Jens Lindemann is an extraordinary player who enjoys an international career as a soloist. He served for five years as lead trumpet of the Canadian Brass and has appeared with ensembles from Rotterdam to Buenos Aires, via Warsaw and Seoul and New York City. He has performed with the Toronto Symphony under Jukka-Pekka Saraste and has wowed 40,000 enthusiastic concertgoers at The Last Night of the Proms. 

Flying Solo features 22 tracks beginning with Debussy’s Girl with the Flaxen Hair in Lindemann’s ethereal transcription for piccolo trumpet. His accompanist here, as on most of the selections, is wife Jennifer Snow, head of pedagogy at the Glenn Gould Professional School in Toronto and visiting associate professor at UCLA. 

The second track, Fats Waller’s Handful of Keys, surely must be as fun to play as it is to listen to. Brad Ellis, at the piano for this one and five other tracks, shares Jens’ enthusiasm. 

The album runs the gamut of emotions and styles from Amazing Grace, Danny Boy, Nature Boy, and The Irish Washerwoman to the final track, Play That Funky Music. The latter is arranged for multi-tracking of four trumpet parts plus euphonium. It’s a hoot (or should that be a toot?).

Initially I thought that I couldn’t sit through the whole album. I did and I enjoyed it. Marquis is an independent label based in Toronto, with international distribution through EMI. While it does not have the largest catalogue around, each album has persuasive artistic reasons to be heard. Check them out.

Bruce Surtees 

Graupner: Musique instrumentale et vocal, Vol.1  L'Ensemble des Idées heureuses; Geneviève Soly Analekta FL 2 3162

Christoph Graupner (1683-1760) is probably best known for turning down the prestigious job of Cantor at St. Thomas’s in Leipzig (a position that was eventually offered to Johann Sebastian Bach). He has remained in relative obscurity since then, but Montreal harpsichordist Geneviève Soly is doing her best to change that. In this first volume of a complete-works project, there are several fine examples of his writing talent.

Certainly one of the highlights is bassoonist Mathieu Lussier’s fun, frolicking performance in the Concerto for bassoon in which his pungent tone and momentum drive the Vivaldi-esque final movement. 

Although only 17 are published today, the program notes mention that beginning with his posting in Darmstadt Graupner composed 1,418 cantatas in all. In Cantate Ach Gott und Herr, soprano Ingrid Schmithüsen’s articulate lyrical singing clearly communicates the text and Graupner’s musical message although her discomfort with high notes is occasionally evident. In excerpts from the opera, Dido, Königin von Carthago, there are many dramatic opportunities but Schmithüsen doesn’t always take advantage of them. 

While Graupner’s Sonata per Cembalo e Violino, is charming but relatively uneventful, it provides the vehicle by which we hear the delightful musical partnership of Soly and violinist Hélène Plouffe. The rhythmic vitality and unity of the ensemble’s strings in the Sonata a quattro tantalize the listener’s ear, and the Concerto for recorder features the expressive and playful soloist Natalie Michaud.

Historical notes, lyrics and translations, and background information, all offer excellent insight into this ongoing project.

Frank T. Nakashima 

Concert note: On November 10 at 1:00 the Jeunesses Musicales of Ontario and Harbourfront Centre present a Cushion Concert featuring Les Boréades de Montréal with Hélène Plouffe, among others, at the Brigantine Room.
 

Sax Summit  Phil Dwyer w/Blake; Perry; Murley; Rieu; Ryga; White; Eisenman; Swainson; Clarke CBC Records TRCD 3001

The danger in any "All Star" jazz session is that the whole exercise can turn into a self-indulgent display of one-upmanship. This is certainly NOT the case with the Sax Summit CD.

This disc presents seven excellent Canadian saxophonists: Phil Dwyer (tenor, soprano and music direction), Seamus Blake (tenor), P.J. Perry (alto), Mike Murley (tenor and soprano), Yannick Rieu (tenor), Campbell Ryga (alto), and Perry White (baritone). The recording was done during a live concert at Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto in January of 2001. Each musician has room to stretch out and strut his stuff, but the resulting improvisations are more akin to interesting conversations, rather than clashes of ego.

