Classical and Beyond

The youthful and adventurous Danish Ensemble Midtvest (EMV) makes its Canadian debut, March 13, as part of Mooredale Concerts’ current season. Mooredale’s artistic director, cellist Adrian Fung told me via email how he first met the group: “My Afiara Quartet tours Denmark every two years, each time playing over 20 cities. It was on one of these trips that I met the EMV, which is managed by the same energetic gentleman (Oliver Quast) who builds our successful Danish tours.”

Based in Herning, which is in the centre of west Jutland (hence the “midwest” reference), in the Herning Museum of Contemporary Art (HEART), EMV consists of five string players, a pianist and a wind quintet. As Fung pointed out, “They bring an incredible flexibility to their playing, as the size of their ensemble shrinks and expands to the benefit of the repertoire and their programming. Think of a team of chefs that each have their specialty, but only called to the fore when the menu calls for it.”

Their Walter Hall concert will see six members of EMV joined by American clarinet virtuoso, Charles Neidich, “a celebrated luminary of the clarinet” as Fung dubbed him, in a program that focuses on the ensemble’s piano-wind nexus. Danish composer Carl Nielsen’s  Fantasy: Pieces for Oboe and Piano Op.2 opens the recital and I was able to get a sense of it by sampling EMV’s cpo CD, Neilsen: Complete Chamber Works for Winds. I was struck by the richness of Peter Kristein’s singing tone on the oboe in the Romance and look forward to hearing him and pianist Martin Qvist Hansen live. Mozart’s Quintet for Piano and Winds in E-Flat Major K452 stands at the pinnacle of writing for piano, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn. I have been in love with it since childhood when my father introduced me to the Angel LP with pianist Walter Gieseking and the Philharmonia Wind Quartet that included the legendary hornist Dennis Brain.

Two months after Schubert finished writing Die schöne Müllerin, he took the 18th song in the cycle (Faded Flowers) and used it as the basis of a set of variations, Introduction and Variations on “Trockne Blumen” for Flute and Piano D802 Op posth.160. A solemn introduction leads into the gentle bucolic theme and as the variations progress the flutist is called on to convey beauty, tempestuousness, vulnerability and propriety. Flutist Charlotte Norholt, who will perform the work here in March, said before EMV’s first appearance at Carnegie Hall in 2012 (in a Danish video available on YouTube) that “the quest for musical excellence is the driving force of this ensemble.”

For Brahms’ Clarinet Trio in A Minor Op.114, cellist Jonathan Slaatto joins pianist Hansen to welcome back special guest Neidich for this enduring late-in-life masterpiece that was inspired by the same clarinetist (Richard Mühlfeld) who led Brahms to write his equally memorable clarinet quintet and sonatas. Slaatto, in that same YouTube video from 2012, expressed part of what makes EMV (and any good ensemble) tick when he said, referring to finding a suitable tempo, that your own view of any piece is subordinate to the view of the group as a whole.

Fung told me that he “was lucky to nab EMV on the same trip they are playing New York’s Carnegie Hall (their third appearance with them).” I suspect the Mooredale audience will agree after hearing their March 13 concert.

Maxim Vengerov. On March 11, the universally acclaimed violinist, the extraordinary Maxim Vengerov, makes his first recital appearance in Toronto since a right shoulder injury and recovery from surgery forced him to suspend playing for four years in 2007. His Roy Thomson Hall concert with pianist Patrice Laré, presented by the Montreal Chamber Music Society, will include Franck’s emotionally rich classic, Sonata for Violin and Piano in A Major, Ysaÿe’s devilishly difficult, unaccompanied Sonata for Violin No.6 as well as music by Brahms and Paganini.

I got a sense of Vengerov’s journey back, which involved an assiduous rehab and reinvention of his violin technique from much reportage on the Internet, particularly Laurie Niles’ revelatory violinist.com interview published on January 9, 2013. In that interview, Vengerov also spoke of his close relationship to cellist/conductor Mstislav Rostropovich and pianist/conductor Daniel Barenboim, both of whom he got to know as a teenager.

Of Rostropovich, Vengerov says he was “like a musical father, he was so close to my heart; I think it was his great musicianship and also understanding of the violin repertoire, of the stringed instruments, that helped us to build an incredible chemistry that I had with no one else.”

Barenboim, Vengerov says, would “view a piece of music as an instrumentalist, as a pianist, from the harmonic point of view, from the orchestration, colouring,” whereas Rostropovich had an “instant connection with the composer, with the soul of the composer,” imagining he was the composer himself performing the music.

Of course Vengerov himself has conducted successfully (as anyone in the audience in October of 2012 at Roy Thomson Hall was only too aware, for his historic double role as soloist/conductor with the TSO in an exceptional performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade), but the violin remains his “first source of communication with the audience – no doubt my first love.”

Vengerov looked at the time when he couldn’t play as beneficial to deepening his musical knowledge. “I think I have more colours to my violin playing than before, for the fact that I hear it somehow differently.” He also discovered, after surgery, that he had to change his technique so that he moves much less; he had been putting too much physical effort into his playing. Working with quite a lot of pain forced him to relax his playing. “If I had pain, that meant I was doing something wrong,” he said.

All in the service of the music, of “the great heritage Beethoven, Brahms, Shostakovich, Tchaikovsky left for us. We have to deliver these great works in the best possible way that we can. We have to find a very personal approach to them. Every soloist nowadays has to try to say something unique, something personal. Otherwise, if you’re playing just another performance of Brahms’ concerto, why do we need to hear that? That is the great lesson that Barenboim taught me…Just study the score…I want to really hear your Sibelius, your discovery, based on your new, detailed knowledge of the musical score.”

Takemitsu in Kyoto. An unexpected delivery of a DVD recently rekindled memories of Toru Takemitsu, who won the Glenn Gould Prize six years before Pierre Boulez. The DVD, Kyoto, is a quasi-documentary, part travelogue, atmospheric portrait of a place and a lifestyle, made in 1968 by the Japanese master filmmaker Kon Ichikawa (The Makioka Sisters) with a soundtrack by Takemitsu, then in his late 30s. Its 37 minutes are densely packed with artfully composed images that treat a rock garden, a Buddhist temple and a royal villa with the same aesthetic respect as that given to the people who walk the city’s streets. Takemitsu’s music, mysterious and quietly surprising but always filled with a deep humanity, acts as the foundation that illuminates these images. With a modernist sensibility always conscious of a cultural past, his score is an essential component of this fascinating piece of cinematic art. The handsomely packaged DVD is available from martygrossfilms.com. Many years ago, I was fortunate to be invited to watch Takemitsu at work one afternoon supervising the marriage of music, sound design and image in Marty Gross’ exquisite Bunraku film, The Lovers’ Exile. Takemitsu’s attention to detail, personal warmth and humility made a lasting impression.

QUICK PICKS

Music Toronto: If you’re quick off the mark you may be fortunate enough to hear the eminent British pianist Steven Osborne Mar 1. On Mar 10 the exuberant Montreal string ensemble, collectif9, performs a diverse program including Geof Holbrook’s Volksmobiles, from collectif9’s CD of the same name which Strings Attached DISCoveries’ columnist Terry Robbins praises elsewhere in these pages. Mar 17 the ebullient Quatuor Ébène’s strong program begins with Mozart’s delightful Divertimento K136, moves to Debussy’s Quartet in G Minor (a piece they own) before concluding with Beethoven’s immortal String Quartet No.14 Op.131. Apr 5 Duo Turgeon, husband-and-wife duo pianists, perform a heavyweight program that includes a new arrangement of Ravel’s Second Suite from Daphnis and Chloe by Vyacheslav Gryaznov, Lutoslawski’s Variations on a Theme by Paganini and Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Haydn as well as pieces by the Russian Valery Gavrilin and the Canadian Derek Charke.

Royal Conservatory: I wrote in my last column about the talented young Norwegian violinist Vilde Frang and her Koerner Hall debut Mar 2. She’s followed Mar 4 by Canadian violinist Karen Gomyo, Swiss cellist Christian Poltéra and Finnish pianist Juho Pohjonen in an appealing program of Mittel-European fare. On Mar 20 Paul Lewis performs his first solo recital in this city since his remarkable Toronto debut with the Women’s Musical Club in the fall of 2013. In this upcoming Koerner Hall concert, he focuses on Brahms (Four Ballades Op.10; Three Intermezzi Op.117), Liszt (the transformative Après une lecture du Dante, fantasia quasi una sonata, “‘Dante Sonata” from Années de pèlerinage, Italie) and Schubert (the enchanting Sonata D575). On  Mar 29 the current crop of Rebanks fellows are on display in a recital in Mazzoleni Hall, which is also the venue Apr 7  for chamber music by Haydn, Berg (the uber-Romantic Lyric Suite) and Dvořák (the charming Piano Quintet No.2 Op.81) performed by the Musicians from Marlboro. In Koerner Hall on Mar 30 violinist Augustin Dumay and pianist Louis Lortie bring their powerful musical gifts to sonatas by Beethoven (“Spring”), Franck and Richard Strauss.

Perimeter: Best known as artistic directors of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, husband-and-wife cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han bring their considerable performing talents to the Perimeter Institute Mar 10, in a program of music by Richard Strauss, Chopin, Messiaen, Glazunov and Albéniz.

Nocturnes in the City: Pianist Adam Zukiewicz plays Beethoven and Liszt Mar 13. (One evening earlier, Mar 12, Zukiewicz plays a similar program at St. Basil’s Church.) The Czech-based Epoque Quartet plays Vivaldi, Jezek and others at the Praha restaurant Mar 27. Notable Czech pianist and Smetana specialist, Jan Novotný, makes a welcome visit to Toronto for a recital that includes music by Smetana, Schubert and Mozart.

Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber Music Society: The final weekend of the Attacca Quartet’s Haydn 68 series takes place Mar 18, 19 and 20; since their last appearance in the KWCMS Music Room, the quartet has a new violist, Nathan Schram. (My Q & A with the KWCMS’ Jean and Jan Narveson and interview with former Attaca violist Andrew Fleming appeared in The WholeNote’s November 2013 issue as the complete Haydn string quartet cycle began.) Mar 24 cellist Rachel Mercer and pianist Angela Park perform the complete Mendelssohn works for cello; on Apr 3 they join violinist Elissa Lee and violist Sharon Wei, their partners in Ensemble Made in Canada, for a Syrinx concert of music by Beethoven, Schumann and Omar Daniel.

Academy Concert Series presents Mozart’s masterful Sinfonia Concertante K364 for violin, viola and orchestra, and Beethoven’s first sonata for cello and piano, Op.5 No.1, transcribed by nineteenth-century arrangers for string sextet and cello quintet, respectively, Mar 19. Also Mar 19, Jeffery Concerts presents the TSO Chamber Soloists – Nora Shulman, flute, Teng Li, viola, Jonathan Crow, violin, Heidi Van Hoesen Gorton, harp, and Joseph Johson, cello, in a program of music by Françaix, Saint-Saëns, Debussy, Ravel and Jongen.

The TSO: Stéphane Denève, principal conductor of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, leads the TSO in a crowd-pleasing program Mar 23 and 24 that features the charismatic Jean-Yves Thibaudet as soloist in Saint-Saëns’ exotic Piano Concerto No.5 “Egyptian.” On Mar 31 the TSO presents the Victoria Symphony conducted by Tania Miller with Stewart Goodyear as soloist in Grieg’s lyrical Piano Concerto. Soprano Carla Huhtanen, poet Dennis Lee and narrator Kevin Frank join conductor Earl Lee in two afternoon Young People’s Concert performances Apr 2 of Abigail Richardson-Schulte’s musical treatment of Lee’s iconic children’s classic, Alligator Pie. It would be a surprise if Gabriela Montero didn’t improvise her own cadenza in Mozart’s sublime Piano Concerto No.20 K466 when she appears as soloist with the National Arts Centre Orchestra under its new conductor Alexander Shelley Apr 2; two of Richard Strauss’ most exciting tone poems, Don Juan and Death and Transfiguration open and close the concert.

Massey Hall/Roy Thomson Hall presents Chopin champion Yundi in his first Toronto recital in a decade Mar 19; the famously conductorless Orpheus Chamber Orchestra features Pinchas Zukerman as soloist in Mozart’s Violin Concerto No.3 K216, a masterpiece of gallantry and lightness, and in Beethoven’s tender First Romance, Mar 20.

Canzona presents the XIA Quartet – Edmonton Symphony Orchestra concertmaster Robert Uchida and Toronto Symphony Orchestra members, violinist Shane Kim, assistant principal violist, Theresa Rudolph, and principal cellist, Joseph Johnson, playing music by Bartók, Debussy and Schubert, Mar 20 at St. Andrew by-the-Lake, on Toronto Island, repeated Mar 21 on the mainland.

Three years ago, Rashaan Allwood was the very rare recipient of a perfect 100 in his ARCT Royal Conservatory exam. Now he’s a U of T student with an upcoming free recital Mar 26 at Walter Hall of piano music inspired by birdsong and nature – Messiaen, Ravel, Liszt, Granados and others.

Last month I wrote about Andrew Burashko, Art of Time Ensemble’s founder and artistic director; the group’s unmissable next concert, “Erwin Schulhoff: Dada, Jazz and the String Sextet: Portrait of a Forgotten Master,” takes place Apr 1 and 2 at Harbourfront Centre Theatre.

Following their playing of Mendelssohn’s engaging String Quartet No.2, U of T Faculty of Music ensemble-in-residence, the Cecilia String Quartet is joined by James Campbell for a performance of Brahms’ Clarinet Quintet, a cornerstone of the clarinet repertoire, Apr 4.

The COC orchestra’s top two violinists, Marie Bérard and Aaron Schwebel, give a free noontime concert featuring music by Ysaÿe and Leclair, in the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre, Apr 5. 

