Montreal music festival brings classical delights
MONTREAL— Where once the Canadian musical landscape was a summer desert, festivals are now poking vigorously through the sand, especially in Ontario and Quebec.
Although Luminato remains something of a disappointment to serious music lovers — notwithstanding this year’s ambitious staging of R. Murray Schafer’s Apocalypsis — Toronto Summer Music promises three-and-a-half weeks of richly rewarding listening, beginning July 16, and Ontarians with access to a vehicle can find plenty more at such festivals as Stratford Summer Music, Bravo Niagara, the enormous Ottawa International Chamber Music Festival, and James Campbell’s always enterprising Festival of the Sound in Parry Sound, Ont.
Across the border in Quebec the festivals are equally tempting, ranging from Lanaudière to Orford and Domaine Forget to one of my personal favourites, the recently concluded Montreal Chamber Music Festival, founded 20 years ago and still directed by Denis Brott.
“Sometimes I think there are more Brotts than people,” quipped a sardonic Montrealer several years ago, and not without a grain of wit.
The Brotts are surely one of this country’s most comprehensively talented musical families, beginning with Brott the father, Alexander by name, one of the most versatile Canadian musicians of his generation, a violinist (sometime concertmaster of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra), founder-conductor of the McGill Chamber Orchestra, a university professor and, not least, an award-winning composer.
This being the 100th anniversary of his birth, Brotts the sons, distinguished musicians in their own right, decided to honour their progenitor by featuring his music in the festivals they direct.
Conductor Boris, director of the modestly named Brott Festival of Music, has already led his National Academy Orchestra (recruited from young musicians from across the country) in a performance of “British Columbia” from the orchestral suite From Sea to Sea at Mohawk College, and on Aug. 9 will lead the same orchestra in Papageno Revisited at the Festival of the Sound.
For his part, cellist Denis opened a Montreal Chamber Music Festival concert by the Festival Strings and Israel’s Ariel Quartet at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ splendid Bourgie Hall with the early string piece Ritual.
Ritual reflected the young Alexander’s anglophile taste, with echoes of Edward Elgar and Ralph Vaughan Williams sounding through its well-crafted pages. Sadly, like most deceased Canadian notesmiths, Brott the father is a name in the history books now rather than a presence in the active repertoire.
Oh, yes, Brott the mother, Lotte, had a musical career of her own as a cellist in the Montreal Symphony Orchestra and behind the scenes orchestrator of what one might characterize as the family business. There really are more people than Brotts, although perhaps not many.
But back to the Montreal Chamber Music Festival, which concluded its anniversary season in late June with an Antonio Vivaldi concert devoted to L’Estro Armonico, led by the noted Baroque violinist Elizabeth Wallfisch and featuring winners from the Canada Council Musical Instrument Bank competitions.
Denis Brott helped found the bank, which lends valuable string instruments to talented Canadian musicians, and still plays the first instrument in its collection, a vintage 1706 Tecchler cello.
But perhaps the most prized instrument heard at this year’s festival arrived in the hands of the American violinist Rachel Barton Pine, a 1742 Guarneri del Gesu that she used to give a relatively rare performance of all 24 of Niccolo Paganini’s fiendishly difficult Caprices for solo violin.
Recognizing the challenge that listening to 24 Caprices in succession would represent to an audience, Barton Pine offered a commentary along the way. What the commentary did not include was the poignant story of her own triumph over polio to become one of the leading violinists of her generation. Like many of the artists at this year’s festival, including Toronto Symphony concertmaster Jonathan Crow and pianist Marc-André Hamelin, Barton Pine is a friend and colleague of the festival’s director.
As Denis Brott suggests, “given the intimacy and partnership chamber music exemplifies, it necessitates teamwork on- and offstage,” and it does help to be working with people you know and admire.
An eclectic programmer, Brott invited a range of artists stretching from the Bach-singing Swingle Singers to the Preservation Hall Jazz Band (yes, he regards jazz as chamber music) to the Emerson String Quartet, with a Quebec favourite, soprano Marie-Josée Lord, showcased in a homage to the singers who inspired her, from Edith Piaf to Leontyne Price.
Little known in Ontario, Lord is one of those native daughters Quebec has taken to heart. A sometime church soloist, she has represented Canada at the Cardiff Singer of the World Competition, appeared in local opera productions and recorded a number of compact discs.
An Israel Connection series also featured the virtuoso clarinetist David Krakauer and his Acoustic Klezmer Quartet, and a Spirit of Montreal series brought jazz master Oliver Jones to the stage, with much of the music in the various programs inspired by the 70th anniversaries of the end of the Second World War and the Holocaust.
The right ingredients for a festival? You bet.