The ten tunes presented on the CD include such jam session classics as Blues Up and Down, Body & Soul, My Favorite Things, Work Song and Billie's Bounce. Dwyer contributes his arranging skills and his own tune Appearing Nightly to the recording. The arrangements (necessary with ten musicians) are excellent. The balance between solo room and ensemble passages is just right.

I highly recommend this disc - it's unlikely you'll ever get a chance to hear this combination of players live any time soon. That is unless there's a Sax Summit Two disc in the works.  In the meantime, I'm going to put on Blues Up & Down and revel in the glorious sound of four of the best tenor players on the jazz scene today.

Merlin Williams 

Concert note: Deleon White Gallery’s Now’s the Time Jazz Series features Mike Murley & Dave Occhipinti, Nov 3 at 2:00 and the Earl Seymour Memorial Saxophone Quartet with Phil Dwyer, Perry White, John Johnson & David French, Dec 1 at 2:00. U of T University of Toronto Faculty of Music presents Up Close and Personal with the Faculty Saxophone Quartet, Nov 27, 12:10 in Walter Hall.
 

Romantic Gems  Christina Petrowska Quilico Welspringe Productions (Independent)

The music on this disc is like a refreshing spring breeze through an open window. Petrowska Quilico plays with an enviable grace and ease, making the most difficult of the works seem effortless.

An incredible 32 selections are packed into the 63-minute programme.  All fall into the category of miniatures, beginning with Alkan and encompassing a wide range of the genre. The oldest composer represented is Josef Kossovits (1750-1824), with Nikolay Rakov (1908-1990) being the most recent. Well-known heavyweights such as Liszt, Nielsen and Rachmaninoff are included.

Petrowska Quilico’s pianistic skill is nicely complimented by the benign sound of CBC’s Glenn Gould Studio and one of its Steinway D-274’s. A slight trace of low-frequency thump, an unfortunate tendency in sessions with closely miked pianos on wood floors, is noticeable in Grondahl’s Summer Song, Op.45, No.3. Overall, though, producer Michael Coghlan has done an excellent job. 

The five-panel insert has notes by scholar William Westcott, spreading over all the panels. Graphic designer Adriana Dossena has superimposed Westcott’s text over a background comprised of a greyed-out enlarged fragment of the cover drawing, a work created by the pianist herself. The recording is dedicated to the pianist’s late husband, baritone Louis Quilico. Photos of the couple in happier times are included in the insert.

This disc brings much enjoyment and would be an excellent choice for a Christmas gift. 

John S. Gray 

Editor’s note: Christina Petrowska Quilico will perform Pierre Boulez’ First Sonata at the presentation of the International Glenn Gould Prize to Mr. Boulez on November 24 (by invitation only). Later this month Welspringe will release “Gems with an Edge”, a re-issue of Petrowska Quilico’s 1970s recordings of works by Messiaen, Boulez, Brégent, Davidovsky and Coulombe Saint-Marcoux.

WORTH REPEATING
 
 

The Music of Victor Schertzinger, Hoagy Carmichael and Vincent Youmans Robert Farnon and his Orchestra; Johnston Singers Vocalion CDLK 4100

One listen to any of the 23 tracks will inform you that this is a re-issue. Not because of the sound which is good British mono, but because they don’t play that way anymore, nor much of this repertoire neither. For those who enjoyed the best of these three American composers of the 20’s and 30’s, listening to this disc is like going to heaven. Really!

It’s a long time since you’ve heard any of these once ubiquitous tunes played with such unerring style and élan: The Fleet’s In, Dream Love, Marcheta, One Night of Love, Tangerine and others written by Victor Schertzinger (1880-1941). Or these treasures by Hoagy Carmichael (1899-1981): Stardust, Little Old Lady, Georgia on my Mind, and One Morning in May. Vincent Youmans’ (1898-1946) extensive output included Tea for Two, Without a Song, Orchids in the Moonlight, Time on My Hands, and the dance that helped put Astaire and Rogers (Fred and Ginger, that is) onto the movie marquees, The Carioca.