Paul Ennis the managing editor of The WholeNote.

Two brilliant young European violinists make their local debuts in February. In winning the 2001 Queen Elizabeth Competition, Latvian violinist Baiba Skride joined such luminaries as Oistrakh, Kogan, Laredo and Repin in the fiddling firmament. The Guardian recently called Skride “a passionate heart-on-sleeve player.” Now 34, she will appear with the TSO in Brahms’ richly sonorous Violin Concerto, February 17 and 18.

According to BBC Music Magazine, the 29-year-old Norwegian, Vilde Frang, “has the knack of breathing life into every note.” Frang will give a recital at Koerner Hall, March 2, with Michail Lifits on piano. Her program begins with Schubert’s Fantasy in C Major for Violin and Piano D934, another masterpiece from the last year of the composer’s life, and moves through Lutoslawski’s Partita, commissioned by Pinchas Zukerman in 1985, before concluding with Fauré’s ever-popular Violin Sonata No.1. Frang began her musical education at four, played Sarasate’s Carmen Fantasy with the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Mariss Jansons, when she was barely 13, and was thrust into the limelight when she was named Credit Suisse Young Artist of the Year in 2012. A recording contract and worldwide touring were the result.

It’s illuminating to hear both violinists talking about inspiration and interpretation in interviews readily available in cyberspace. Skride told Tobias Fischer (on Tokafi.com April 20, 2006) that interpretation “means giving my opinion to the audience, while at the same time respecting what the composer might have wanted. It’s a combination of my personal beliefs and the composer’s probable intent.” Her interpretive process, she continued, is “almost always emotional. Of course, there are certain things you have to know about and naturally you do get your facts straight while preparing. But 99 percent is intuition, absolutely.” Her approach to performing live is “simply giving everything you have in that very moment.”

In a YouTube video biography made shortly after her Credit Suisse honour, while soaring on her violin in rehearsal for Bruch’s Violin Concerto No.1 with Jakub Hrůša and the Philharmonia Orchestra, Frang spoke of the importance she places on trusting her instincts,  how it’s crucial to take in things and let yourself be inspired. “Inspiration is really the most important thing,” she said. “I use my instrument as a tool [to transform inspiration]. Whether you hear Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, a wonderful horn solo or the sound of the sea, it’s something you can actually work with.”

Later that year, on August 1, 2012, Frang spoke with Laurie Niles of violinist.com about what brought her to the violin. “My father is a double bass player, and my sister is also a double bass player – my mother isn’t a musician, actually. But I watched my sister play in youth orchestras, when I was small, and obviously I thought I was the next one in line, in the double basses family! To me it was a natural thing, but then my father made this argument: our family had a Volkswagen, which was a very tiny car. He said, ‘Can you imagine, when we go on holiday, with three double basses? There is no chance the whole family will get space in the car!’

“So he made me a smaller instrument. It was made of cardboard – there were no strings on it. So I could put my Little Twin Star stickers on it, and Hello Kitty stickers – but the fact that it didn’t make any sound – I found this to be very frustrating! I had to ‘play’ on it for almost a year until I finally got a violin which was alive, which made sound.

“I remember the moment I got the violin that was real, that was really living and alive – I’ve never practised so inspired in all my life, as I did the first couple of days with that violin! I was in seventh heaven, I was so happy.”

Niles asked Frang, who began with the Suzuki method, how she  connected with Anne-Sophie Mutter (See my November 2014 column in The WholeNote for more on Mutter and her foundation): “I first played for Anne-Sophie Mutter when I was 11-years-old,” she said. “After that, she asked me to keep her updated, and she followed my development. I kept sending her recordings and tapes of my playing, and letters about how I was doing. It was obviously a very inspirational thing for me, because I knew that she was always there watching, somewhere. When I was 15, she invited me to Munich to audition for her again, and then I was taken into her foundation, her Freundeskreis Stiftung, or Circle of Friends Foundation, and I was also given this Vuillaume instrument.

“Ms. Mutter has also been a great, great mentor to me over all these years. I did a tour with her in 2008, and we played in Carnegie Hall and the Kennedy Center in Washington. I played the Bach Double with her. Of course, I learned a lot from this experience, not only playing for her, but playing with her. I think the most important was that she encouraged me to always trust my own instincts and follow my own voice. That is her top priority, and that’s the message she wanted to give, which I think is a wonderful thing.

“But more than any other musician I know, she is extremely focused on exploring the musical score, in order to get as close as possible to the composer. Many people might consider her to be very free, but actually she has the most authentic and strictest approach that I know of. I think that is why she allows herself to have that amount of freedom. The more you know the piece and the better you know the score, the more freedom you actually have yourself.”

Hamelin past and future. Marc-André Hamelin’s Music Toronto recital on January 5 had a blissful component running through it from Liszt’s Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude to the Schubert Sonata in B-flat D960 and the well-chosen encore, Messiaen’s Prelude “The Dove.” For me, this emotional line reached its apex with the sublime second movement of the Schubert which had a profundity that reminded me of the last three Beethoven sonatas. There was a serenity to Hamelin’s playing that was more pronounced than when he played at Koerner Hall the previous March. At times he seemed to slow the music just enough that you could feel it palpably.

During the conversation I had with him in November (see my article in the December 2015-January 2016 issue of The WholeNote), Hamelin described his  relationship with Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No.1, which he will perform with the TSO on February 25 and 27. “I learned it very early,” he told me. “I remember the first time I played it was with Skrowaczewski and the Montreal Symphony. I believe it was somewhere like 1990 or ’91. It’s certainly not the deepest piece ever written but it shows consummate craftsmanship. And it’s also very entertaining for audiences. And in some ways quite touching.” Louis Langrée, famous for his stewardship of the Mostly Mozart Festival, his career blossoming as music director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, will conduct.

Quick Picks

Feb 4 The last time I heard the Annex Quartet, they showed their sensitive musicianship supporting Jan Lisiecki in the chamber versions of Beethoven’s Piano Concertos Nos. 2 and 4. Their solid Music Toronto recital includes string quartets by Janáček, R. Murray Schafer and Mendelssohn. Feb 18 The irrepressible St. Lawrence String Quartet makes its annual visit to Music Toronto with works by Haydn, Samuel Adams and Schumann. Mar 1 The distinguished British pianist Steven Osborne performs two Schubert Impromptus D935 (fresh from his sparkling new Schubert CD) and a selection of Debussy and Rachmaninoff, in his Music Toronto return.

Feb 5 Conductor Eric Paetkau’s contagious energy and musicianship guide the eclectic group of 27 in Finzi’s bucolic A Severn Rhapsody and a trio of French works including Dubois’ Cavatine for Horn featuring the TSO’s Gabe Radford. The dynamic Nadina Mackie Jackson is the bassoon soloist in the world premiere of Paul Frehner’s Apollo X.

Feb 11 An ingenious piece of animation, The Triplets of Belleville is filled with cultural references that fly by with terrific panache, Sylvain Chomet’s 2003 film has rightly become a classic. Composer Benoît Charest leads Le Terrible Orchestre de Belleville and special guest Nellie McKay in the live performance of his infectious, original score for the film (rooted in 1930s vaudeville/jazz) accompanying this special screening at Roy Thomson Hall.

Feb 12 Cellist Rachel Mercer follows up her well-received CD of Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites with an exciting concert of music for solo cello at Gallery 345, beginning with one of those Bach suites. Mercer then moves from Cassadó’s early 20th century suite to contemporary pieces by Andrew Downing and the world premiere of Darren Sigesmund’s Solo Suite.

Feb 13 Celebrate the Year of the Monkey with the TSO as the great violinist Maxim Vengerov is the soloist in the Butterfly Lovers Concerto. Long Yu, artistic director of the China Philharmonic Orchestra and music director of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra, conducts. Feb 22 The Associates of the TSO present works by Françaix, Janáček and Brahms for various combinations of flute, oboe, horn, bassoon and two clarinets. Mar 2 Seven soloists from the TSO’s ranks (including the ubiquitous Teng Li) showcase their talents when the TSO presents music by Paganini, Vivaldi and Haydn (his elegant and tuneful Sinfonia Concertante in B-flat Major for the unusual combination of soloists, violin, cello, oboe and bassoon).

Feb 17 The hip, Brooklyn-based orchestral collective, The Knights, make their Koerner Hall debut, joined by violinist Gil Shaham, whose warm playing should illuminate Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No.2, in all its angularity and dark beauty. Feb 26 Koerner Hall gives us the rare gift of hearing violinist Christian Tetzlaff, his sister, cellist Tanja Tetzlaff and pianist Lars Vogt performing piano trios by Schumann, Dvořák and Brahms. Richard Haskell praised them in these pages last September for their “conducive music-making in the three Brahms piano trios.” Andras Schiff’s monumental Feb 28 recital in Koerner Hall is sold out. Those lucky enough to have tickets (myself included) can look forward to a program memorable for its inclusion of the final piano sonatas by Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert. Mar 4 Much-in-demand (especially since she received the Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2008) Canadian violinist, Karen Gomyo, teams up with well-regarded cellist, Christian Poltéra, and talented young Finnish pianist, Juho Pohjonen, to perform trios and sonatas by Haydn, Janáček and Dvořák. All four of these events are presented by the Royal Conservatory.

Feb 19 The charming Trio Arkel (TSO members violist Teng Li and cellist Winona Zelenka, COC concertmaster Marie Bérard) move into their new venue, Jeanne Lamon Hall at Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre, with a program including Gubaidulina’s exhilarating String Trio, Kodály’s Serenade for Two Violins and Viola and Beethoven’s glorious Quintet for Strings, Op.29 “The Storm.” Joining them for this and a repeat concert in London, Feb 29, presented by the UWO Don Wright Faculty of Music, will be violinist Scott St. John and violist Sharon Wei.

Feb 20 Also in London, Jeffery Concerts presents the award-winning cellist Yegor Dyachkov and longtime chamber music partner, pianist Jean Saulnier, in works by Brahms, Schumann and Janáček.

Feb 23 Charles Richard-Hamelin, who finished second in last year’s prestigious Chopin competition in Warsaw, will give a COC free noon-hour concert of a selection of Chopin’s last piano works at the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre. Based on his thrilling performance of Chopin’s Sonata No.3 at Mazzoleni Hall on January 15, I urge you not to miss it.

Mar 3 The Women’s Musical Club of Toronto’s talent-laden season continues with the widely acclaimed Daedalus String Quartet performing Sibelius’ String Quartet in D Minor “Voces Intimae” Op.56. Montreal native, clarinetist Romie de Guise-Langlois, joins them in James MacMillan’s powerful lament, Tuireadh, and Brahms’ sublime Clarinet Quintet in B Minor Op.115. 

Paul Ennis is the managing editor of The WholeNote.

Daniel Hope has built a substantial international career as an acclaimed violin soloist, chamber musician and music festival curator. A champion of contemporary music and an advocate of the classical canon, his musical curiosity cannot be pigeon-holed. He was the violinist with the legendary Beaux Arts Trio for six years and is currently associate artistic director of the Savannah Music Festival. He is a prolific writer (with three German-language books to his credit) who has devoted much of his time over the last 15 years to the study and preservation of music by composers murdered by the Nazis. He has worked with the brilliant, Oscar-winning German actor, Klaus Maria Brandauer, on  projects combining music and the spoken word, including a look at Stravinsky’s A Soldier’s Tale through the prism of war and peace.

Hope’s father, author Christopher Hope, was an outspoken critic of apartheid. Those beliefs forced the whole family to leave South Africa in 1974 when Daniel was six months old. They moved to London, where his mother took a job as Yehudi Menuhin’s secretary, later becoming his manager.

January 28 Hope returns to Koerner Hall for his third Toronto concert in 16 months following memorable appearances September 30, 2014 as soloist in Max Richter’s Vivaldi’s Four Seasons Recomposed, and April 8, 2015 when his singing tone contributed greatly to the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s performance of Mahler and Brahms piano quartets. His upcoming recital “Yehudi Menuhin @ 100” with pianist Sebastian Knauer is a tribute to the man in whose house he grew up and with whom he performed many times during Menuhin’s last ten years.

The program consists of music dear to Menuhin’s heart. He and Glenn Gould famously recorded J.S. Bach’s Violin Sonata No. 4 in C Minor, BWV 1017. The next piece on the program, George Enescu’s Impromptu concertant reflects the fact that Menuhin studied with Enescu from the age of 11, a mentorship that led to the two becoming lifelong friends. Menuhin speaks about him on YouTube: “Enescu will always be my guiding light as a man, as a musician.” Menuhin also had great affection for the next piece on the program, Mendelssohn’s Sonata in F Major, which Menuhin was instrumental in publishing for the first time in 1953.

The Walton Violin Sonata was commissioned by Menuhin in the late 1940s. It’s followed by Ravel’s “Kaddisch” from Deux mélodies hébraïques. Hearing Menuhin play it on YouTube from a recording he made when he was 20 is a very moving experience. He lets the music speak for itself; his playing is serene yet paradoxically forceful. Bartók’s Romanian Folk Dances, which conclude the program, acknowledge Menuhin’s devotion to the Hungarian composer (Menuhin commissioned the Sonata for Solo Violin from Bartók). All in all, a splendid way to evoke Menuhin’s spirit.

Hope and Menuhin: I spoke briefly with Hope backstage after his  Soundstreams concert last year and he told me a little about growing up in Yehudi Menuhin’s house and what an extraordinary influence it was on his life, how it was absolutely incredible in so many ways.

“That it happened completely by accident, that was the thing. My parents are not musicians at all; they have no musical training. But we were kind of thrown into this musical environment and then Menuhin himself, of course, but also the people who came to that house, who played with him, who came to work with him. The amalgamation of musical styles in that house was something out of this world. You would have on the same day Rostropovich and Ravi Shankar. Or Wilhelm Kempff and Oscar Peterson.

