Banff festival spotlights premier string quartets
BANFF, ALTA.— If a competition exists merely to be a competition it is missing the point, or so says Barry Shiffman.
To Shiffman, associate dean of the Royal Conservatory’s Glenn Gould School and director of the worldclass Banff International String Quartet Competition, competitions are about making other things happen.
So when Janice Price, president and CEO of the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, came to him after last year’s competition to propose holding a festival in the competition’s off-years, the founding second violinist of the St. Lawrence String Quartet leapt at the opportunity to organize the first one.
It wasn’t to be a large festival, only a three-day concentrated weekend, but it would afford an opportunity to showcase some of the remarkable foursomes that have passed through Banff since the competition’s beginning in 1983.
Festival No. 1, which took place last weekend, showcased three of those foursomes: the St. Lawrence String Quartet, which won in 1992 and has since become this country’s foremost string ensemble; America’s Jupiter String Quartet, which won in 2004; and Canada’s Rolston String Quartet, which won last year.
Since its 2016 victory, the Rolston has played dozens of concerts on both sides of the Atlantic, most of them a direct result of its success in Banff, and is currently enrolled as graduate quartet-in-residence at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music in Houston, Texas.
In other words, like so many of the past winners, it has been well and truly launched. The same could be said of the Cecilia and Afiara Quartets, first and second prize winners in 2010. And yet, both of these talented Canadian ensembles are already breaking up. Long-range survival represents a serious challenge for a string quartet.
As Shiffman suggests, it is extreme- ly difficult for a quartet to sustain a career without an academic appointment. The St. Lawrence Quartet, for example, is in residence in California at Stanford University; the Jupiter at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
The reasons are easy to imagine. Although one of the greatest in classical music, the quartet literature is designed to be played in small venues, and performance fees have to be divided four ways. Making a secure living is hard.
With the honourable exception of the University of Victoria, which has engaged the Lafayette String Quartet, Canada’s universities seem reluctant to emulate the example of their American counterparts in providing a secure working environment for these custodians of some of our greatest music.
Meanwhile, they soldier on. There has probably never been another time when audiences have been exposed to so much superb cham- ber music-making as today and last weekend’s festival only served to make the point.
Over six concerts plus companion events, the three featured ensembles surveyed the literature from J.S. Bach to R. Murray Schafer with guests artists such as Canadian singers Julie Nesrallah and Tyler Duncan, Canadian violinist Blake Pouliot and cellist Denis Brott, Australian pianist Piers Lane and Russian-born pianist Alexander Malikov.
And as if to illustrate the continuity of string playing, a 17-year-old Royal Conservatory student, violinist Alice Lee, appeared alongside them.
In a morning master class, Geoff Nuttall, first violinist of the St. Lawrence String Quartet, made reference to a photograph in the lobby of the music building of a Banff teacher of years past, the late violinist Lorand Fenyves.
The great Hungarian violinist Jeno Hubay taught Fenyves; Fenyves taught the members of the St. Lawrence Quartet, including Shiffman, and now Shiffman is teaching Lee. That, surely, is how traditions are born.
Of course, festivals are also about innovation and, to conclude the first Banff International String Quartet Festival, the Spanish filmmaker Beatriz Caravaggio appeared to introduce a film she made to accompany the Rolston Quartet’s performance of Different Trains (1988), Steve Reich’s minimalist classic for string quartet and recorded tape.
A musical reminiscence of train rides Reich took as a child back and forth between New York and Los Angeles between 1939 and 1942, Different Trains was expanded by Caravaggio into a reminiscence as well of the Holocaust, using archival footage of the freight trains hauling Nazi prisoners to their extermination.
Not surprisingly, the composer himself has praised the intensification Caravaggio has brought to our experience of the music. It is at festivals such as Banff’s that we look to have our experiences broadened and deepened.