Robert Farnon, born in Toronto in 1917, took the Canadian Band of the Allied Expeditionary Forces to England in 1944. After associations with many famous bands of the era he built his own orchestra. Acclaimed by his peers, everyone but everyone wanted him behind them. His arrangements were the ultimate in sophistication and his many British Decca recordings were best sellers. 

The 23 tracks selected for this CD date from 1951/52. The ensemble and the arrangements are almost unique. Happily, Vocalion has five other Farnon discs. 

Bruce Surtees 

.

DISCS OF THE MONTH
(November is New Music Month):

Canadian Composer Portraits 
 

Violet Archer  Centrediscs CMCCD 8502

Jean Papineau-Couture  Centrediscs CMCCD 8602

Oskar Morawetz  Centrediscs CMCCD 8702

 

Malcolm Forsyth  Centrediscs CMCCD 8802

 

R. Murray Schafer  Centrediscs CMCCD 8902

This month the Canadian Music Centre will launch the second installment of its Canadian Composer Portraits series produced in conjunction with the CBC and funded by the Canada Council and Canadian Heritage. As with the first set of offerings (reviewed in the July/August 2002 issue of WholeNote) each of these five portraits includes an hour-long radio documentary about the composer and an additional disc featuring three or four major works in their entirety. 

Aficionados of the music of R. Murray Schafer will be pleased to know that they no longer have to commit to an eight-day wilderness adventure to get at least a taste of the final installment of the Patria series. For the past ten years Schafer and his “wolves”, a group of dedicated participants now numbering about 75, have been creating a ritual musical drama each summer in the wilderness of the Haliburton Forest and Wildlife Reserve entitled And Wolf Shall Inherit the Moon. This epilogue to the series of ten music-theatre works, created in a variety of site-specific venues, has previously only been accessible to those who were willing to dedicate a week of their summer (and every subsequent summer) to the work’s creation. Schafer feels that “If Wolf Music went into a concert hall it… would wither before the concentration of listeners.” He has however allowed a CBC recording team to attend the process and record some selected musical pieces from the wilderness experience. 

Violet Archer is well represented by the cantata The Bell, dating from 1949, the Sinfonietta of 1968 and the String Quartet No.3 from 1981, a stunning work which, forty years after the fact, still shows the influence of her formative teacher Bela Bartok. The disc also includes the Piano Trio No.2 from 1957, but the trio, in this same performance, is already available on a compact disc distributed by the Canadian Music Centre. Surely Archer would have been much better served by the inclusion of Evocations (1987) for 2 pianos and orchestra, a work that was the pride of her later years. 

Jean Papineau-Couture, the dean of Quebec composers, died two years ago at the age of 83. He composed actively until the last decade of his life but you wouldn’t know it from this collection which ends with Paysage, a 1968 setting of a text by Saint-Denys Garneau commissioned by the Biennial Festival of Contemporary Music of Zagreb, Yugoslavia. However, one of the true highlights of this series is the premiere recording of the Concerto pour violon et orchestre de chambre (1951-52) in a sparkling performance by Victor Schulz with the CBC Vancouver Orchestra under Mario Bernardi. The previously unavailable work is an outstanding example of Papineau-Couture’s early creative output and his personalization of the influence of Stravinsky through his teacher Nadia Boulanger. In the documentary we hear much talk of Clair-Obscure, a 1986 concerto for contrabassoon, double bass and orchestra, an intriguing work which I dearly wish we were offered the opportunity to actually hear. As it is, for later works we are left having to turn to another Centrediscs recording (CMCCD 6499) which offers chamber works from the years 1968-1982.

Oskar Morawetz, a Czech-born Canadian whose Romantic voice we are told is directly descended from Dvorak and Janacek, fairs a little better, with works spanning the years 1968 to 1991. Gianetta Baril’s performance of the Concerto for Harp and Chamber Orchestra (1976), written for the Guelph Spring Festival, and the String Quartet No.5, “Tribute to W. A. Mozart” (1991), commissioned by the Glory of Mozart Festival for the Orford String Quartet’s final public performance, are particularly good examples of his craft. 