“So you had great, great music, the essence of music. And as a result, it took me until I was 10 or 11 to actually realize there were different categories of music. I didn’t understand that. I heard amazing music and this music amazed my ears. And the fact that it happened to be Indian music or it happened to be a Beethoven sonata didn’t make a difference to me. It was just fascinating.”

When Hope was four he announced that he was  going to become a violinist. I asked how he came to that decision.

“It came about,” he said,” because of absorption. It was hearing the violin, it was seeing the violin. There were violins everywhere; there were real violins, there were images of violins. He had the most incredible collection of Paganini original concert posters. He had sketches and drawings of Paganini everywhere. Hundreds of them. So, wherever you looked you saw an image of a violin or a violinist.

“Plus you had him always with a violin, you had violinists who came in there. So I heard this sound all the time so it wasn’t perhaps so much of a surprise when I announced that this is what I wanted to do but it did throw my parents slightly a curve because they didn’t really know how to deal with that. And it was out of the question to go to my mom’s boss.

“Because I could have said the next day, ‘I want to be a fireman or an astronaut or something.’ So ... four-year-old child, whatever. So they decided instead to find a teacher who lived around the corner. And that was the next bit of great luck. This lady happened to be one of the great, great pedagogues of children. We didn’t know that. We just asked a few people who said, ‘This lady’s pretty good with kids.’ Sheila Nelson was a groundbreaking teacher. And she was the one who made this happen actually.

“Menuhin, much later in life, took a real interest, but only when I was 16 or something. So I had to make my way and I had to learn how to practise and meet the teachers that defined the way I played and the way I worked. And it was through my last teacher, Zakhar Bron, the great, great teacher, that Menuhin became quite interested because [Bron] had great success with Maxim Vengerov and Vadim Repin, at the time, 15-, 16-year-old kids. And I think he was curious to see what could Bron have done. And that’s when I went to play for him when I was 16 and it was a mixture of shock and delight because [I was] the little kid who always ran around the house, who was very close to him (he was like a family member to us). Suddenly it changed and we became kind of teacher-student, mentor, colleague.”

That was the beginning of 60 concerts Hope performed with him.

“Starting from that moment on, until his death, his last concert. That was a period of about ten years; going on the road with him, studying with him, then playing in the evening, playing the concerts. That was the ultimate because you could learn so much in a lesson but nothing actually prepares you for that moment when you go out and play, when you perform.

“And do the great concertos with him, you know, the Elgar, and the Bartóks – the things that he had, you know, he’d met the composers and he’d worked with them – was just incredible.”

Hope’s January 28 concert precedes the international release of his new CD, My Tribute To Yehudi Menuhin, by just a few days. There are many parallels between its contents and the program of the Koerner Hall recital. The CD includes Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in D Minor which Menuhin resurrected after one of the composer’s relatives presented it to him in 1951. There are works by Bartók and Enescu. There is an homage, Unfinished Journey, by Bechara El-Khoury, written ten years after Menuhin’s death. There are three tributes to Menuhin, by John Tavener, Steve Reich and Hans Werner Henze, part of the Compassion project that Menuhin undertook with violinist  Edna Michell.

Quick Picks

Dec 2 The Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber Music Society presents pianist Alexander Tselyakov and the Canadian Sinfonia Chamber Musicians in Hummel’s Piano Quintet Op.87 and an intimate setting of Chopin’s Piano Concerto No.2. Dec 9 Duo Concertante’s pianist Timothy Steeves goes it alone in a performance of four diverse Haydn sonatas. Dec 16 K-WCMS celebrates Beethoven’s birthday with the Penderecki String Quartet’s program of two of the composer’s most riveting quartets, Op.59 No.3 and Op.132. Jan 27 Mozart’s birthday is acknowledged in a diverting program by Trio+ that includes the piano Sonata K457, two trios (K502 and K542) and the poignant Sonata for violin and piano K304, reputedly Albert Einstein’s favourite piece to play. Jan 30 André Laplante studied with Yvonne Hubert in Montreal and no doubt had the same experience as all of Hubert’s students; she would sit on her student’s right and, with her left hand, play all the right-hand passages flawlessly. Laplante’s K-WCMS program consists of crowd-pleasing jewels by Schubert, Ravel, Liszt and Chopin.

Dec 10 The iconic Gryphon Trio begins the third decade of its annual Music Toronto association with a program that includes an early Beethoven trio (Op.1 No.3), a world premiere by Vincent Ho (Gryphon Realms) and Arno Babajanian’s Piano Trio in F-Sharp Minor. Jan 14 The compelling JACK Quartet brings their contemporary focus to works by John Luther Adams, John Zorn and Iannis Xenakis. Feb 4 Music Toronto’s season continues with the Toronto-based Annex Quartet, whose program includes Janáček’s powerful Quartet No.1 “Kreutzer Sonata”, R. Murray Schafer’s Quartet No.5 “Rosalind” and Mendelssohn’s Quartet No.2. 

Jan 17 A period ensemble that plays on gut strings with classical bows, the London Haydn Quartet brings a quintessential classical program to Mooredale Concerts’ first event of the new year.  Their performance of the same program – Mozart’s sublime Clarinet Quintet in A Major, K581 (with guest clarinetist Eric Hoeprich), Haydn’s String Quartet in Bb Major, Op. 50, No.1, and Beethoven’s String Quartet in D Major, Op. 18, No. 3 – was called “revelatory” by the New York Times last year. The review went on to praise “the earthy, warm sounds of the gut strings [that] blended beautifully throughout” and the “myriad details of shading and contrast, and beautifully calibrated phrasing.”

Jan 18 Pianist Christina Petrowska-Quilico heads a stellar group of chamber musicians in this Associates of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra concert with the intriguing title “Colours in Music: Composers with Synaesthaesia.” The sensation of experiencing sounds as colours manifests itself in a wide-ranging program of works by Liszt, Ellington, Sibelius and Caravassilis.

Jan 16, 17 The TSO’s “Mozart @ 260” features a representative sampling of the great composer’s creative output: the overture and two arias from Don Giovanni, his “Jeunehomme” piano concerto (with French pianist Alexandre Tharaud) and his final symphony, all conducted by Bernard Labadie. Jan 27, 28 The musical treasure that is Barbara Hannigan returns to the TSO in a performance of Dutilleux’s Correspondances. Hannigan and Dutilleux had a very close artistic relationship which the singer touched upon in CBC RADIO 2’s This Is My Music recently. Peter Oundjian also leads the orchestra in Berlioz’s ever-fresh Symphonie fantastique, which will share the stage with Richard Strauss’ buoyant Horn Concerto No.1 on Jan 30. The TSO’s principal horn, golden-toned Neil Deland, is the soloist.

Jan 30 Winner of the 1998 Tchaikovsky Competition, 40-year-old Russian pianist Denis Matsuev puts his poetic and virtuosic talent on display in a program that begins with Schumann’s Kinderszenen and Kreisleriana before concluding with Rachmaninov’s Etudes-Tableaux Ops.3,6 and 9  and Sonata No.2. As we go to press the Koerner Hall concert is almost sold out. Act quickly.

Daniel Hope performs “Menuhin @ 100” at Koerner Hall, January 28. 

Paul Ennis is the managing editor of The WholeNote.

Toronto and Canada have been abuzz recently with the announcement of pianist Charles Richard-Hamelin’s second-place finish in the 17th Fryderyk Chopin Competition in Warsaw. It’s the first time a Canadian has won a prize in that prestigious event. In addition Richard-Hamelin won the Krystian Zimerman Prize for best performance of a sonata for Chopin’s Sonata No. 3 in B Minor, Op. 58. The Women’s Musical Club of Toronto was justly proud. It was the same sonata that won him their Career Development Award last April. In fact at the initial concert of their 148th season October 15, the WMCT announced that Richard-Hamelin had just made the finals.

Even mainstream media picked up on the historic nature of the award, the story made sweeter by the (perhaps) more unexpected news that 16-year-old Toronto high school student Yike (Tony) Yang, who finished fifth, became the youngest prizewinner in the history of the gruelling competition. One of Yang’s teachers, former Chopin Competition winner (1980) Dang Thai Son (the subject of The WholeNote’s February 2000 cover story), was one of 17 jury members. Martha Argerich (whose final vote mirrored the top two finishers -- Seong-Jin Cho of South Korea was awarded first place), Garrick Ohlsson, Yundi and Adam Harasiewicz were other former winners among the jurors. Richard-Hamelin’s second place puts him in the distinguished company of Vladimir Ashkenazy, Mitsuko Uchida and Ingrid Fliter.

Yulianna Ardeeva: This month’s listings are brimming with young talent. In a coincidence of rare serendipity, Yulianna Ardeeva, who placed first in the previous Chopin competition in 2010, is the guest soloist with the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal (OSM) at Roy Thomson Hall on November 25. On her website you can get a sense of the crisp articulation that will undoubtedly serve her well here in Stravinsky’s elegant Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra. Kent Nagano will also lead the orchestra in Shostakovich’s profound Symphony No.10.

Alexander Seredenko, who won first prize in the Canadian Chopin Piano Competition in 2014 is the soloist in the latest instalment of Rob Kapilow’s ongoing TSO series “What Makes It Great?” Rachmaninoff’s justly popular Piano Concerto No.2 will be explored by the engaging Kapilow and the up-and-coming Seredenko.

Anastasia Rizikov, another gifted prodigy, now 16, gives a recital at Glenn Gould Studio, November 28. It will be interesting to see if she performs Albéniz’ Triana, which earned her first place at the Jaén International Piano Competition in Spain earlier this year, as well as a special prize in the Obligatory Spanish Work category. This piece is scheduled for inclusion on her upcoming Naxos CD, to be released next March, 2016.

Phil and Eli Taylor Academy: Speaking of prodigies, the COC is featuring three young pianists from the RCM’s Phil and Eli Taylor Performance Academy for Young Artists, in a noontime free concert, November 26: 11-year-old Leonid Nediak, who won the Canadian Music Competition (age 7 to10) in 2013 and made his OSM debut in 2014; 12-year-old Raymond Huang; and Richard Chao Gao, who appeared at RTH in the Emanuel Ax-curated “Pianorama” last February. The fall edition of the Taylor Academy Showcase Concert November 21 at Mazzoleni Hall is already sold out, so this is an opportune moment to get a sense of the young talent on the rise in our city without having to wait for the Taylor Academy’s next showcase in the winter of 2016.

Jan Lisiecki: No reference to prodigies would be complete without noting the sublime Jan Lisiecki, now 20, whose December 6 Koerner Hall recital is sold out. I’m happy to say I already have my ticket and I’m looking forward to hearing Lisiecki (and his pellucid, singing tone) perform, among other works, Chopin’s Preludes Op.28, Mozart’s Sonata No.11 in A Major K331 and Mendelssohn’s Variations sérieuses in D Minor, Op. 54.

Peter Jablonski, now 44, who makes his Toronto debut at the Jane Mallett Theatre November 10, began studying drums at five and piano at six. He played the Village Vanguard with Buddy Rich and Thad Jones when he was nine, earning praise from Miles Davis. He then made his solo recital and orchestral piano debut at eleven in Sweden before establishing a distinguished professional career in the U.S. and U.K. in the early 1990s. His Music Toronto program is unusually rich and varied, moving from Szymanowski and Chopin to Grieg, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin and Leonard Bernstein’s transcription of Copland’s El Salón Mexico.

Schulich School. Richard-Hamelin, currently studying with André Laplante, received his master’s degree from the Yale School of Music in 2013 and a bachelor’s degree in performance from McGill’s Schulich School of Music in 2011. Another Schulich tie-in: celebrating the Schulich School’s tenth anniversary, the McGill Symphony Orchestra, led by conductor Alexis Hauser, makes its Koerner Hall debut November 17.

Highlighting the evening will be Brahms’ resplendent Double Concerto in A minor, Op.102 with violinist Axel Strauss and cellist Matt Haimovitz as soloists. Strauss’ Naxos recording of Volume 2 of Enescu’s violin and piano music caught the attention of Terry Robbins in last June’s WholeNote. He called the CD “exceptional” and Strauss “terrific”in his Strings Attached column. The opportunity to hear the internationally acclaimed Haimovitz is always welcome. All three artists are on the Schulich School faculty. The evening begins with John Rea’s Over Time. Rea, a two-time recipient of the Jules Léger Prize for New Chamber Music, will attend the concert. Closing out the program is Shostakovich’s forceful Symphony No.5, with its contagious rhythms that careen from sarcasm to triumph.

And speaking of student orchestras, ten days later, Tania Miller, music director of the Victoria Symphony, leads the Royal Conservatory Orchestra (the RCM’s own student orchestra) in its fall Koerner Hall concert. Their program opens with Traffic Jam, by the Banff Centre’s “emerging composer” and composer-in-residence of the Victoria Symphony, Jared Miller. Concertmaster Heidi Hatch, a Glenn Gould School scholarship recipient, is the soloist in Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy, a delightful mashup of Scottish folk songs and German Romanticism. Mahler’s memorable Symphony No.5 completes the evening.

Grosvenor’s Return: Last month I profiled the extraordinarily talented young British pianist, Benjamin Grosvenor. His return visit to the Jane Mallett stage October13 exceeded all my expectations. For a report on the concert, please read my blog on thewholenote.com.

QUICK PICKS

November 5 The Cecilia String Quartet’s Music Toronto concert includes Mendelssohn’s String Quartet Op.44, No.2 which is featured on their newly released Analekta CD. The quartet series continues November 26 with the Toronto debut of the young Polish ensemble, the Apollon Musagète Quartet, playing Dvořák and Schubert.

November 6 Beethoven’s under-appreciated Symphony No.4 is the featured work in a diverse program by the energetic group of 27 under the direction of the effervescent Eric Paetkau that also includes works by Purcell, Burge and Glazunov.

