Quebec’s Nouvelle Ensemble Moderne of which Forget was a charter member and with which Petric was performing as a soloist. The two worked initially on a transcription that Forget had done of Schubert’s Die Winterreise.  Their most recent offering is the Bach organ sonatas. They emphasize the interpretive, developing new ways of engaging the role of the listener as interpreter. “Contemporary audiences come better prepared to listen,” Petric says.
 
The duo will perform the six sonatas at a concert at Enoch Turner Schoolhouse on March 1. As enterprising as the folks behind the recent “Mega Launch” I wrote about in December, they are using the event as a fund-raiser to support the production of the independent CD of these works. The price of admission includes a copy of the CD, which will be mailed to ticket holders once it has been produced.


Recently In Town
Andrew Porter in converstion with Pamela Margles

Andrew Porter is known and admired mostly as a music critic. But he was visiting Toronto in December to direct Mozart’s The Magic Flute for the Canadian Opera Company Ensemble Studio, in his own translation. I spoke with him in his temporary home in an apartment near the Edward Johnson Building, where The Magic Flute was being performed. He is unsparing in his opinions. But his mellifluous voice punctuated by a gleeful laugh, his gracious manner, and above all his matter-of-fact sensibility seduced me into believing  he is not just fair, but largely correct.
 
We talked the morning after the second of three sold-out performances. On the coffee table in front of us was an oversized facsimile of the score in Mozart’s hand. ‘I only brought it along to answer questions – I can’t say I directed from a facsimile.’  I had brought with me that morning’s Globe & Mail review. ‘Do you mind if I glance through it? Is it a good review?’ he asked. Then ‘It’s a nice review – he really understood what I was at.’
 
Porter himself was thrilled  with the performance and its enthusiastic reception. ‘I’m very happy with this young cast. They all projected awfully well. They’re not used to speaking in theatrical speech, so I had to work on the dialogue very hard. I was very nervous to begin with, thinking I wasn’t getting what I wanted. But when I told them to be free, within a framework, they responded marvellously. Every rehearsal was largely concerned with engaging the audience, right to the back row. There are all sorts of little tricks.  I would say, “Sing that for someone sitting there. Just meet her eye, and say, “That phrase is for you.”’
 
‘Ideally I would have really liked the house lights up a little more so that there was even more interplay with the audience. When Papageno sings, “I can see pretty girls all around me,” I would like him actually to be able to see them. It makes them feel that you’re not just addressing the drama within the proscenium arch, but you’re actually talking to the people in the audience. That’s not Wagner’s way, but it is very much Mozart’s and Verdi’s. I love the Macmillan because it has a big forestage. Nowadays, they’ve all been destroyed. Early in the 20th century, theatres were Wagnerized so that everything could be kept behind the proscenium frame. We raised the pit a bit so there was interplay between the voices and the instruments, which you don’t get in a deep sunken pit.’
 
Mozart’s ensembles inspired some of Porter’s most masterly touches. ‘The quintets are some of the most wonderfully composed music in the world, I think.’ He carefully worked on getting the singers to listen to each other and blend. ‘It’s no good having the singers scattered all over the stage singing from different places. Those are magic moments. It should be natural. The singer should feel comfortable. Singers can, of course, sing lying on their stomachs, up on steps, or rolling around, but - why?
On the whole, I’m against additions to what the composer and librettist wrote -  unless they are by directors of genius like Peter Sellars. He doesn’t actually add, he interprets. I love his production of The Magic Flute, which couldn’t be more different from mine. There are so many possibilities in the world.’
 
Porter’s experience working at the COC was thoroughly happy. ‘It’s such a well-run company. It’s been marvellous just seeing the mechanics of it. I just murmur to the stage manager, Leslie Abarquez, that I’d like the curtain a little bit quicker -  and it happens.’
 
‘It’s a wonderful orchestra – I’ve heard it a lot - and Bradshaw is a wonderful musician. A friend said he heard things in the score he’d never heard before. Bradshaw also seems to be a very good fundraiser. He’s managed to get the new opera house built. The plans look wonderful.’
 
These days, writing mostly for Opera and the Times Literary Supplement, opera is Porter’s focus. ‘I’ve reached a point where I can pick and choose what I want to write about. I don’t have to record everything that goes on, so I just write when I have something to say.’ He devotes special attention to apprentice performances such as the one he directed here. ‘I sometimes feel that I never want to see another Bohème in my life. It isn’t true, of course. I go all the time, and I love it. But I don’t bother to review another revival of Carmen unless a marvellous new Carmen or José turns up. It’s much more exciting to review a college or conservatory performance and discover singers who are continuing to discover themselves.’
 
The New Yorker and the Financial Times no longer devote nearly as much space to classical music as they used to, when Porter wrote regularly for them. ‘I’m rather depressed about the state of reviewing now’. ‘Paper after paper has stopped even employing music critics in London. They are now being dumbed down like everything else.’
 
Along with his own judgments, his reviews will include vivid, clear, and witty descriptions of what he has heard, based on his authoritative knowledge of all aspects of music-making.  The audience’s response often becomes part of that picture.
 
He once wrote about Peter Sellars’ Così fan Tutte, “I can understand resistance to this Così as easily as my surrender to it.”  He comments, ‘I’m rather proud of reviews when people say to me afterwards, “I can see why you liked it and I can see why I would have hated it,” or the other way around. What I hope to do is to give an accurate account of what happened and what was heard, as far as possible. That is what reviewers should do - describe. Of course it’s coloured by opinion all the time.’

‘It’s very seldom that I say “Don’t miss this,” except by writing in such an enthusiastic way that someone would say, “That is something I must go to,” or “That is something I would hate, even though this chap liked it.”
 
