Tafelmusik goes for brash instead of beautiful
In this week’s program, Tafelmusik Orchestra takes its audience to the proverbial dressing mirror. Here, a person stands looking at themselves wondering if their desire for a dash of sartorial adventure may be crossing the boundaries of good taste. At the first concert in its Tem
pestuous Violin program on Thursday evening, guest leader and soloist Enrico Onofri and the orchestra took their attentive listeners at Trinity- St Paul’s Centre on a survey of early string repertoire.
Onofri began with the birth of the Baroque era, still resonating with the sounds of Renaissance polyphony, and took us to its apogee in the music of Antonio Vivaldi and Arcangelo Corelli.
The later violin concertos are old favourites of Tafelmusik’s, but they sounded substantially different. Onofri, in the company of fellow Italian, Tafelmusik music director Elisa Citterio, set them on fire.
All of the music on the evening’s program was delivered as the aural equivalent of seeing the stately white marbles of Ancient Greece repainted in bright, saturated colours. This could possibly be the way this music was meant to be played, but the effect crossed the line into gaudiness on more than one occasion.
This is the current way of performing period-instrument music in Italy, where today’s Baroque ensembles push the dynamics, accentuate the rhythms and goose the tempos. It’s bracing and exciting. It’s also a bit tiring and the sound is not always pretty.
Tafelmusik has a nearly fourdecade history of presenting finely crafted music done very tastefully. This set of concerts represents a change. To these ears, it wasn’t a change for the better, despite the wonderfully virtuosic solo work by Onofri, Citterio and their colleagues.
There were several young faces in the orchestra. The most notable was cellist Keiran Campbell, who was spectacular in his contributions to continuo work throughout the program.
The concert program itself was a fascinating, largely chronological survey.
But its technical merits weren’t matched by musical appeal. The earlier works, by such composers as Girolamo Kapsberger, Giovanni Gabrielli and Samuel Scheidt, were short sonatas and symphonies that came across as more of a sampler than an attention-absorbing set.
These pieces based in polyphony sounded much like their choral and wind counterparts, and Onofri’s need to push the dynamics frequently made the strings sound forced rather than natural.
Matthew Locke’s eight-movement incidental music for The Tempest offers moody, evocative writing. It also became a study in pushing the strings beyond where they should reasonably go, dynamically speaking.
We live in a busy, noisy world where we put a premium on stimulus and excitement. This week’s program delivers in spades. But just like after a big day scuttling around the big city, the aftermath of a concert like this practically demanded silence and rest. Classical music writer John Terauds is a freelance contributor for the Star, based in Toronto. He is supported by the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation. Follow him on