November 8 Marquis Classics recording artist, flutist Susan Hoeppner, and TSO principal oboist, Sarah Jeffrey, are joined by pianist Jeanie Chung in a program of works by Ginastera, W.F. Bach, Ibert and others in Mazzoleni Hall.

November 8 The superb string trio, Trio Arkel, includes Haydn and Beethoven in its Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber Music Society (K-WCMS) recital. November 9 finds the Arkel in Heliconian Hall playing a similar program.  November 12 the COC free noontime concert series features them again in the Beethoven Trio Op.9, No.3 as well as Michael Oesterle’s Warhol Dervish.

November 10 Legendary musicians flutist Suzanne Shulman and harpist Erica Goodman perform “An English Midday Serenade” at McMaster University in a free lunchtime concert that includes music by Vaughan Williams, Handel and Elgar, among others.

November 11 Nocturnes in the City presents the celebrated Zemlinsky String Quartet in a program of works by Dvořák, Janáček, Suk and Shostakovich

November 12 The K-WCMS series continues with the Zemlinsky String Quartet. The esteemed Czech musicians include the first of Beethoven’s late string quartets, his Op.127, in their program. November 18 rising star violinist Francesca Anderegg gives a solo recital featuring Bach, Ysaÿe and Kreisler. November 21 the versatile Ottawa-based pianist, David Jalbert, mixes and matches Satie, Poulenc and Stravinsky in his “Soirée Parisienne.”

November 12 and 14 Michael Sanderling, of the musical Sanderlings (father Kurt, brothers Thomas and Stefan) and conductor of the Dresden Philharmonic, leads the TSO in Mahler’s Symphony No.4, perhaps the composer’s most popular symphony. November 18 and 19 Peter Oundjian takes back the baton for Rimsky-Korsakov’s crowd-pleasing Scheherazade, with concertmaster Jonathan Crow as violin soloist. Principal clarinetist Joaquin Valdepeñas brings his gorgeous, full tone to Weber’s Clarinet Concerto No.1. Dec 2, 3 and 5 Crow returns to the spotlight for Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto, that enduring romantic icon, while Oundjian conducts another of the composer’s masterpieces, his Symphony No.6 “Pathétique.”

November 14 The Dover Quartet caught everyone’s attention when they won the Grand Prize and all three Special Prizes at the 2013 Banff International String Quartet Competition. Their concert in Kingston’s Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts should be worth the trip.

November 15 The Windermere String Quartet performs Russian works by Alabiev and Glinka as well as Beethoven’s great “Razumovsky” Quartet Op.59, No.2.

November 25 André Laplante brings his secure pianistic sense to Schubert’s Moments Musicaux (Nos.1,2 and 6) and Three Petrarch Sonnets by Liszt as part of the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir’s “German Romantics” program.

November 29 Canadian superstar violinist, James Ehnes, is the soloist in Lalo’s virtuosic Symphonie Espagnole with the Niagara Symphony Orchestra. 

 Paul Ennis is the managing editor of The WholeNote.

Jennifer Taylor has a knack for programming. Music Toronto’s artistic producer and general manager admitted in a recent chat that while she has “a tiny reputation for piano recital debuts,  just say that I am lucky.” We met in her office in an older building high above the city’s downtown core. Glancing at the list of pianists who have made their local debuts under Taylor’s watch over the last 25 years, many of the names jump out: Pascal Rogé, Misha Dichter, Nikolai Lugansky, Markus Groh, Andreas Haefliger, Simon Trpčeski, Piotr Anderszewski, Steven Osborne, Arnaldo Cohen, Alexandre Tharaud, Till Fellner, Peter Jablonski and Benjamin Grosvenor, who returns to the stage of the Jane Mallett Theatre on October 13, a mere 19 months after his memorable debut there in 2014. Conceding that she doesn’t usually gamble on pianists as young as Grosvenor, she said: “He was the real thing.”

Grosvenor’s exceptional talent was widely revealed at 11 when he won the keyboard section of the BBC Young Musician of the Year. At 19, shortly after becoming the first British pianist since the legendary Clifford Curzon to be signed by Decca, he became the youngest soloist to perform at the First Night of the Proms. The venerable magazine Gramophone bestowed its “Young Artist of the Year” on him in 2012.

"There are so many composers and so many projects,” Stewart Goodyear said recently to WholeNote editor David Perlman. “What makes this life so exciting is that the discovery is endless; the road doesn’t end and there’s discovery galore.”

The two men were wrapping up the latest edition of Conversations <at>The WholeNote for the magazine’s YouTube channel, a conversation prompted by Goodyear’s upcoming appearance as soloist in the first concert of Mooredale Concerts 2015/16 season, September 27. Billed as “Legendary Piano Variations,” it’s the coupling of two major works, Bach’s joyful Goldberg Variations and Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations (the essence of which, according to Alfred Brendel and others, is humour).

Goodyear talked about the similarities in the two pieces: “They both centre around dances. There is humour in both (of course used very differently), voices, innovative harmonies – one in each set almost sounds like a 21st-century work, the harmonies are so advanced it still shocks the listener. Even if the listener has heard it around 10,000 times – like yours truly – it always makes a huge impression and I’m bowled over by what I hear.”

That’s the boyish pianistic explorer talking, the 37-year-old pianist who is famous for the Beethoven “Sonatathon” in which he has played all 32 sonatas in chronological order at one sitting, who calls himself a “music gourmet” with an appetite for big programs (such as performing all five of the Beethoven piano concertos with the Niagara Symphony Orchestra on Hallowe’en night, repeating the marathon the following Sunday afternoon, November 1). Or, on the same weekend as the Mooredale date, performing all five Beethoven concertos in a slightly more traditional setting with Edwin Outwater and the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony: One and Four on Friday evening; Three (and Symphony No.8) on Saturday afternoon; Two and Five Saturday evening.

“It humbles me as an interpreter,” Goodyear continued, discussing his Toronto recital. “I always want to bring an intimacy to both of those works…to get into the marrow.”

Playing these two monumental works on the same recital is “like a Canadian program for me,” he says. His introduction to the Goldberg Variations was Glenn Gould’s 1955 recording of the piece “and then immediately after, I heard [Gould’s] second [recording].” The first recording of the Diabelli Variations he heard was Anton Kuerti’s. Goodyear's own CD of the Diabellis was released last fall by Marquis and very favourably reviewed, by among others Christina Petrowska Quilico in our November 2014 issue.

Goodyear had lived with the Goldbergs all his life before finally performing them in public for the first time on Gould’s own piano at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa last spring, surrounded by portraits of Gould. “I was face to face with Glenn Gould,” he said. “It gave me another excuse to connect with the audience.”

Gould’s piano felt custom made to him, he says. He found playing it “challenging” with its “brilliant sound and lots of colours. Just being a part of that history inspired me a lot,” he continued. “I felt that there was something spiritual going on.”

The Mooredale recital will be Goodyear’s fourth performance of the Bach this year. “Every time I do it, it’s different,” he said. The notational text is sacrosanct, the basis for all Goodyear’s formal preparatory work until it feels “like it’s in every pore.”

“So that whatever happens, it feels like I’m improvising,” he elaborated. “I know it 500 percent that whatever comes out it’s not like I’m reciting something or reiterating something; it’s just coming out.”

Part of his practising method is delving into a piece’s history and its qualities. In the case of Messiaen’s Turangalîla Symphony which he’s playing again with Paavo Järvi, later this season with the Orchestre de Paris, it’s trying to “find the seed to this masterpiece.” Listening to him talk about its character reveals the way he relates to a musical work: “It’s very theatrical; there are sweeping gestures, extremely lyrical, very colourful, with fermatas, rallentandos. There are moments when you see the lovers running to each other just like Hollywood; there are slow-motion moments when they finally embrace. It’s a technicolor extravaganza. It’s a beautiful work, 80 minutes long. It’s decadent, it’s pure, it’s everything. It’s romantic.”

It’s a telling insight into Goodyear’s approach. Despite the marathons, despite the prodigious technique and memory that they require, the basis for Goodyear’s appeal is his empathetic relationship with the music he performs and his ability to communicate that to an audience – qualities that will undoubtedly be evident to all who hear him in Walter Hall on the last Sunday afternoon of September.

Summer Pleasures. A completely different traversal of the Beethoven piano concertos took place in Stratford August 27 to 29 when Stratford Summer Music presented Jan Lisiecki and the Annex Quartet with Roberto Occhipinti, bass, in three programs encompassing all five of the concertos in transcriptions by the German composer and conductor, Vinzenz Lachner’s (1811-1893). It was Lisiecki’s first time performing all five piano concertos. In the days leading up to our September production deadline, I was fortunate to find time to attend the middle concert which paired the Second and the Fourth.

The 20-year-old wunderkind was his usual gracious and charming self as he introduced the concert. “We can’t give you all the drama,” he said. “But we can give you intimacy and the beauty of this music.”

St. Andrew’s Church is a bright room acoustically but Lisiecki met its challenge (and that of the Yamaha grand) in the Piano Concerto No.2, Op.19, begun when Beethoven was still a teenager and only published after his first six string quartets (Op.18). Lisiecki’s touch was even-handed, very classical, marvellous. He made every note count. The Allegro con brio was Mozartean in its passagework, Haydn-like in its succession of swells but intimations of the composer-to-be were clearly present. The Largo that followed is not one of Beethoven’s best but Occhipinti’s rich, sonorous sound stood out. The lively Rondo, however, is a delight, presaging the more mature symphonist, and the performers seemed to relish playing it, bringing out the joy that flows from the return of the opening theme in its inverted form.

The six played like cohesive, well-balanced chamber musicians in the Rondo, and the piano part especially stood out since it didn’t have to compete with a full orchestra. This transparency continued in the Op. 58 concerto, a piece composed in that luminous time just after the Triple Concerto, the “Waldstein” and “Appassionata” Sonatas and the “Eroica” Symphony and immediately before the “Razumovsky” String Quartets. Lisiecki often played with a sound big enough to match an orchestra which made for a less balanced whole, though given the somewhat rough-hewn sound of the violins, it was not unwelcome. Intimations of beauty leading into the cadenza were dashed by a hurried approach until a surfeit of melody righted the course on the way to a thundering climax.

The second movement conversation between the dark and dissonant strings and the gorgeous lyricism of the keyboard set up the magical, rhapsodic piano cadenza. The spirited third movement Rondo, seemed to outrun its musical sense. But all was right in the encore, the Rondo of the “Emperor” Concerto, in which Lisiecki seemed re-engaged if not re-energized. It was a generous gift to an appreciative audience who greeted the conclusion of each of the three pieces with a standing ovation.

(All of which makes me look forward to Lisiecki’s December 6 recital in Koerner Hall when his program will include Chopin’s 24 Preludes, Mendelssohn’s Variations sérieuses and Mozart’s marvellous Piano Sonata, K331 among other works.)

Paul Lewis. Still on the subject of Stratford Summer Music, on the last Thursday afternoon of July in a warm St. Andrew’s Church (hand-held fans were provided) British pianist Paul Lewis spoke to his congregation, as it were, those of us privileged to hear this supreme interpreter of Beethoven and Schubert, describing how he saw the pieces he was about to play – what he called “true peaks of the piano repertoire” – Beethoven’s last three piano sonatas. 

The concert turned out to be the highlight of my summer. You can read more about it in my blog on thewholenote.com. (Lewis will also be giving a recital, of Brahms, Schubert and Liszt, in Koerner Hall March 20, 2016. I already have a ticket.)

Botos and Bartók. Meanwhile, the tenth anniversary season of Toronto Summer Music reached a significant climax August 6 with separate concerts late in the afternoon and into the evening. Robi Botos and Béla Bartók, two Hungarian-born émigrés to the New World, were appropriate poster boys for the well-conceived and multi-layered 2015 TSM festival.

With its extensive schedule built around a foundation of TSM Academy fellows and mentors, the concerts, masterclasses, lectures, films and open rehearsals flowed organically, buttressed by a number of additional concerts featuring special guests such as soprano Measha Brueggergosman, pianists Garrick Ohlsson, Ingrid Fliter and Danilo Pérez and the Danish String Quartet. They provided ample evidence for artistic director’s Douglas McNabney’s contention at the opening concert that TSM provides “a significant contribution to the cultural life of this city in the summer.” Not to mention a significant contribution to the life of the Academy fellows.

I took in six concerts, one dress rehearsal, two masterclasses and a lecture over the 25 days of the festival and barely scratched the surface. Highlights included the well-devised “American Avant-Garde” program devoted to Cage, Feldman, Ives and Zorn with the personable pianist Pedja Muzijevic and the irrepressible Afiara String Quartet; Ohlsson’s Scriabin; the Danish String Quartet’s playing of Adès’ audacious Arcadiana; the Borromeo String Quartet’s complete Bartók cycle in one evening, preceded the day before by first violinist Nicholas Kitchen’s illuminating lecture on the week he once spent exploring Bartók’s original manuscripts in Budapest; Finnish lyric soprano Soile Isokoski’s memorable masterclass; Botos’ exuberant tribute to Oscar Peterson in the presence of Peterson family members at a rollicking, jam-packed Heliconian Hall; Brueggergosman’s touching and extraordinarily beautiful Summertime. Further details on TSM 2015 can be found on thewholenote.com.