The youngster in this crop of senior composers is Malcolm Forsyth, who was born in South Africa in 1936. He is represented by Sagittarius (Concerto Grosso No.1), written for the Canadian Brass in 1975, and Atayoskewin, Suite for Orchestra from 1984. Also included is the 1987 Concerto for Trumpet and Orchestra, but the same performance is currently being offered for sale on another disc at the Canadian Music Centre’s website for $6 (SMCD 5130). This is a composer who is still very active, yet we are offered nothing produced in the past 15 years.

I have some misgivings about things that were not included in these packages—the music as stated above—and some quibbles with the content of the documentaries—was it really necessary to begin Violet Archer’s portrait with three people telling us how tiny she was? I also wish there was more documentation in the booklets about who is speaking and when in the documentaries. They obviously draw extensively on archival interviews and it gets a little surreal to hear long-dead people speaking without any indication that we are not in the present.

These issues aside, I feel that these Canadian Composer Portraits are an invaluable contribution to our cultural heritage. They also provide hours of wonderful listening. 

David Olds

Editor’s note: Although not available in time for this review, the CBC will once again issue a companion set to accompany the portraits with an additional hour of the more “listener friendly” music of each of the composers mentioned above.

Philippe Manoury: 60th Parallel  Orchestre de Paris; David Robertson Naxos 8.554249-50

Manoury was born in 1952 and studied at the Paris Conservatoire. He has been active in the activities of IRCAM (the Institute for the Research and Co-ordination of Acoustics and Music founded by Pierre Boulez) which was also involved in this project. 

His music has been performed widely, notably under Boulez with the Chicago Symphony, and he has served as composer in residence with the Orchestre de Paris, who perform on this CD.

The 60th Parallel is a large-scale collaboration between music, libretto and theatre. The story has many layers: passengers stuck inside an airport while a storm rages, two murders, a love story, a man hunt and Einstein's brain going about in a jar! The airport represents a fixed, enclosed space--a haven of safety from the storm. Things happen slowly, and seem to have no purpose. The words between the characters are often banal--the type that strangers stick to when they're lost or uncomfortable. This is the musical equivalent of the writings of Samuel Beckett.

The vocal writing is reminiscent of Berg or Strauss. The orchestra depicts the many climaxes of the storm. This is extraordinary writing showing the composer has command of a wide range of colours and expression.

Recorded live at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, this is featured as part of a Naxos cycle entitled 21st Century Classics. 60th Parallel is thought provoking. It is an intellectual masterpiece that will set the standard for opera in the 21st century.

Kevin Mallon 

Orbiting Garden  Joseph Petric Centrediscs CMCCD 7802

This new release from Centrediscs proffers samples of the abundant harvest of Canadian music accordionist Joseph Petric has cultivated over the course of his career. Since his first commission in 1977 (from yours truly), he has enhanced the international accordion repertoire with over a hundred new works.

The pop-like opening title track by Christos Hatzis seems more of a busy zoo than a tranquil garden, with the accordion countering a tottering cantus firmus to a garish array of synthesized orchestral textures. Alcides Lanza’s approach to the electronic component of his Arghanum V is simpler and subtler, and his idiomatic writing for the accordion is fully integral to the discourse.

Micheline Roi strikes a judicious, highly effective balance between the harmonic and melodic strengths of the instrument in her solo work fondly, through the madness breathing. Tomas Dusatko’s Diastema for viola, accordion and percussion features Toronto violist Doug Perry in a fascinating alchemy of archaic and modern influences.

Serge Arcuri’s jumpy Bandoneon offers a pleasant acousmatic excursion in rondo form and flows quite nicely into the late Norman Symonds' masterful El Duo, which delivers the energy Arcuri promises but never quite delivers. Symond’s artful colloquy draws superb ensemble playing from both Petric and master marimbist Bob Becker.

My only caveat concerning this disc involves the liner notes, which fail to address the programmatic element of Ms. Roi’s work, the role of improvisation in the Dusatko, or any technical aspects of the electroacoustic works.

