Features

Music is an essential part of Christmas and with that time of year fast approaching, I thought I’d offer a look at some records that might enhance our enjoyment of the season. These are all personal favourites; most, but not all, are jazz-oriented. Hopefully there’s something here for all tastes, from the religious to the secular, for those who like their Christmas music straight and those who like it, well…not so straight. To organize things a bit, I’ve arranged the selections into four loose categories:

JAZZ INSTRUMENTAL

Three Suites – Duke Ellington. One of the three suites is Ellington’s adaption of a holiday staple, The Nutcracker, to his unique musical world. While he and Billy Strayhorn remain quite true to the original, the highly individual voices of such Ellington veterans as Johnny Hodges, Paul Gonsalves, Harry Carney, Ray Nance and Lawrence Brown cast Tchaikovsky’s score in an entirely new light, to say the least. The majestic swing of the Overture is especially thrilling; as far as I’m concerned the Christmas season hasn’t begun till I’ve heard it. As an added bonus the other suites are Grieg’s Peer Gynt and Suite Thursday by Ellington and Strayhorn, after John Steinbeck’s novel Sweet Thursday.

A Charlie Brown Christmas - Vince Guaraldi. A delightful essential for the inner kid in all of us. Linus and Lucy, Christmas Time Is Here and other favourites from the timeless cartoon are all here, but the strongest track is still the jazz treatment of O, Tannenbaum by Guaraldi and his trio-mates Monty Budwig and Colin Bailey.

Marc-André Hamelin In Conversation

Marc-André Hamelin had just come in from a walk when he answered his phone. I had called him mid-November in advance of his Music Toronto recital next January 5. “It’s my first concert of the year, actually,” he said. I opened our conversation by congratulating him on his recent inclusion in the Gramophone magazine Hall of Fame, a group of 25 pianists that ranges from legends like Rachmaninov, Richter, Rubinstein, Horowitz, Michelangeli, Gould and Lipatti to contemporaries such as Argerich, Pollini, Perahia, Uchida, Hough and Schiff. I asked whether he feels a kinship with any particular pianist, living or dead.

Sir David Willcocks (1919-2015)

On Saturday, December 19 at 7:30pm, Yorkminster Park Baptist Church will ring out with the sounds of carols and Chanukah songs old and new as Toronto’s Amadeus Choir, along with the glorious voices of the Bach Children’s Chorus, joins with the Trillium Brass, composer and pianist Eleanor Daley and organist Shawn Grenke to celebrate the life of Sir David Willcocks, the great British choral director, who died in September.

This event is much more than simply a tribute to a great musician for me personally, as Sir David was a great mentor and friend to me.

Canadian composer Ann Southam’s Glass Houses, a collection of 15 pieces for solo piano, was composed for Christina Petrowska Quilico in 1981. Christina often played selected pieces from the collection in her recitals, many of which were broadcast on my CBC Radio Two series, Two New Hours. We found that the public response to these pieces on our broadcasts was always enthusiastic. Southam (1937–2010) was quick to point out the essential elements in these compositions. The first was the allusion in the title to the minimalism of Philip Glass, which had charmed her since the 1970s. But equally important was the sound of traditional East Coast Canadian fiddle music, which she had first encountered in the 1950s on the CBC Television show, Don Messer’s Jubilee. Southam found great affinities between these two disparate sources, both of which delighted her.

Making our way to Sondra Radvanovsky’s rural Caledon, Ontario home, on this particular October day, takes us down a blazing gold avenue to the side door of a spacious country house on ten hilly acres, about an hour and a half’s drive from Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts.

Nice thing about arriving at the side door is it takes one into the house through a light-filled informal side room, past an upright piano laden mostly with opera scores, and lumped in among them an oversize box of Crayola crayons. The wall behind the piano is covered with posters for various operas. The posters collectively supply a snapshot of contemporary opera’s greats – its greatest singers, conductors, directors and opera houses. Radvanovsky’s name is nestled in among them in each poster.

I’m already mumbling my (only partially sincere) apologies for the intrusion as I sidle in the door. True, I am disrupting one of a few precious days of “down home” time for Radvanovsky before she and husband/manager Duncan Lear must hit the road again. She has just completed five Donizetti Anna Bolenas at the Met, as well as a glittering New York appearance at the annual Park Avenue Armory Gala (alongside electropop duo The Young Professionals). From here it’s on to Berlin for Manon Lescaut and Tosca. And it’s only October.