September is here. The TSO begins its 2015/2016 season with a crowd-pleasing program headed by guest soloist Itzhak Perlman in Bruch’s dazzling Violin Concerto No.1. With its gorgeous melodic lines and virtuoso passages seamlessly integrated, it’s one of the most popular concertos in the violin canon. Having just turned 70, Perlman will celebrate that milestone as well as his ongoing relationship with the TSO (which goes back to 1966) in Roy Thomson Hall, beginning at 7pm September 24. The orchestra then jumps into the deep end with a rousing program featuring the legendary Three B’s. Following Leopold Stokowski’s arrangement of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor the TSO moves on to the rich and melodious Double Concerto of Brahms with TSO concertmaster Jonathan Crow and principal cellist Joseph Johnson as soloists. Post-intermission comes Beethoven’s iconic Symphony No.5. If you have never heard this piece live, get yourself down to RTH September 25 or 26 or experience it September 27 in the glorious acoustics of the George Weston Recital Hall. If you haven’t heard it recently, now’s the time. A live reacquaintance with this music is essential at least once every decade. September 30, Shostakovich’s jaunty Suite for Variety Orchestra (which may be familiar to some readers for its use in Stanley Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut) is joined on the program with Gershwin’s challenging Concerto in F. The mulit-faceted Russian-born, American Kirill Gerstein is the piano soloist and the guest conductor is the gifted American James Gaffigan. October 1 and 3 Prokofiev’s indispensable Symphony No.5 augments the program, making for a full musical evening indeed.

QUICK PICKS

Sept 13: Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber Music Society. South African pianist Petronel Malan’s program includes Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata.

Sept 16: KWCMS. The New Orford String Quartet opens its program with Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 3, Op.18, No.3 before moving on to the seminal Op.130 and its original ending, the Grosse Fugue, Op. 133.

Sept 18: Prince Edward County Music Festival (PECMF). The New Orford String Quartet performs Brahms’ String Quartet No.2, Beethoven’s Grosse Fugue Op.133 and Gary Kulesha’s String Quartet at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene.

Sept 19: PECMF. The Gryphon Trio’s concert includes Beethoven’s Archduke Trio at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene.

Sept 19, 20, 21: KWCMS. Georgy Valtechev, violin, and Lora Tchekoratova, piano, perform all ten of Beethoven’s sonatas for violin and piano in a series of three concerts.

Sept 20: RCM. Glenn Gould School faculty-member, 80-year-old John Perry’s big program for a Sunday afternoon includes Mozart’s divine Piano Sonata K.333, three Brahms Intermezzi, Op.117, Beethoven’s penultimate piano sonata, Op.110 and Schubert’s melodic masterpiece, his final sonata, D960.

Sept 25: PECMF. “Inspired by Clara” – chamber music by Clara Schumann, Robert Schumann and Brahms at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene.

Sept 26: RCM. The ARC Ensemble’s ambitious program includes the sublime clarinetist Joaquin Valdepeñas in Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet K581, Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet Op.57 and Weinberg’s Sonata No.1 for Violin and Piano Op.12. You’ll need a ticket, but it’s FREE, part of Culture Days.

Sept 26: PECMF. An evening of German and French cabaret songs with Patricia O’Callaghan at the Regent Theatre.  

Paul Ennis is the managing editor of The WholeNote.`

Toronto Summer Music Festival celebrates its tenth edition by paying homage to the Pan Am Games being held in Toronto from July 10 to 26. Festival artistic director Douglas McNabney has focused his fifth season at TSM on an exploration of the culture of the Americas in the 20th century. How the musical heritage of waves of European immigrants merged with that of indigenous peoples and Americans of African descent is an ongoing narrative that never gets old. To that end, McNabney has curated several programs that will keep any serious concertgoer’s mind off the noise of the hemispheric contests simultaneously raging in the realms of physical culture throughout our fair city.

Soprano Measha Brueggergosman headlines TSM’s July 16 opener, “Americans in Paris,” spotlighting the music of Gershwin and Copland, whose careers were elevated by their European experiences. “The Hollywood Connection” and “American Romantic” are other concerts that promise beautiful music from Barber and Dvořák to Korngold, Beach and Antheil. Arts patron Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge was typical of the classical music lover of the New World, commissioning works by Prokofiev, Poulenc, Britten and Bloch. McNabney cleverly includes a concert July 24 of the fruits of her largesse performed by a collection of topnotch chamber musicians led by TSO concertmaster Jonathan Crow. The final thematic evening "American Avant-Garde,” features the Afiara String Quartet, Pedja Muzijevic, piano, and Harumi Rhodes, violin, performing Cage, Ives, Feldman and Zorn. This kind of stimulating programming is part of what makes summer festivals and TSM, in particular, so compelling.

Argentinian pianist Ingrid Fliter performs Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major with the YOA Orchestra of the Americas, conducted by Carlos Miguel Prieto, in a concert that also includes Mexican composer Carlos Chávez’s infectious Symphony No.2 “Sinfonia India” and Dvořák’s ever-fresh Symphony No.9 in E Minor Op.95 “From the New World.” Panamanian pianist Danilo Pérez brings his considerable jazz skills to an all-star Koerner Hall evening July 22.

Garrick Ohlsson, the first American to win the International Chopin competition (in 1970), and coincidentally, a musical inspiration for the young McNabney, brings his sizable pianism and imposing six-foot, four-inch frame to a noteworthy program (in Koerner Hall on July 23) of Scriabin – Désir, Op.57 No.1, Sonata No.10, Op.70, Fragilité, Op.51, No.1 and Sonata No.5 in F-sharp Major, Op.53 – and Beethoven (Sonatas Opp.109 and 110).

Even more impressive is the Borromeo String Quartet’s complete traversal of Bartók’s six string quartets which will take place August 6 at 7:30pm in the intimate confines of Walter Hall. As David Patrick Stearns wrote in The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2012: “Compared to the Emerson Quartet’s famous Bartók marathons at Carnegie Hall in the 1990s (one of which I attended), Borromeo’s at Field Concert Hall had musicians, music and audience contained in a smaller room that, over the three-hour-plus concert, became laudably claustrophobic: the performances never coasted or let you coast. While the 1990s version of the Emerson Quartet used vibrato so unceasingly as to form a safety curtain between your ears and the music’s intensity, the Borromeo Quartet is much more judicious about such matters, giving performances with more nuanced contrasts of light and shade, as well as more open windows that your ear can’t help but enter. The music’s mystery, violence and sorrow become absolutely inescapable. Spanning the period from 1908 when the composer was 27 to the eve of World War II in 1939, Bartók’s quartets ask to be performed in a single concert not just because they represent one of the highest peaks in 20th-century music, but because there’s an easily traceable progression.”

TSM also acts as a mentoring academy to 28 young musicians on the threshold of a professional career. Chosen by a jury headed by McNabney, 14 fellows in the Chamber Music Institute program for piano and strings (July 13 to August 8) and 14 in the Art of Song program for singers and pianists (July 12 to 25) will study under violinists Martin Beaver, Jonathan Crow, Mark Fewer, Ernst Kovacic, Harumi Rhodes and Axel Strauss; violists Paul Coletti, Steven Dann and Eric Nowlin; cellists Henrik Brendstrup, Denise Djokic and Mark Kosower; soprano Soile Isokoski; and pianists Martin Katz, Pedja Muzijevic, John Novacek, Steven Philcox and Huw Watkins. The “Mentors & Fellows” concerts at Walter Hall feature artist mentors and festival guest artists sharing the stage with TSM Chamber Music Institute fellows at 4pm and 7:30pm on July 18, 25, August 1 and 8. These are unparallelled opportunities for the aspiring professionals to gain invaluable experience making chamber music in front of the public while performing with seasoned musicians of the highest calibre. Which makes them fascinating to attend as well.

In a free TSM preview concert at the Richard Bradshaw Ampitheatre May 28, violist McNabney and violinist Axel Strauss anchored a hushed, lyrical performance of Dvořák’s tuneful Piano Quintet No.2 in A Major, Op.81. Pianist fellow Todd Yaniw was a sensitive keyboardist; cellist fellow Sarah Gans and violinist fellow Aysel Taghi-Zada blended in nicely. The noontime recital proved McNabney’s point (in his introductory remarks) that (young) musicians learn how to project their feelings about music by playing in public. In Dvořák they had a most willing partner. The first and second movements were filled with so much melody that if you were on a walk in the woods, dropping notes like breadcrumbs, you would have no trouble finding your way back home.

Stratford Summer Music: The Liverpool-born pianist Paul Lewis discovered classical music by listening to records in his local library as a child. Curiously, the first pianist he heard was Alfred Brendel, whose affinity for Schubert and Beethoven was echoed in Lewis’ own critically acclaimed recordings many years later. His WMCT Toronto debut playing Schubert’s last three sonatas in the fall of 2012 still lingers vividly in my mind; his recent Koerner Hall recital with the violinist Lisa Batiashvili was memorable for its Schubert and Beethoven. So it makes for a kind of cyclic balance that Lewis’ Stratford recital July 29 will consist of Beethoven’s last three sonatas, Opp.109. 110 and 111. His Harmonia Mundi recording of these pianistic touchstones was named Gramophone Record of the Year in 2008. This is one of the destination concerts of the summer; the fact that it follows Garrick Ohlsson’s TSM recital, which also includes Opp.109 and 110, by a mere six days adds another layer to its attraction – the opportunity to compare artistic interpretations.

Another reason to make the trek to Stratford is the chance to hear budding superstar Jan Lisiecki play all five of Beethoven’s piano concertos with a string quartet! Having heard his trio of concerts with the TSO last November when he performed Nos. 3, 4 and 5 under the baton of Thomas Dausgaard, I can’t wait for the added intimacy the Annex Quartet and the Revival House venue will provide August 27, 28 and 29.

Another innovative piece of programming finds three Tafelmusik violinists each performing a Bach unaccompanied sonata and partita in a “Musical Brunch” on two separate weekends. The series begins July 25 and 26 with Julia Wedman playing Partita No.2. Aisslinn Nosky follows with Sonata No.1 August 1 and 2; Christina Zacharias performs the Sonata No.2 August 8 and 9; Nosky returns with Partita No.3 August 15 and 16; Zacharias follows with Partita No.1 August 22 and 23; Wedman completes the cycle August 29 and 30 with Sonata No.3.

Festival of the Sound: The 36th summer of this long-running vibrant festival has much to recommend between July 18 and August 9 beginning with “Flute, Harp and Strings” on July 21 when Suzanne Shulman, Caroline Léonardelli, Gil Sharon, Ron Ephrat and Yegor Dyachkov perform Debussy, Saint-Saëns and Villa-Lobos among others. An overview of Brahms promises much over three concerts July 22, while July 23 features a wealth of chamber music from Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert to Bruch, Saint-Saëns and Poulenc culminating in a 7:30pm concert of Beethoven’s Piano Quartet with André Laplante and Schubert’s seminal Quintet in C. Violinist Moshe Hammer performs two recitals on July 30; in the later one his Beethoven Violin Sonata “Spring” is followed by the Penderecki String Quartet playing the composer’s great String Quartet Op.131. On August 4, the Afiara String Quartet gives us Beethoven’s final quartet Op.135. The next day violinists Martin Beaver and Mark Fewer lead a cast of supporters in Beethoven’s irresistible Septet. August 7 Beaver and Fewer are joined by festival artistic director, clarinetist James Campbell, the Afiara String Quartet and others for intimate concerto performances of Haydn’s Violin Concerto in D and Mozart’s sublime Clarinet Concerto. Earlier in the day, you can hear Stewart Goodyear’s take on Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations Op.120. Two days later, Goodyear is joined by Boris Brott and the National Academy Orchestra for Beethoven’s Piano Concerto Op.73 “Emperor.” A festival of many sounds.

Music and Beyond: Running from July 4 to 17, this Ottawa classical music and multi-disciplinary festival highlights the delightful Vienna Piano Trio (whom I profiled in my March column earlier this year) in three concerts July 8, 9 and 10. Then on July 11, the trio’s pianist, the voluble and charming Stefan Mendl, joins soprano Donna Brown for an afternoon of “Song and Conversation” with music by Schubert and Brahms.

Clear Lake Chamber Music Festival: The tenth anniversary of this August long-weekend festival (July 30 to August 3) under the artistic direction of pianist Alexander Tselyakov features seven musically rich concerts, two of which are jazz-oriented. The five classical recitals are well-programmed and varied, with Tselyakov himself, and his talented pianist son Daniel, collaborating with violinist Marc Djokic, hornist Ken McDonald, cellist Simon Fryer and others in music ranging from Beethoven to Piazzolla, Mendelssohn and Schumann to Franck, Sarasate and Corigliano, all of which only enhance the natural beauty of Riding Mountain National Park, Manitoba, where the festival takes place.

Ottawa Chamberfest: There is a feast for the ears here from July 23 to August 6. Belgian violinist Augustin Dumay’s July 24 recital of Brahms, Debussy, Ravel and Beethoven is a chance to hear this patrician musician before his Koerner Hall concert next year. The strong Haydn component begins July 28 with “Haydnfest I,” the first of two programs by the kinetic St. Lawrence String Quartet. The Calidore String Quartet also play two Haydn recitals, as do the Cecilia and Eybler String Quartets, making a total of eight “Haydnfests.” The Calidore quartet joins up-and-coming Russian pianist Pavel Kolesnikov July 28 in a performance of Schnittke’s Piano Quintet following a selection of Scarlatti sonatas and Beethoven’s Op.109. Stalwart Canadian pianist André Laplante’s solo recital July 31 includes Bach, Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven and Liszt. In “Metamorfosi” soprano Suzie LeBlanc joins the Constantinople Ensemble August 1 in works by 17th-century Italian composers Monteverdi, Kapsberger, Landi and Strozzi. The celebrated Danish String Quartet performs two evening programs August 5. Beethoven’s Op.18, No.1, Schnittke’s String Quartet No.3 and Nielsen’s String Quartet No.1 comprise the earlier concert; the later one is devoted to Wood Works, their CD of traditional Nordic folk music. Four days later, the Danes play the Beethoven and Nielsen as part of their TSM recital, a must-see for those who cannot be in Ottawa. In the meantime, there are worthwhile musical moments every day in this packed festival.

