CHAMBERFEST FINALE
Festival ends on a high note
California and Montreal Guitar Trios At Dominion-Chalmers Reviewed Thursday night
What has six heads, 12 hands and 60 fingers? The closing concert of Chamberfest 2015, featuring the Montreal and California Guitar Trios.
The globe- and genre-trotting program was a condensed version of the festival, with a little bit of everything: surf guitar; Rush; David Bowie; film music; George Harrison; world flavours from India, the Middle East, Central Europe and Latin America; Félix Leclrec; and even some Bach.
The California trio was first up. The ensemble members read like the start of a joke: Angeleno Paul Richards, Belgian Bert Lams and Japanese Hideo Moriya. They’ve been playing together more than 20 years and have honed a blended, laid-back West Coast style.
The 1959 instrumental hit Sleepwalk had fans of doo-wop nostalgia swooning. A jointly composed original, The Marsh, was serene and resonant, with echoes of Mason Williams. But a transcription of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor was too rigid and mechanical, and could have used a dose of the more relaxed phrasing the trio exhibited in their pop excerpts.
The California Guitar Trio sounded like, well, a highly accomplished guitar trio, but the Montreal Guitar Trio sounded like an orchestra. Marc Morin, Sébastien Dufour and especially Glenn Lévesque are all virtuosos, and together they play with smouldering intensity and no small measure of mano a mano competitiveness.
Boomers and Can-rock fans loved their version of Rush’s Tom Sawyer, in which Dufour and his impressive guitar slapping took the place of a drum kit. Dufour turned tabla player in his South-Asian spiced composition Garam Masala, with Lévesque doing an effective sitar impersonation.
The groups came together after intermission. Bowie’s Major Tom was a hit, and Lévesque’s fast-and-furious Breizh Tango, an unlikely, catchy mash-up of music from Brittany, Argentina and Romania, invited enthusiastic audience participation.
The inevitable Ottawa standing O after the final strum was longer and rowdier than the chamber music norm and seemed to be as much for Chamberfest as a whole as for the half-dozen deserving musicians onstage.
So how did this year’s edition of the world’s biggest chamber music festival fare? There were a number of home runs: the hugely successful and smartly planned Haydnfest; three sold-out #UncleJohn performances; the popular draw of turntablist Kid Koala’s Nufonia Must Fall. There were large, appreciative audiences for favourites such as the St. Lawrence String Quartet and the Gryphon Trio (whose cellist, Roman Borys, is Chamberfest’s artistic director).
But there were misses, some surprising. Attendance at the superlative recital by French violinist Augustin Dumay on July 24 was lacklustre. Weekend concerts suffered from empty seats. Maybe there should be a Venn diagram of the intersect of chamber-music lovers and cottage owners.
It’s a mystery why there weren’t more aspiring singers at the Dido and Aeneas double bill or more piano students at the masterful André Laplante recital. When the hip, foul-mouthed #UncleJohn is dominated by an older demographics, it doesn’t bode well for audience sustainability.