Daniel Foley 

John Cage: Litany for the Whale  Theatre of Voices w/Terry Riley; Paul Hillier Harmonia Mundi 907187

Paul Hillier and his American ensemble, Theatre of Voices, have straddled the world of early and contemporary music since they first began performing in 1990 and have previously released two discs of music by Arvo Pärt. Now Hillier has assembled a disc of John Cage vocal pieces, the first in a potential “Modern American Composers” series on Harmonia Mundi. 

What the excellent Litany for the Whale offers is Cage filtered through Hillier, which is exactly what the composer would have liked. Still it is a bit unnerving to hear such ecclesiastical modernity. The CD opens with the 25-minute title track, a spacious and spare 5-note requiem, mesmerizingly sung by tenors Alan Bennett and Paul Elliot. The rest of the disc is linked by an undulating three-note melody that practically (and intentionally) becomes plainchant when sung by Hillier and others. The familiar folksiness of Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs and Experiences No. 2 becomes something altogether different. In the cryptic Thirty-Six Mesostics Hillier even sends his own ‘liturgical’ self up. It’s a fascinating interpretation.

The more outré Cage of Aria and Aria No.2 jumps out in contrast but never quite dazzles. Despite the ensemble’s name, what’s lacking is theatricality. Cage’s music depends not only on notes, rhythm, and time, but space, audience, and performance as well, so a recording can never really capture the whole experience. Hillier has shaped this disc with care and Theatre of Voices give invigorating and fresh interpretations, but Cage, even ten years after his death, demands a live performance.

Kevin McMillan 

Walter's Freak House  Société de Musique Contemporaine de Québec; Walter Boudreau ATMA Classiques ACD22283

FREAK:  A fleck or streak of colour. A thing or occurrence that is markedly unusual or irregular. An abnormally formed organism, especially a person or animal regarded as a curiosity or monstrosity.  A sudden capricious turn of mind; a whim. A nonconformist person, especially a member of a counterculture.

Walter Boudreau is a freak. Not because of his careful rejection of superficial composerly posturing. Not because of those damned red shoes, the sunglasses and short-panted chicken legs on the cover, and not because of the title logo that looks as though it could have been lifted from a roadside Steak House. It’s because in this eclectic, spirited collection of compositions spanning the period between 1978 and 1991, he so skillfully and shamelessly revels in his convoluted cultural lineage.

His studied reconciliation of European musical precedents, the significant timbral influence and sometimes meandering nature of 1970’s Progressive Rock in a contemporary art music rhetoric, and the confrontation of weighty religious symbolism in a distant, agnostic context make for complicated and frictional subject-matter, yet Boudreau approaches them with commitment and sincerity. The results are
difficult, sometimes beguiling, and simultaneously vivid, animated, and engaging. 

The “problem” is that identifying these topics and their successful involvement in his work prominently weaves the composer into the fabric of post-1960’s Quebec musical life. As a result, the four pieces on this recording resonate with many of the influences and issues of the time and place, making Boudreau not freakish, eccentric, or irregular at all, but considerably aware, museful, and reflective. 

Paul Steenhuisen 

Alexina Louie – Music for a Thousand Autumns  Various artists Centrediscs CMCCD 7902

This disc is an excellent cross-section of chamber works by Alexina Louie. Composed over the last two decades, the four pieces on this disc open a wide window on this Toronto composer’s mysterious and evocative world – at times delicate and subtle, at others harsh and brutal.

At her best, Louie works a kind of magic. The piano quintet Music from Night’s Edge is a beautiful piece, filled with a kind of fleeting lyricism, lush textures and even a touch of whimsy. Music for A Thousand Autumns for twelve players is also a fascinating composition – all trilling woodwinds, slithering strings and jangling percussion.

But at times Louie’s preoccupation with orchestration seems to get the better of her. In Demon Gate (also for twelve players) there’s lots of colour, but beyond that, the musical ideas are thin. This tendency has an annoying way of co-existing alongside some her richest music: the beginning of her string quartet Dénouement is dynamic and engaging, but by its end it has grown rather sparse.