Quick Picks

Tafelmusik Baroque Summer Festival: This annual Toronto event provides an invaluable introduction to our world-class baroque orchestra. Even better, admission is free, on a first-come basis. Check the Summer Festivals listings for details on programs and venues for the June 5, 10, 14 and 17 concerts.

Summer Music in the Garden: July 5 Elinor Frey, cello; July 19 Shauna Rolston, cello, and the Cecilia String Quartet play Schubert’s glorious Quintet in C; July 30 Ton Beau String Quartet; August 13 Blythwood Winds play Barber and Rossini.

Music Mondays at the Church of the Holy Trinity: June 8 Angela Park, piano; June 29 Raphael Weinroth-Browne, cello; July 6 Cecilia Lee, piano; July 20 Mary Kenedi, piano; July 27 Chris James, flute, Lara Dodds-Eden, piano.

Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber Music Society: June 24 Pianist Su Jeon and violinist Andrea Tyniec have included Schubert’s vital Violin Sonata D574 and his Fantasy in C along with Arvo Pärt’s mesmerizing and iconic Spiegel im Spiegel in their intelligently designed program; July 26 pianist Alexander Tselyakov’s program includes Brahms’ Horn Trio and Beethoven’s Horn Sonata in what is in effect a preview of his own Clear Lake Festival recital five days later, only with different musical partners.

Toronto Symphony Orchestra: June 10 and 12 the TSO led by Peter Oundjian performs Mahler’s essential Symphony No.2 “Resurrection.” June 26 the TSO performs Holst’s indispensible The Planets in a Luminato “Late Night” concert. June 28 the TSO’s free Luminato concert, “A Symphonic Zoo,” runs the gamut from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and Stravinsky’s Firebird to Rimsky-Korsakov’s Flight of the Bumblebee, Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, the Bulldog from Elgar’s Enigma Variations and the Mule from Grofe’s Grand Canyon Suite. 

June 17 and 18 HanVoice presents a benefit concert with Scott St. John and friends, including cellist Roman Borys and pianist Angela Park, performing Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No.3, Mendelssohn’s Octet and Dvořák’s Piano Quintet.

June 20 and 21 “The Night Dances” presented by Luminato, finds Charlotte Rampling reading Sylvia Plath and Sonia Wieder-Atherton playing selections from Britten’s Suites Nos. 2 and 3 for solo cello. Anthony Tommasini wrote of its American premiere in The New York Times on April 24, 2015: “During some stretches of ‘The Night Dances,’ music and poetry overlapped. For me, the greatness of Britten’s music came through with special force when Ms. Wieder-Atherton played alone and Ms. Rampling just listened, with an acuity as gripping as her recitations.”

June 23 Nine Sparrows Arts Foundation presents flutist Allan Pulker in a free lunchtime concert.

July 29 St. Stephen’s in-the-Fields Anglican Church presents the Ton Beau String Quartet in a free midday concert. 

Paul Ennis is the managing editor of The WholeNote. he can be reached at editorial@thewholenote.com.

Yo-Yo Ma, arguably the most famous cellist in the contemporary classical firmament, has risen from his early days as a seven-year-old immigrant (born in Paris to Chinese parents, his first teacher at four was his father). A student of the legendary Leonard Rose at Juilliard, he subsequently sought a broader education at Harvard. His wide-ranging interests and musical gifts propelled him to great acclaim as a soloist, chamber musician and orchestral collaborator, culminating in the formation of the Silk Road Ensemble in 1998. As his website puts it, the ensemble “mixes the modern and the traditional, breaking boundaries of ethnicity and era ... [demonstrating] once again that there are no barriers for those approaching music with an open mind.”

In an interview with On Being’s Krista Tippett last September, Ma invokes the great cellist Pablo Casals, the scientist Carl Sagan and the violinist Isaac Stern to illustrate how getting from one note to the next has cosmic resonance: “If you look at, to quote Carl Sagan, ‘the billions and billions of stars out there’ and what stirs the imagination of a young child ... you start wondering where are we? How do we fit into this vast universe? And [you look] to Casals saying that within the notes that he plays, he’s looking for infinite variety … [and] to Isaac Stern saying, the music happens between the notes. OK, what then do you mean when you say music happens between the notes? Well, how do you get from A to B? Is it a smooth transfer: it’s automatic, it feels easy, you glide into the next note? Or you have to physically or mentally or effortfully reach to go from one note to another? Could the next note be part of the first note? Or could the next note be a different universe? Have you just crossed into some amazing boundary and suddenly the second note is a revelation?

“The realm of playing an instrument is pure engineering. But the mental process, the emotional process, the psychic investment in trying to make something easy [is] infinitely hard.”

Curiously, for a string player, in an interview with Elijah Ho for the San Francisco Examiner in January 2013, Ma responded to a question about which of the instrumentalists of the Golden Age had made the greatest impression on him by revealing his love for some of the finest pianists of the last century. His illuminating response was triggered when the journalist asked him if he ever had the opportunity to hear Vladimir Horowitz.

“Yes, I heard him once in Toronto at Massey Hall. I got one ticket to one of his Sunday afternoon concerts and I was right up, last row of the balcony. And it was just extraordinary. He played Scriabin, Rachmaninov, Scarlatti, etc. And the whole concert, he played between pianissimo and mezzo forte, until he played the Stars and Stripes encore. Then he just blew the roof off the hall [laughs]. And it was extraordinary. I loved Horowitz, I love hearing Richter recordings. I have some great recordings of Richter playing the Beethoven Sonatas. I also treasure my Schnabel Schubert recordings, I love Dinu Lipatti’s last concert in Switzerland and a lot of early Glenn Gould. I have great memories of great pianists. I never heard Rubinstein live, but I once watched the DVD of his concert in Moscow and it was extraordinary, just extraordinary. These are the gold standards, and I still hold on to them; lots of great people.”

On May 29, Ma joins the celebration of Sir Andrew Davis’ 40th anniversary with the TSO in a performance of Elgar’s intimate, passionate Cello Concerto, along with Dvořák’s the most popular concerto in the cello repertoire. Ma will undoubtedly make it all appear effortless.

James Ehnes: In 2008 James Ehnes won the Gramophone Award for Best Concerto Recording of the Year for Elgar’s Violin Concerto with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Sir Andrew Davis. That same year Ehnes’ recording of the Barber, Korngold and Walton concertos with the Vancouver Symphony conducted by Bramwell Tovey won the JUNO for Best Classical Album of the Year: Large Ensemble or Soloist(s) with Large Ensemble Accompaniment. That same recording won the 2008 Grammy for Best Instrumental Soloist(s) Performance with Orchestra. Shortly after that breakout awards year Ehnes sat down with Andrew Palmer for an interview for All Things Strings in May 2009.

Palmer wondered how Ehnes keeps his performances fresh while on tour. Is there anyone for whom, or to whom, he performs?

“My wife [ballerina Kate Maloney, whom he married in 2004] is on the road with me a lot—she’s actually here now—and she loves music, which is a good thing because she hears a lot of it! Every time I play I want to make sure she doesn’t regret going to concerts three times a week. And there’s something else in my psychology, which may result from where I grew up: Brandon, Manitoba, in the centre of Canada. Although it has a lot of music for a city of its size, it was always a big event when major stars performed there. But they only came once, so I was thrilled when they gave it their all. On the other hand, I was left feeling very bitter if I got the impression that they played a lot of concerts and that some were important and some weren’t, and that this one wasn’t. Believe me, there were a lot like that.

“I never forget that at each of my concerts someone in the audience is hearing me for the first time. Someone is also hearing the piece of music for the first time. And it’s a point of pride that if I don’t play as close to my best as I can, there’ll be people who’ll tell their friends afterwards, ‘James Ehnes wasn’t very good,’ and I’d have to agree with them. Which would really hurt! So mostly I feel a responsibility to myself to take advantage of every opportunity to make people love the piece of music. I don’t get nerves about performing, but five minutes before going onstage I feel a huge responsibility that this had better be good, because if anything goes wrong, everyone will know. And I don’t think this psychological mechanism is such a bad thing. It keeps me on my toes.”

Six years later, the 39-year-old virtuoso returns to Koerner Hall on May 15, having just won a tenth JUNO, this time for his Chandos CD of Bartók chamber works. The Toronto recital includes Debussy’s final composition, the deeply emotional Violin Sonata in G Minor, Bach’s demanding Sonata for solo violin No. 3 in C major, BWV 1005, Elgar’s much-loved Violin Sonata in E Minor and the Toronto premiere of Alexina Louie’s Beyond Time, commissioned by and dedicated to Ehnes. Louie points out in the program note that she began by writing the last movement, Perpetual, first, setting out to compose a highly charged movement that would showcase the violinist’s prodigious technique, which seems to her to be superhuman. Knowing how the piece ended, Louie aimed to write an opening movement, Celestial, which would be as virtuosic as the finale. Since she wanted that movement to sparkle, she wrote extended passages of string harmonics to achieve this goal. She writes that the second movement, Eternal, “can be thought of as an internalized, quiet, lyrical interlude between the two fast outer movements ... The title, Beyond Time, suggests that the piece stands outside of time, in an infinite sound world — Celestial, Eternal, Perpetual.”

Seen and Heard: April 8 at Koerner Hall, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Centre gave one of the most satisfying concerts of the season. The program was comprised of music written within a 35-year span of the mid-19th century: Mahler’s youthful Piano Quartet Movement in A Minor, Schumann’s Piano Quartet in E-flat Major Op.47  and Brahms’ Piano Quartet No.1 in G Minor Op.25. Co-directors of the Society (and married to each other), pianist Wu Han and cellist David Finckel (who spent 34 years as a member of the Emerson String Quartet) were joined by violist Paul Neubauer (formerly principal violist of the New York Philharmonic) and British virtuoso violinist Daniel Hope.

Seating was fairly close with the violin and viola crowded together just beside the keyboard. The intimacy carried over into the performance which seemed the ultimate in musical sophistication. Hope sang eternal in the gem of beauty composed by the 16-year-old Mahler. Exquisite string playing throughout was finely supported by Wu’s unruffled piano; impeccable ensemble playing with great expressiveness that was never showy or gauche.

The piano was more of a factor in the Schumann, its joyful first movement anchored by Finckel’s sublime cello. The mad dance of the Scherzo was led by the cello with the piano particularly sensitive in the many quick and delicate staccato passages that had to be navigated. The Andante cantabile which followed is one of Schumann’s most beautiful creations; a real treat. The Brahms was thick with melody as various instrumental combinations came to the fore during the opening movement’s development. A beautiful theme emerged from the ethos with great delicacy on the violin as the piece continued through to the Andante con moto, its violin and cello parts reminiscent of the composer’s Double Concerto. The Gypsy tune at the centre of the Rondo alla Zingarese broadened out led by the piano to an exquisite duet between cello and viola before the violin picked up the tune, the DNA of which Brahms found (happily) impossible to shake. It was a night where the Romantic melodists reigned supreme.

Quick Picks

May 1 Evgeny Kissin’s RTH recital, which moves from Beethoven’s “Waldstein” Sonata to Prokofiev’s Fourth through three nocturnes and six mazurkas by Chopin and Liszt’s “Rackoczi March,” is almost completely sold out at press time.

May 1 Jacques Israelievitch and pianist Valentina Sadovski perform works by Schumann and Saint Saëns at Grace Church, 700 Kennedy Road, Scarborough. May 14 Israelievitch and pianist Stephen Cera play pieces by Fauré and Bridge at Briton House Recital Hall.

May 2 The Cecilia String Quartet plays Mozart’s String Quartet K590 and Mendelssohn’s String Quartet Op.44 No.2 at the Burlington Performing Arts Centre.

May 6 Emerging violinist Augustin Hadelich performs Mendelssohn’s enduring Violin Concerto Op.64 with the TSO led by Peter Oundjian. May 27 and 28 the elegant Louis Lortie is the soloist in Liszt’s Piano Concerto No.1 with the TSO under Sir Andrew Davis, the same soloist (Lortie was 18!), concerto and conductor as in the orchestra’s groundbreaking 1978 visit to China. Ravel’s scintillating orchestral version of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition completes the evening’s program. June 4, 6 and 7 Oundjian leads the TSO’s exciting “All American” lineup: John Adams’ Short Ride in a Fast Machine; Barber’s Symphony No.1; André Previn’s Double Concerto for Violin and Violoncello (Canadian première/TSO co-commission) with soloists Jaime Laredo and Sharon Robinson; and Gershwin’s An American in Paris.

May 9 Violinist Joyce Lai and cellist Rachel Mercer are the soloists in Brahms’ compelling Double Concerto. The Canadian Sinfonietta (led by Tak Ng Lai) concludes the celebration of the composer’s birthday (May 7) with a performance of his seminal Symphony No.1.

May 12 TSO bassoonist Samuel Banks is group of 27’s recital soloist in a concert at Heliconian Hall, complimentary food provided by Cheese Magic and Wanda’s Pie in the Sky. Also May 12 members of the COC Orchestra combine their virtuosity and artistry to perform Georges Enescu’s lush Octet for Strings in C Major, Op. 7.

May 13 Kent Nagano and the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal celebrate Sibelius’ 150th anniversary with his tuneful and heroic Symphony No.2. In the first half of this TSO presentation, Piotr Anderszewski joins the Montrealers for Mozart’s magisterial Piano Concerto No.25 K503.

May 14 Artists of the COC Orchestra and guest harpist Lori Gemmell perform pastoral works by Arnold Bax (Elegiac Trio for flute, viola and harp), Béla Bartók (String Quartet No.4) and Maurice Ravel (Introduction and Allegro) in a free noontime concert.

