Classical fun and game(s)
Laughter ensues at Off Centre musical send-up Opera Carnival of Animals unleashes new narration
It’s one thing to be off- centre. It’s quite another to be in left field. Or maybe off the wall. Whatever it was, yesterday’s Off Centre Music Salon, at the Glenn Gould Studio, was anything but a regular classical music concert. Instead, it was an afternoon of laughter and monkey business that happened to include music. The presence on stage of Canada’s very own prima donna, soprano Mary Lou Fallis, and her partner-in-musical-crime accompanist Peter Tiefenbach was the first clue. Then there was the program, made up entirely of musical parodies. The warm-up act — Off Centre Music Salon artistic directors/ pianists Inna Perkis and Boris Zarankin — was a piano suite for four hands: Souvenirs de Bayreuth by French composers Gabriel Fauré and André Messager. When Wagner’s opera festival first opened in the late 19th century, it created a sensation in Europe. Fauré and Messager, for the amusement of their close friends, made up this suite from the Ring Cycle, parodying the music into a foursquare dance, the quadrille. With tongues firmly in cheek for the rest of the program, out came Fallis and Tiefenbach, who did a parody of an art- song recital. Cole Porter met Franz Schubert in a song that melded “ Gretchen am Spinnrade” and “ I’ve Got You Under My Skin.”
There was also a very clever Claude Debussy’s Claire de lune overlaid with “ Blue Moon,” in an arrangement by Tiefenbach. And the duo outdid itself in “ Bingo Night in Berlin,” where Fallis made like Lotte Lenya in Tiefenbach’s mock-Kurt Weill score. What to do when you have a broken heart and “ on the bingo card of life there’s only I”? Reach for Leroy Anderson, of course. A hilarious nod to the Christmas season included fractured versions of the American composer’s greatest hits, including “ Sleigh Ride,” with the audience invited to jingle car keys. Who knew that you can perform Anderson’s “Sandpaper Ballet” by gliding a microphone ( Fallis’s) over a five- o’clock shadow ( Zarankin’s)? And guest double bassist Joel Quarrington showed us how the Chinese ehru ( sort of a two- stringed violin) is as good as any western instrument when you gotta play “ Jazz Pizzicato.” Quarrington enjoyed some limelight with Fallis in Eugene Kurtz’s crazy The Last Double Bass in Las Vegas and Two Jazz Songs by British composer Betty Roe. The weightiest item on the program was Camille SaintSaëns’ fabulous Carnival of the Animals, itself a parody of other composers’ work. Perkis and Zarankin attacked the extremely challenging score on two pianos, while Tiefenbach and Fallis produced a new narration, replacing Ogden Nash’s sparky English text with one they cowrote with Michael Patrick Albano. The new verses repeatedly threatened to sink under their puns and bad rhymes. But the duo pianists’ game ( pun intended) reading of the 14-animal score, and Quarrington’s lunky “ Elephant,” made it worthwhile.