WHAT A WEEKEND
Percussionist Glennie takes on a new Canadian work; pianist Rana plays Schumann and Chopin
Vancouver hosts two remarkable artists in concert this weekend — percussionist Evelyn Glennie plays with VSO, while Beatrice Rana tickles the ivories.
VSO presents Dame Evelyn Glennie
Saturday and Monday, 8 p. m. |
Orpheum Theatre
Tickets: $ 28.50 to $ 88 at vancouversymphony. ca
Vancouver Recital Society presents Beatrice Rana
Saturday, 3 p. m. | Vancouver Playhouse
Tickets: $ 25 to $ 55 at tickets. vanrecital.com
Two remarkable artists come calling this weekend, swinging the fall music season instantly into high gear. Percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie is considered one of the more extraordinary performers of our time; Beatrice Rana is building the sort of career notices that classical pianists long for.
Glennie is here to start the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s 95th season with a bang ( sorry: the pun was irresistible), performing a new concerto for percussion by Canadian composer Randolph Peters at the Orpheum Saturday and Monday nights. Rana plays her first recital at the Vancouver Playhouse for the Vancouver Recital Society Sunday afternoon.
Perhaps the only classical superstar with her own registered tartan, Glennie hails from Aberdeenshire, where she was nurtured by a musical family before going south to London and attending the Royal Academy of Music. She’s an indefatigable performer, playing gigs of inconceivable variety and forging collaborations with an impossibly wide range of fellow musicians. Her skills as a touring virtuoso make her a superstar, but it’s her work as an activist that has made her a household name. She has consistently used her prestige and star power in the service of music and education. She is a committed populist with a clear eye on the audience and her responsibility to bring it every ounce of her artistry.
Her website sets out her core beliefs. “So who are our customers? While my employer may be the many orchestras and other promoters that hire me to perform over 100 performances per year, my customer is actually the paying public who come to these venues and events to be entertained and stimulated by our artistic endeavours and experience the passion which we bring to our specialties. An artist without passion is the same as any other employee who is just doing their job — our extra effort makes the difference.”
Italian pianist Rana is also from a music- focused family, and, it would seem, one of those blessed performers who simply love the stage. Though she placed second this summer at the Van Cliburn Competition in Fort Worth, Texas, she was the obvious audience favourite. She first came to the fore in Canada two years ago, at the Montreal International Piano Competition ( where she reportedly took to hockey with preternatural enthusiasm).
It’s early to say where Rana’s career might take her; she is still studying her craft in Germany. But there are clear indications that Rana has the same sort of passion and good common sense that have been touchstones for Glennie.
“The most difficult thing about staying away from home at Hannover is that there is very many crazy people,” Rana recently told a Texas journalist. “They think just of music and don’t think of life. This is very, very bad. How can we play music if we don’t know life?”
Beyond the appeal of both artists as performers of outstanding ability, the programs they will appear in are of more than passing interest.
Rana is eschewing the “a bit of this/ a bit of that” approach so often favoured by young pianists on the rise. Here she plays two works by Schumann — Abegg Variations and Symphonic Etudes — then devotes the entire second half of her program to the wonderful, enigmatic Preludes of Chopin.
Could there be any better repertoire for a developing pianist who believes life informs art? The aphoristic 24 Preludes are one of the wonders of the Romantic era; though they have their virtuoso moments, they create a universe of miniatures, quite the artistic and emotional workout for any pianist, let alone one who is aged just 20.
At the VSO, Glennie demonstrates both her technical prowess and her commitment to expanding the percussion repertoire: with pre- modern works very thin on the ground, Glennie has made it her mission to work with composers. Back in the day, Randolph Peters happened to be composer in residence with the Winnipeg Symphony when Bramwell Tovey was its music director. Peters’s party piece for celebrating our orchestra’s landmark season is a full- length percussion concerto inspired by medical writer Oliver Sacks’s book Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.
Peters writes: “In the past decade we have witnessed an explosion of new research dealing with the brain, hormones and neurotransmitters and how they relate to music. Oliver Sacks is one of the first to write about this fascinating new field of study. His narrative reports are based on actual cases where unusual brain conditions have caused strange and surprising ways of experiencing music. The idea for this concerto was to take the most interesting ‘ conditions’ that Oliver Sacks writes about and turn them into movements of a longer piece of music. This is music about the way we hear music.”
And while Glennie commands the concerto slot in the VSO’s Saturday and Monday programs, the rest of the concert is classic Tovey, the sort of program that could easily have been heard at this summer’s Proms at the Albert Hall. In a nod to the 200th birthday of Giuseppi Verdi, the Force of Destiny Overture precedes the new concerto. Then it’s Paul Hindemith’s Symphonic Metamorphosis on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber, a deadpan title for a charming work that simply bristles with spirit and humour; then Maurice Ravel’s inimitable Bolero.
There’s going to be lots of classics and heavyweight repertoire at the VSO later in this celebratory year. Why not kick off the season with a end- of-summer flurry of orchestral showpieces?