Two of these compositions, Music from Night’s Edge and Dénouement, feature the Accordes String quartet (in the first work they are joined by pianist Lydia Wong). Here, playing is balanced and sensitive, although the performers might have “dug in” a bit more at times. The members of Toronto’s Esprit Orchestra, performing the other two pieces, are not so shy. Under the direction of Louie’s husband, Alex Pauk, they offer bold, dramatic interpretations.

Bravo to Centrediscs for this well produced, well programmed recording!

Colin Eatock 

The Modern Cello: Nocturnal Dances of Don Juan Quixote I Musici de Montréal Yuli Turovsky, cello/director Chandos CHAN 9973

This, the fortieth release from cellist Yuri Turovsky’s excellent string orchestra I Musici de Montréal, features the veteran ensemble lavishly enhanced with winds, brass, percussion, organ and cimbalon in a program of twentieth century music which can scarcely be called modern.

It opens with a high-powered performance of Leonard Bernstein’s sprawling Three Meditations for cello and orchestra, based on material culled from the composer’s problematic Mass of 1971. Try as he might, Bernstein can't seem to escape the Tchaikovskian yoke of the two-bar phrase followed by a modulation, though it must be said that those phrases are nonetheless memorable ones which Turovsky conveys with great emotion.

The major triumph of this disc is unquestionably Finnish composer Aulis Sallinen’s joyful, effervescent and extremely infectious Nocturnal Dances of Don Juan Quixote for cello and strings. There is never a dull moment in this mad Tango of phantasmagoric proportions, which Turovsky dispatches with transcendent virtuosity.

Paul Hindemith's Trauermusik, composed overnight in response to the death of King George V, is best known in the version for viola and strings. Judging by the extremely overwrought interpretation this work receives here I’m not convinced that poaching this particular fowl was worth the effort. Béla Bartók’s folkloristic Rhapsody No. 1 (originally for violin) seems far better suited to Turovsky’s fiery temperament and characteristically brusque, penetrating timbre.

Chandos’ highly processed sound offers an idealized perspective of the orchestra, placing the cello so commandingly to the fore that Turovsky’s constant respirations become annoyingly audible.

Daniel Foley 

Shostakovich/Schnittke: Piano Quintets Vermeer Quartet; Boris Berman Naxos 8.554830

Last month Naxos, the “little company that could”, celebrated the 15th anniversary of its founding and owner Klaus Heymann was in Toronto for a reception at the Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Art. I had been aware that the label features a number of local artists (Aradia, Amici, Martin Beaver and Judy Loman to name but a few) but had not realized that thanks to producers Norbert Kraft and Bonnie Silver and the suitability of Toronto venues, many Naxos chamber recordings are done here even when foreign artists are involved. 

One such suitable location is of course Glenn Gould Studio and it was there that respected American ensemble the Vermeer Quartet met with renowned pianist Boris Berman to record two classic works of the 20th century repertoire. The Shostakovich Piano Quintet was written in 1940. This work is not without its dark moments, but the rollicking scherzo and playful finale are among the most joyous movements in the Shostakovich canon and they receive a boisterous performance here. 

In contrast to this Alfred Schnittke’s Piano Quintet is a very sombre work. It was begun in 1972 after the death of the composer’s mother. It was then set aside for three years until, following the death of Shostakovich, Schnittke returned to finish this funereal work. But rather than morose this is a quietly beautiful composition that resonates hauntingly in the marvelous acoustic of Glenn Gould Studio.

David Olds 

Concert note: On November 28 Mark Fewer and Peter Longworth will perform Schnittke’s Violin Sonata No.1 at the Royal Conservatory of Music.

The WholeNote welcomes your participation and looks forward to your cooperation in making DISCOVERIES a lively addition to our magazine and to our  website. 

Catalogues and review copies of CDs should be sent to:
The WholeNote, 60 Bellevue Avenue, Toronto ON M5T 2N4

For more information contact David Olds at dolds@interlog.com or call 416.535.7740.