May 16 The recently formed XIA Quartet consists of Edmonton Symphony Orchestra concertmaster Robert Uchida and TSO violinist Shane Kim, assistant principal violist Theresa Rudolph and principal cellist Joseph Johnson. It makes its Toronto debut in a wide-ranging program of Haydn, Bartók and Beethoven (the buoyant Op.59 No.1).Also May 16 Ensemble Polaris plays new music created to accompany short films (from Ryerson University’s School of Image Arts) on the idea of “home” and “away,” shot in Iceland, New Zealand, France and Italy.

May 22 Gallery 345 presents the Ton Beau String Quartet with clarinetist Peter Stoll performing Ravel’s String Quartet in F, Brahms’ Clarinet Quintet and Gershwin’s Three Preludes (arr. Stoll). Also at Gallery 345 May 30 Trio McMaster’s recital is filled with the cream of the piano trio repertoire: Schubert’s Piano Trio No.1; Fauré’s Piano Trio Op. 120; Beethoven’s Trio Op.70 No.1 “Ghost” and Mendelssohn’s Trio No.1 Op.49.

May 24, 25 The Canzona Chamber Players smartly program Haydn’s Gypsy Trio, Bartók’s Suite for Piano, Op.14, Schumann’s Five Pieces in Folk Style for Cello and Piano, Ravel’s Tzigane and Dvořák’s Dumky Trio with Yosuke Kawaski, violin, Wolfram Koessel, cello, and Vadim Serebryany, piano.

May 26 Mexican-Canadian pianist Alejandro Vela mixes the freshness of Latin American composers Lecuona (Noche azúl, Córdoba, La comparsa, Gitanerías), Ginastera (Sonata No.1) and Corea (Armando’s Rhumba), with standards by Chopin (Ballade No.1) and Rachmaninov (Five Preludes, Op. 23) in his free noontime COC concert. May 28, in another free Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre recital, Toronto Summer Music artistic director Douglas McNabney offers a sneak preview featuring emerging artists and music from the upcoming festival. June 2 violinist Véronique Mathieu and pianist Stephanie Chua perform rarely heard works by women composers Heather Schmidt, Louise Farrenc, Clara Schumann, Elizabeth Jacquet de la Guerre and others in their free noontime COC recital.

May 30  5 at the First Chamber Music Series presents two sublime chamberworks: Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet in A, K.581 and Brahms’ Clarinet Quintet in B Minor, Op.115, with Yao Guang Zhai, clarinet, Marie Bérard, violin, Yehonatan Berick, violin, Teng Li, viola, and Rachel Mercer, cello.

May 31 Acclaimed cellist Winona Zelenka is the soloist in Elgar’s beloved Cello Concerto with Orchestra Toronto conducted by Kevil Malloon.

June 2 The Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber Music Society presents the Penderecki Quartet performing Beethoven’s celestial Quartet No.14 Op.131 and, with cellist Pamela Highbaugh-Aloni, Schubert’s glorious Quintet in C. The K-WCMS bills it as “Concert of the Century” rightly pointing out that these are two of the five greatest chamber works ever written.

Paul Ennis is the managing editor of The WholeNote.

“Grimaud doesn’t sound like most pianists. She is a rubato artist, a reinventor of phrasings, a taker of chances.”
— D.T. Max, The New Yorker, 2011

The remarkable French-born pianist Hélène Grimaud last visited Toronto a year ago when she performed Brahms’ Piano Concerto No.1 with the TSO and showed off her great dynamic range. Her intimate pianism exposed the intrinsic beauty of the slow movement and she entered fully into the passion of the third movement with its rhapsodic cadenza, spurring the audience into an immediate standing ovation. The year before she held the Koerner Hall audience in her sway with a performance of her Resonances CD that moved from Mozart to Berg to Liszt to Bartók, all united by the historical fact of the composers being children of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Her upcoming Koerner Hall appearance April 19 is typical of her adventurous spirit and imaginative programming. All the pieces are united by the theme of water: Berio’s Wasserklavier III; Takemitsu’s Rain Tree Sketch II; Fauré’s Barcarolle No.5 in F-sharp Minor, Op.66; Ravel’s Jeux d’eau; Albéniz’s Almería from Iberia Suite Book 2; Liszt’s Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este from Années de pèlerinage: Troisième année, Janáček’s In the Mists I; Debussy’s La Cathédrale engloutie from Préludes, Book I; concluding with Brahms’ Piano Sonata No.2 in F-sharp Minor, Op.2.

She told William Grimes of The New York Times: “Water is the element most necessary to life, the most precious resource for our planet, the most endangered and the one that poses the greatest risk on its potential for conflict.” Explaining her process in a video for the artnet News website, she described how she spent two years “boiling down” her conception of pieces having to do with water, to reduce it to “something very pure and abstract in its expression.” There were several Liszt works that fit her original idea but the one she finally selected was the “most abstract of all his water pieces.”

“An art form has to live in the moment,” she said. “It has to sound as if it is being written while you hear it.” On the San Francisco Classical Voice website she explained to Lara Downes earlier this year that the water program is “more fragile and vulnerable repertoire, and as an audience member you have to be willing to make that journey.”

When she performed the same pieces last December in New York over ten nights, she did so in an inch of water, mixing performance art metaphors. Anthony Tommasini in The New York Times described the riveting 20-minute process of filling the 55,000 square foot Drill Hall of the Park Avenue Armory with that inch of water for “Tears Become ... Streams Become ... ” He called the collaboration between Grimaud and the artist Douglas Gordon a “compelling, boldly original work, a dramatic combination of art installation, light show and piano recital.”

Brian Levine, the executive director of the Glenn Gould Foundation, sees in Grimaud a resemblance to Gould: “She has this willingness to take a piece of music apart and free herself from the general body of practice that has grown up around it.”

Ten days after her Toronto concert she performs with the Stamford Symphony Orchestra to bring awareness to her other passion: environmental education centred around wolves – she founded the Wolf Conservation Center in South Salem, New York in 1996.

Evgeny Kissin: Evgeny Kissin’s mother was a piano teacher, his father an engineer. When Kissin was born (in Moscow in 1971), his sister, who was more than ten years older, was learning the piano. In Christopher Nupen’s DVD Evgeny Kissin: The Gift of Music, Kissin tells a tale one would be inclined to dismiss as apocryphal were it not for everything that has happened to him since. He had been a quiet baby, even standing on his cot in silence as his sister practised. When he was 11 months old, he opened his mouth and sang the Bach fugue she had just been playing (the Prelude and Fugue in A-Major from the 2nd book of the Well-Tempered Clavier). By the time he could reach the keyboard he was two and on his way to superstardom.

He elaborated in an interview with Frederic Gaussin for piano mag on iplaythepiano.com. “Before I began my studies at the School, I had been listening to music non-stop, practically from the day I was born. I became familiar very early on with all different kinds of music and pieces, until one day I became physically able to touch the keyboard and play this repertoire, these melodies, by ear ... From the very beginning, my taste was vast, very eclectic.”

In that interview he speaks of Chopin as the composer that he plays the most, “whose music is closest to my heart.” He continues: “From a pianistic point of view, Chopin was a revolutionary, the only one (with the exception of young Scriabin, who drew much from Chopin) who demands such flexibility from the hand at the piano.” Gaussin raises the topic of Debussy – not in Kissin’s repertoire – as someone who was not “any less sensitive or technically innovative than Chopin in his personal idiom.” Kissin responds that the same is true of Shostakovich, Schoenberg and Prokofiev, adding Messiaen, “whose works I do not yet play. His music is profound, very spiritual. He’s a perfect counter-example ... I see him in a way as the last survivor of an extinct species. I will certainly play Messiaen in the future.”

May 1 marks Kissin’s first solo recital at RTH in 15 years; his most recent appearance with the TSO was in May of 2012. It’s a virtuoso program beginning with Beethoven’s Sonata No.21 in C major, Op.53 “Waldstein” with its glorious third movement, followed by Prokofiev’s quietly charming, utterly logical Sonata No. 4 in C minor, Op.29. Then three nocturnes and six mazurkas by Chopin lead into Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 15 S.244/15 “Rákóczi March,” a quixotic foot stomper.

Kissin’s popularity is immense, his intellectual and musical gifts even more so. He once said that the main purpose of music is “that it elevates us into the world of the sublime.” The evening should be memorable.

Sara Constant:The WholeNote’s social media editor, flutist Sara Constant, headlines a concert titled “Xi” at Array Space April 24 featuring an intriguing line-up of mid to late 20th-century music. Stockhausen’s Xi (1987) for solo flute utilizes microtonal glissandi throughout. Denisov’s Sonata for Flute and Piano (1960) has been described as a collage of styles. Chiel Meijering, the composer of I Hate Mozart (1979) for flute, alto saxophone, harp and violin, says that he considers eroticism, sensuality and even obscenity prerequisites for a high-quality performance of his music. In each of Lutosławski’s Three Fragments (1953) the flute takes the melodic lead and the harp supplies a consistent, animated backdrop. Tsuneya Tanabe’s Recollections of the Inland Sea (1995) for flute and marimba was inspired by the scenic impression the composer had as an adult of a beautiful inland sea, Setonaikai, in the middle of Japan.  The music, he says is his effort to “express my interior vision of the sea, spreading out before me….”

Seen and Heard:The elegant Vadim Repin shone in his Russian repertoire – Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky – in Koerner Hall March 6; The Vienna Piano Trio displayed an exemplary sense of ensemble and an unusually close seating arrangement in their well-received recital March 8 highlighted by Beethoven’s Kakadu Variations and two Mendelssohn Andantes (from his Trio Nos.1 and 2; the latter played as an encore); Till Fellner brought exceptional musicianship to Mozart’s Piano Sonata K282 on March 10. Kudos to Music Toronto’s Jennifer Taylor for bringing us Fellner as well as the London-based Elias Quartet March 19. French sisters Sara and Marie Bittloch on violin and cello set the tone for the quartet’s intimate sound and its impeccable sense of ensemble. Equally attentive were second violinist Scotsman Donald Grant and Swedish violist Martin Saving. Together the foursome brought heavenly pianissimos and wonderful silences that allowed Mozart’s music to breathe in his “Dissonance” Quartet K465 and unrelenting anger and passion to Mendelssohn’s last string quartet without losing the ruminative lyricism of its slow movement.

Quick Picks:

April 8 and 9 former TSO music director Jukka-Pekka Saraste returns to conduct Mahler’s glorious Symphony No.5 and accompany pianist Valentina Lisitsa in Rachmaninoff’s romantic masterpiece, his Concerto No.2. Conductor Peter Oundjian, soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian, violinist Sergey Khachatryan and pianist Serouj Kradjian join with the TSO April 22 for a concert celebrating Armenian music. It includes a double dose of Aram Khachaturian as well as the world premiere of Mychael Danna’s Ararat, a suite Danna constructed from his soundtrack to Atom Egoyan’s film of the same name. May 6 finds Oundjian supporting the up-and-coming twentysomething German violinist Augustin Hadelich in Mendelssohn’s justly celebrated Violin Concerto, a work which will appear on his next CD later this spring.

April 8 the co-artistic directors of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, cellist David Finckel (ex-Emerson Quartet) and pianist Wu Han, are joined by the versatile violinist Daniel Hope and violist Paul Neubauer in a compelling program of piano quartets by Mahler [Movement in A Minor], Schumann [E-Flat Major Op.47] and Brahms [No.1 in G Minor Op.25] at Koerner Hall. Also at Koerner Hall, April 24, take advantage of a rare chance to hear international superstar Yannick Nézet-Séguin conduct his hometown ensemble, Orchestre Métropolitain in a program of English music: Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No.4; Elgar’s indelible Enigma Variations and his ever-popular Cello Concerto with 20-year-old cellist Stéphane Tétreault as soloist.

April 10 the Mercer-Oh Trio play Haydn, Jean Lesage and Smetana under the auspices of the Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber Music Society. Pianist Eric Himy shows off his technical prowess in a program of Rachmaninov, Scriabin, Chopin, Albéniz and de Falla April 25. Still in Waterloo, TSO violinist Arkady Yanivker leads the Toronto Serenade String Quartet in music from Latin America April 28 while on May 2 it’s Sofya Gulyak of London’s Royal College of Music who tests the mettle of the Music Room’s piano in music by Liszt, Coulthard and Mussorgsky. She repeats the program in Toronto May 3 under Syrinx’s banner at the Heliconian Hall.

April 12 Syrinx presents the Seiler Trio (violinist Mayumi Seiler, cellist Rachel Mercer and pianist Angela Park) playing Beethoven’s beloved Archduke Trio, Mendelssohn’s Trio No.2 and Kevin Lau’s Trio.

April 13 finds the Associates of the Toronto Symphony saluting the double bass with music of Rossini, Boccherini and Dvořák. Double bassist Tim Dawson teams up with violinists Etsuko Kimura and Angelique Toews. violist Christopher Redfield and cellist Marie Gelinas at Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre.

April 16 Music Toronto presents the Lafayette Quartet, an all-female ensemble who have remained together since their founding in 1986, a distinct rarity. Since then they have spent their time entertaining audiences and teaching some of Canada’s finest young string players from their base at the University of Victoria. Their program includes a middle Haydn quartet (No.28, Op.29, No.6), a late Beethoven (No. 15, Op.132) and Jean Coulthard’s String Quartet No.2, “Threnody.” The latter two pieces will be part of their Chamber Music Hamilton concert April 19.

April 17, group of 27: TSO principal oboist Sarah Jeffrey brings her warm sound to Mozart’s tuneful Oboe Concerto K314; Symphonies by C.P.E. Bach (the wild and beautiful Wq.179) and Haydn (No. 19), along with Jocelyn Morlock’s addictive Disquiet complete an intriguing group of 27 program. The group’s founder and music director, the dynamic Eric Paetkau, whom I interviewed in the December/January issue of The WholeNote, has just been named music director of the Saskatoon Symphony Orchestra. The night before the concert, April 16, The WholeNote will be hosting an open rehearsal of the group at the Centre for Social Innovation, 730 Bathurst St., ground floor. Doors open at 7:30pm. Experience g27’s lively playing in a casual, intimate atmosphere.

