Gift ideas: music made in Quebec
Ditch argyle socks, buy a CD instead
Compact discs under the Christmas tree: The image seems quaint, almost Victorian. Those shiny saucers do work as gifts, though. They are reasonably priced, easy to wrap, easy to shove into stockings. Perhaps they can be grouped now with argyle socks and oven mitts as items exchanged more or less exclusively at Christmas.
The difference, of course, is that they can give pleasure to the people who receive them. They are also often made in Quebec. Some recommendations follow: From Analekta we have
For the End of Time, so titled in English in my copy, with the quartet Olivier Messiaen wrote famously in a prisoner of war camp as the central opus.
Now, strictly speaking, we celebrate the birth of Jesus at Christmas, not his eternity, but what the heck. This score synthesizes theology and modernism as masterfully as anything written in the last 70 years, and the Gryphon Trio with clarinetist James Campbell do it justice. Cellist Roman Borys and violinist Analee Patipatanikoon speak with the intensity of true believers and the piano playing of James Parker has a celestial ring.
The recording as produced in the Banff Centre is excellent. And there is a good filler, Alexina Louie’s Echoes of Time, an inventive tribute to Messiaen. There is also a flimsy Mozartian suite by Valentin Silvestrov, which need not detain us.
Perhaps the most vigorously promoted Analekta release of 2012 is François Dompierre’s set of 24 Pre
ludes for solo piano as played with full-fingered conviction by Alain Lefèvre. Many listeners will dig the jazzy numbers, but I veer to the Scriabinesque nocturnes such as No. 12 (Immobile) and No. 14 (Mystérieux). The writing is unfailingly pianistic.
Anyone who heard the bass-baritone Philippe Sly at the OdM gala last weekend will be tempted by his Analekta recording of
Schumann’s Dichterliebe with Michael McMahon as accompanist. I must re--
gretfully issue a warning. This performance is slow, monotone and weighed down by reverberation. Guy Ropartz’s Poèmes d’après l’intermezzo are interesting to hear, but Yamaha was perhaps not the best choice of piano for a work with such a long introduction. Wait for the next Sly CD.
By all means proceed in the case of Stéphane Tétreault’s debut disc matching SaintSaëns’s Cello Concerto No.
1 with Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations (plus fine fillers by these composers). The baritonal beauties of the Stradivarius famously on loan from Jacqueline Desmarais have been captured close-up — a perspective that also suits the natural musicality of the performer. There is decent support from the OSQ under Fabien Gabel, although some passages could have done with another take.
From ATMA we have a disc that almost requires a fireplace and wreath for proper appreciation: a program by Viva Voce of part songs bearing the title Good Night, Good Night, Beloved! This is not mere Victoriana but Montreal Victoriana from the library of the Mendelssohn Choir of Montreal (1864-94), which is now held at McGill.
Quality is very acceptable, with Henry Leslie’s How Sweet the Moonlight Sleeps leading the lot in melodic inspiration and workmanship. Joseph Gould, who was the director of the Mendelssohn choir, starts us off with a comic setting of Jack and Jill that sounds a little like God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen; presumably the resemblance of You’ll Never Guess to When the Saints Come Marching In is a coincidence.
All this music is a cappella, and thus by definition challenging, with much sinuous barbershop chromaticism adding to the difficulty. The 13 voices of Viva Voce manage splendidly under Peter Schubert. Intonation is excellent and phrasing is dictated by musical rather than respirational priorities.
Perhaps the recording could have been less churchy and reverberant. A close-up perspective would have been more evocative of the parlour (and made the words easier to understand). Still, this audio portrait of English Montreal is easy to like and a valuable recognition of a history we are apt to overlook.
“It’s as if Adès has chosen to take the music out of Shakespeare’s play in order to substitute his own — a music of no particular place or period, and whose notes seem to dart upward or downward with an unpredictable questing movement, moving where least expected, hovering at unresolved angles. In his book of interviews, Adès en- visions music as a perpetual search for an impossible stability — ‘where there is life, there is no stability’ — that can aspire at best to ‘a sort of captured, eternal volatility.’ His Tempest is the description of just such an unstable environment, a music not ‘at home’ anywhere because none of those here, variously exiled, shipwrecked, or enslaved as they are, can call the island home, save for Miranda, who has known nothing else.”
I reproduce this passage from a review of Thomas Adès’s The Tempest, which enjoyed an acclaimed run this fall at the Metropolitan Opera, to illustrate how viable it is in the 21st century to write music that is erratic, unconstructed, non-referential, darting upward or downward, neither here nor there, bereft of any coherent style, and expect that music (fashionably singularized as “a music”) to be hailed as really quite wonderful and perfectly suited to its subject. My comment two weeks
ago concerning the nonattendance of OSM musicians at the TSO concert of Nov. 18 was, to put it mildly, ill-considered. The OSM that afternoon was rehearsing a program of its own.
A source reports that about 30 OSM players sat in on the TSO rehearsal. The same source disputes my generalisation concerning musicianly non-attendance at concerts by others: “... There were a lot of OSM musicians at the NY Phil concert last year ... as well as at the Gergiev/Marinsky concert.”