‘If something is a huge success for the public, that fact should be mentioned, even if I’ve absolutely hated it. Yet I’m bothered sometimes when I go to Covent Garden, where the ticket prices are so high that audiences have to believe that what they have seen is worth it. You can get huge applause that doesn’t seem to be discriminate.’  ‘We had a Butterfly in London last month directed by film director Anthony Minghella. It was a huge hit. I thought it was a travesty of Puccini’s opera, and it didn’t move me at all. It was just a grand show. The baby was a little puppet moved by two puppeteers. It just seemed to destroy the pathos.  I think my review was fair. It said it was a smashing show, but didn’t get to grips with the spirit of the opera.’
 
Porter has been a notably strong advocate for contemporary music. ‘The really important composers I’ve grown up with are Elliott Carter, Hans Werner Henze, Peter Maxwell Davies, Harrison Birtwistle…Roger  Sessions was a voyage of discovery for me when I first came to America.’ The festschrift published two years ago, Words on Music: Essays in Honour of Andrew Porter on the Occasion of his 75th Birthday, features contributions by prominent scholars, composers and critics. But he is proudest of the tribute from Carter, a four-bar composition, For Andrew.  ‘I think Carter is the greatest living composer. He writes such emotional music – his Piano Concerto is wonderful drama, filled with passion.’
 
‘I remember the premiere of Carter’s third String Quartet. It was a terrible night in New York, yet Tully Hall was absolutely thronged with people. Carter had the New York Times against him for a long time. The Times said, “It has to be admitted in the end that Carter remains a cipher.” That was for the very performance that packed Tully Hall!’
 
‘Yet you could say that same thing against me when I write about, shall I say, moments when John Adams seems to be just too soggy. Younger people love it. I admire the operas rather a lot. But my ears are not young enough or fresh enough to understand this new thing he’s bringing. It doesn’t seem to be new – it just seems old.’
 
Porter has always been a passionate advocate of period instruments. ‘There’s something about the sound of original instruments that is very communicative. I love Furtwängler’s performances, although no-one would think they were in authentic, historical style. They were just great interpretations. And of course I want to hear Alfred Brendel play Beethoven on a modern piano. But I also love the sound of the instrument Beethoven wrote for. I’m not only for one or the other. I’m not an either/or person in that way – I hope – because each has different merits.’
 
‘Period instruments have now influenced the way that modern orchestras play, so that you get conductors like Charles Mackerras taking certain kinds of timbre, phrasing and lightness learned from using early instruments, and applying them in the correct works. We don’t get a Furtwängler or Karajan kind of performance any more. I remember a sublime performance of Bruckner’s Eighth in Carnegie Hall with Karajan. It’s one of the big performances of one’s life. I heard a wonderful Flute in Salzburg conducted by Furtwängler. It was the longest – but it didn’t seem a minute too long.’
 
Porter is also a famously keen advocate of performing opera in English for English-speaking audiences. His own thirty-five translations are widely performed – Opera Atelier uses his Flute translation.
 
‘In every production you look at your cast, your audience, the number of performances, the hall, then decide specifically in each case which language to use. The quality of the translation available is another factor. For my translation of the Flute  I worked all the time to get as close to the sounds of the original as you can get.  It’s gains and losses. You get the merits of communication in the one, and the sounds of the original language in the other. It’s perfectly right for the COC to do the Ring here with an international cast in German, and for the English National Opera to do the Ring with a British cast in English.’
 
‘But would you have had this Magic Flute in German? There’s not a great composer who hasn’t wanted his works to be done in translation. Verdi, Wagner - they wanted the audience to understand what was being said because the music makes sense when you know what it’s expressing. It’s a word perfectly sung that gives you a sudden pang. Singers nearly all say that the most important thing is to express the words. There was a little moment last night where Miriam Khalil sang the word “joy” in such a way that it produced joy in one’s heart. If the word had been in German, it wouldn’t have made that kind of particularly thrilling moment.’
 
‘A director like Peter Hall works so much to get the singers to express the words to the audience. I admire his work all the time,  including his Flute.  Jonathan Miller produced an Otello in my English translation that was moving. A lot of Verdi’s beautiful sounds were changed, of course, because that always happens in translation, but the directness of what they were saying was superb.  People respond to the drama.’
 
For the future, he says, ‘The opera I long to direct is Fidelio. Flute and Fidelio are the two operas closest to me. If we had the cast and a theatre small enough that you could hear the spoken dialogue, I’d love to do Fidelio - in English, of course. I’d have to translate it first.’
 
PUBLICATIONS
Words on Music: Essays in Honour of Andrew Porter on the Occasion of his 75th Birthday, edited by David Rosen and Claire Brook; Pendragon Press 2003
 
Verdi’s Macbeth: A Sourcebook, edited by David Rosen and Andrew Porter; Norton 1984
 
Many of Porter’s reviews from his twenty-year stint at The New Yorker were published in five volumes: A Musical Season: A Critic from Abroad in America; Viking
Music of Three Seasons 1974-1977; Farrar, Straus, Giroux
Music of Three More Seasons 1977-1980; Knopf
Musical Events: A Chronicle 1980-1983; Summit Books
Musical Events: A Chronicle 1983-1986; Summit Books
 
A number of his thirty-five opera libretto translations are readily available. Hushion House publishes many of them in their series of English National Opera Guides, including Otello,  Tristan & Isolde, The Force of Destiny, and  Don Carlos. Pendragon Press has published Turk in Italy. Porter’s translation of The Ring of the Nibelung is published by Norton.
 
Porter has written opera librettos for The Song of Majnun by Bright Sheng (recorded on Delos with Ward Holmquest, conductor) and The Tempest by John Eaton 

 

  
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