April 25 Karin Kei Nagano, the teenage daughter of conductor Kent Nagano and pianist Mari Kodama (read the glowing review of her recording of all 32 Beethoven sonatas elsewhere in this issue), joins her mother for what should be a memorable afternoon of piano music; part of the BravoNiagara! Festival of the Arts.

Paul Ennis is the managing editor of The WholeNote.

The Vienna Piano Trio’s previous Toronto appearances – with the Women’s Musical Club in November 2005 and three visits to Toronto Summer Music from 2010 to 2012 – were greeted with widespread acclaim. So it’s no surprise that they are highly anticipating their Mooredale Concerts recital March 8. That’s what the gregarious Stefan Mendl, the trio’s pianist and last remaining of its founding members, told me recently by phone from Vienna, the city where he has lived since his birth.

I asked him about the particular sensibility that typifies a chamber musician. “From scratch you must have the urge to find a special sound that is the group sound,” he answered. “You should not be so restrained that nobody can hear you but neither are you so predominant that you drown out the others. It must be your goal from the beginning that you find this sound; if you have a good ear and if you have the will to do this, then you are off to a good start.

“Then, of course there is experience, knowing when you can really play out and when you have to combine with the strings; when you have to give them more bass or less bass. You have to put aside your own ambitions and have the will to find a sound that blends.”

In his own case, right from his first experience on stage, chamber music felt better. “I discovered early on in my soloist days [born in 1966, he founded the trio in 1988] that I enjoyed playing concertos much more than recitals. I think that sometimes you get more ideas or better ideas when you have the chance to interact with others. At least for me that’s the case and I feel very, very comfortable with friends and with colleagues on stage. I don’t feel that comfortable when I’m on my own.

“And of course there is the wonderful music that is written for piano trio, piano quartet and piano quintet [he regularly performs with the Hagen Quartet]. Sometimes, all of our greatest composers put a lot of their inner feelings and emotions into their chamber music. I find it all very fascinating, still,” he said, with a laugh that underlined the hold the music still has on him.

The key thing to a trio’s success he believes is to have three people of equal musical and technical skill who have similar musical goals. “You need a rich palette of ideas and colour. Everybody needs their own opinion amidst the common goal.”

I wanted to know how he relates to the music the trio will be performing on the upcoming Sunday afternoon in Toronto. “Beethoven’s Kakadu Variations is really a fantastic piece of music,” he replied with palpable verve. “The very late opus number [Op.121a] is a bit misleading. No one hearing the very heavy introduction would expect it to turn into this funny theme, but there are hints, hidden in a minor key in a delicate, funny way. One slow variation before the finale is very deep and serious. Like all of Beethoven, the deepest and most serious is right next to the fun, almost grotesque or rude side. He was never shy, even in his greatest works to put little bits of his feelings right next to the really funny things. These variations are a really good way to experience that; in a very short amount of time he does all these turns and twists.”

This was a good opportunity to bring up the relationship between recording and live performance since the trio released the Kakadu variations along with Beethoven’s Trios Op.70, on their latest MDG Gold CD last year. “Recording something always affects your live playing because you get so close to it. You listen more to detail than you would otherwise ... sometimes you get things brought out that you probably wouldn’t have discovered before and then your performance is altered. Of course, your performance always changes over time,” he said.

Mendelssohn’s Trio No.1 Op.49 in D Minor, the concluding piece on the March 8 program, is the more famous of the composer’s two trios, but for Mendl, they are both on the same genius level. The trio plays them frequently and loves both of them. Mendl particularly enjoys the “gorgeous and brilliant and skillful piano writing which hardly any great composer has accomplished to that extent.

“It works so well for the medium of the piano trio because Mendelssohn had all these great melodies – mainly he wrote in the strings – and the texture for that is this incredibly bubbling piano part which makes a fantastic contrast. He does this in a very, very idiomatic way so that his piano trios will always be at the top of the list of the greatest trios both for performers and the audience. And a beautiful lyrical slow movement, a quicksilvery light scherzo – the type of scherzo so different from what anybody else wrote in those days ... The scherzo is perfect; there can’t be a more perfect scherzo imaginable.”

Mendl reminded me that Schumann had written a famous review raving about that D-Minor trio, calling it the role model of a piano trio. Very interesting in light of the preceding work on the Toronto recital, Schumann’s Fantasiestücke Op. 88. Despite its late opus number, it was written earlier than the composer’s piano trios but published later and less often performed. Schumann called them fantasy pieces because they didn’t conform to the trio form. The first and third pieces, the slow ones, are especially close to the pianist’s heart and “contain some of Schumann’s best piano trio writing ... they are in no way second rate.”

I was curious about the formidable list of mentors on the Vienna Piano Trio’s website, almost all of whom the trio met during a memorable two-week chamber music workshop in New York in 1993. “We’d never been to New York before so it was a double experience, really mind-blowing I would say, without exaggeration.” They got several lessons from Isaac Stern, the Guarneri Quartet (Arnold Steinhardt and Michael Tree), from Henry Meyer of the LaSalle Quartet and from the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio. Mendl still remembers the kindness of Jaime Laredo who brought them back to New York for a concert series.

Most important was the enormous impact the intense workshop had on the group’s musical goals. It brought a “kind of down-to-earth quality” to what had been the “very polished style of trio playing we had experienced with [earlier mentors] the Trio di Trieste.”

Finally, I wondered, did living in Vienna inspire him, since the City of Dreams had been a place where many composers lived and died.  “And died especially,” he laughed. “I personally live very, very close to where all these Beethoven memorial places are ... and although I don’t want to do this too consciously, sometimes I’m touched when I wander around in this area and I feel that Beethoven wrote so much music there and lived there for a great while.”

Seen and Heard:The RBC Piano Extravaganza – or “Ax-travaganza” as Mervon Mehta dubbed it – took the city by storm over an 11-day period attracting approximately 14,000 to events at RTH alone. In addition, 27 amateurs performed on the hall’s newly acquired New York Steinway during the Community Piano Showcase; including the Young People’s Concert programs, 20 pianists performed on the RTH stage during the festival; and 200 people played the five Steinways in the festival’s inaugural event, Pianos in the City, February 4 between 11am and 2pm.

My immersion in the Extravaganza began on its second day, Thursday February 5, with festival curator Emanuel Ax’s introduction of two young pianists at a COC free noontime concert. Siberian-born Pavel Kolesnikov, the 2012 Honens Competition winner now studying with Maria João Pires in Brussels, learned three Liszt transcriptions of Wagner operas, including the “Pilgrim’s Chorus” from Tannhäuser, especially for the event. Impressive. American pianist Orion Weiss, who left his native Cleveland for Juilliard, specifically to study with Ax for his integrity and revelatory playing, brought a singing touch to a pair of Granados Goyescas. Several hours later they played a dynamically well-matched Rachmaninoff Symphonic Dances for two pianos that preceded a TSO concert that included the orchestral version of the same piece.

Ax began that program with an agreeable, self-effacing rendition of a Schubert impromptu followed by Mozart’s Piano Concert No. 14 K449. Round tones of limpid liquidity gave the impression that the pianist was opening a musical jewel box.

The four-hour and twenty-minute Pianopalooza Sunday afternoon included 16 disparate performers selected by the RCM in a musical cavalcade that came close to filling Koerner Hall and concluded with a show-stopping, two-piano-eight-hands version of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture complete with recorded cannon shots. The event featured two bona fide highlights: Robi Botos’ jazz set was an uninterrupted 20-minute piece of spontaneous joy; Ax’s melodic, technically assured performance of Chopin’s Scherzo No. 2 was piano playing at its best.

Three days later, Ax joined Jan Lisiecki for Mozart’s heavenly Concerto for Two Pianos K316a/365 and Saint-Saëns’ delightfully entertaining The Carnival of the Animals.

The next day in a pre-concert performance, Ax displayed his chamber music skill set in an immensely satisfying reading of Schumann’s Piano Quintet Op. 44. The string parts were taken by the first chair TSO players, concertmaster Jonathan Crow, principal second violinist Paul Mayer, prinicipal violist Teng Li and principal cellist Joseph Johnson. The players faced the choir loft, which overflowed into the adjacent sections of the hall. No one who heard them will forget the strings’ strength, the way Ax was able to emerge from the background to point out the melody and the assured playing of this propitious gathering.

Later that evening Ax demonstrated a deft curatorial touch in an adventurous program pairing a two-piano piece with its orchestral equivalent. Ax and Stewart Goodyear, more or less balanced in selected pieces of Carl Maria von Weber, returned for an exciting performance of Ravel’s La Valse. In between Anagnoson & Kinton proved to be very well-matched in an apparently seamless gambol through Brahms’ Variations on a Theme by Haydn. As in the previous week’s Rachmaninoff Symphonic Dances, the orchestral colour was more varied than the keyboards’ but the unique opportunity to hear the difference was welcome.

Ax spoke of his love of the word “metamorphosis” when he introduced that program. The next morning he became its agent at a master class for Glenn Gould School students. He was his usual combination of self-effacing and endearing as his analysis and advice transformed a student’s performance of Chopin’s Barcarolle, a piece he called “ecstatic” and which he linked forward to Wagner and back to Bach. He continued his delicate balance of dispensing compliments, ever careful that his suggestions would not be construed as outright criticism.

He recalled an encounter he had as a young man with Pablo Casals when the cellist was 96 and spending his last summer at Marlboro. “[When] the music goes up, [play] loud; music goes down, soft,” Casals instructed. “We all thought he was out to lunch,” Ax said. “But the older I get, the more I see how right he was.”

Quick Picks:

Mar 6 Siberian-born violinist Vadim Repin, the interview subject of my last month’s column, makes his eagerly awaited Toronto recital debut at Koerner Hall in a diverse program of Bartók, Debussy, Ravel, Stravinsky and Tchaikovsky.

Mar 8 at Koerner Hall KahaneSwensonBey, who re-formed in 2012 after a 25-year hiatus, perform piano trios by Mozart, Schumann, Ravel and Schoenfield. In an unfortunate scheduling conflict their afternoon concert occurs at the same time as the Vienna Piano Trio’s Mooredale recital in Walter Hall just minutes away.

On the evening of Mar 8 violinist Moshe Hammer and pianist Angela Park perform works by Brahms, Franck and Sarasate at the Aurora Cultural Centre.

Mar 11, 12 and 14 Gianandrea Noseda conducts the TSO in a program featuring Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, which is all you need to know to make plans to attend. The program also includes Adrianne Pieczonka performing Wagner’s Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde and Richard Strauss’ divine Four Last Songs, which further certifies it as a must-see. Rising star Krzysztof Urbanski and the TSO are joined Mar 27 and 28 by the captivating Sol Gabetta in Dvořák’s masterpiece, his Cello Concerto in B minor, Op. 104, a work they have played together many times. Then Urbanski leads the orchestra in Stravinsky’s rhythmic revelry, The Rite of Spring. Another must-see.

 TSO associate principal clarinetist Yao Guang Zhai is joined by pianist Jeanie Chung for Luigi Bassi’s Concert Fantasy on themes from Verdi’s Rigoletto in a free COC concert also featuring Gershwin, Brahms and three solo pieces by Stravinsky at the Richard Bradshaw Amphitheatre Mar 12.

Mar 14 is crystal ball gazing time when students from the Phil and Eli Taylor Performance Academy for Young Artists give a free concert in Mazzoleni Hall. On Mar 31 another Mazzoleni Hall free concert (ticket required) features solo and chamber works performed by Rebanks Fellows from the Glenn Gould School. Apr 2 three of the Rebanks Fellows perform Brahms’ gorgeous Trio for horn, violin and piano in a free noontime COC concert.

Mar 15 Trio Arkel with guests, cellist Amanda Forsyth and violinist Aaron Schwebel, perform Schubert’s sublime String Quintet in C in the Church of the Holy Trinity.

Mar 16 group of 27 presents Payadora Tango Ensemble and g27 violinist Rebekah Wolkstein in a recital at Heliconian Hall.

Don’t miss your chance Mar 19 to hear the Elias String Quartet, the “excellent” (New York Times), “exuberant” (The Guardian) young British ensemble making their local debut presented by Music Toronto, in works by Haydn, Mozart and Mendelssohn.

Mar 22 Alliance Française presents Stravinsky’s tuneful fable The Soldier’s Tale featuring Jacques Israelievich, violin, with Uri Mayer conducting.

Mar 27 Violinist Lisa Batiashvili, Till Fellner’s trio partner (along with Alfred Brendel’s son Adrian) is joined by pianist Paul Lewis in his first Toronto appearance since his remarkable debut opening the Women’s Musical Club’s 115th season in the fall of 2012. Their program includes Schubert’s “Grand Duo” and “Rondeau brilliant,” Beethoven’s Violin Sonata No.10, Op.96, Telemann’s Fantasia No.4 for Solo Violin and Busoni’s arrangement of Bach’s Chorale Prelude “Nun komm’ der Heiden Helland” for solo piano.

Mar 27 and 28 the incomparable Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber Music Society presents concerts 13, 14, 15 and 16 in the Attacca Quartet’s ongoing series performing all 68 of Haydn’s quartets. Each concert features quartets drawn from the early, middle and later period of the composer’s life.

YouTube star Valentina Lisitsa’s piano playing has struck quite a few chords based on upwards of 80 million views. Before her Royal Albert Hall recital in front of an audience of 8000 in June 2012 her fans had the chance to vote online for their preferred program – a form of audience participation that has become one of Lisitsa’s trademarks. Will the contents of her BravoNiagara! solo concert Apr 4 be similarly chosen?

Paul Ennis is the managing editor of The WholeNote.