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Alix Goolden Performance Hall
November 15, 2008
"What can you do with it? It's like a lot of yaks dancing about".
The musical tastes and opinions of Sir Thomas Beecham were notoriously idiosyncratic, although his feelings about the finale of Beethoven's Symphony No.7 are surely shared by few, if any music-lovers.
Clearly George Corwin and the Civic Orchestra, who opened Saturday afternoon's concert with a weighty and often thrilling performance of the Seventh were in no doubt as to "what to do with it".
Throughout, the music was marked by a powerful rhythmic impetus, full sound with plenty of depth and a firm bass line.
As we have come to expect from Corwin, the composer's wishes were observed to the letter, yet the performance itself was as far from "by the numbers" as one could hope. Whether it was the pounding rhythms in the faster movements, the plaintive winds in the allegretto, the whooping horns and martial trumpets, one could sense that everybody on stage had but one desire: to give this great music the performance it deserves.
And they did.
I must particularly commend to other orchestras the huge advantage of placing the violins to either side of the stage, as was done here. I can think of few moments in the literature to match the work's final coda, that long crescendo over a pedal note, with the violins, violas and cellos tossing a seven-note phrase from the movement's first subject around the orchestra, culminating in the magical moment when the two violins play it in parallel thirds, the cellos and basses growl away at the bottom and the rest of the orchestra surrenders itself to the main rhythm. Place the violins together and much of this effect is lost.
It must be almost fifteen years since I first heard the Civic play Beethoven's Seventh. They clearly knew "what to do with it" even then, but the audience had to settle for an approximation of what the performers were attempting.
No longer. Who says there is no such thing as progress?
The programme had originally been published with the Beethoven occupying the second half. The rearrangement had the benefits of allowing those players not required for the symphony to perform later - and also of placing the music in the chronological order of their composers' births.
I must confess I've not come across Wagner's Rienzi overture before and am unlikely to seek it out again soon. There is a little of his later harmonic lushness and on occasion the music felt like second-hand Rossini - not completely inappropriate, given the Roman setting of the opera.
Corwin directed a fine performance, from the pregnant opening to the tumultuous close. Again the orchestra produced an impressively full sound, with particularly notable playing from the trumpets, trombones and tuba.
Four of the Civic's five Musical Directors are - happily - still with us. Corwin programmed Sibelius's Valse Triste as a memorial to the fifth, the late lamented Stuart Knussen whose contribution to this city's orchestral scene (he was the founding father of the Greater Victoria Youth Orchestra) can hardly be overstated.
It was a lovely, lilting performance featuring excellent piano string playing and delectable winds.
The Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian composed a significant amount of music, including three symphonies, concertos, ballets and film music. His hold on the concert hall today rests on just a handful of those and these mainly because of their use in Western films and TV: Spartacus, used by the BBC in the 1970s for The Onedin Line; Gayane, which includes the famous Sabre Dance (once a top ten hit in Britain for rock band Love Sculpture) and the Adagio used in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey; and Masquerade, although I am unaware of any evidence that this last has ever been used by either film or TV,
It does, however, contain much highly colourful and melodic music and made a fine closer to a marvellous afternoon. The opening waltz - such a contrast to the Sibelius which preceded it - sounded like a huge ball in The Hermitage; the Nocturne was charming and the violin solo which weaves throughout the music was superbly played by the orchestra's leader Raya Fridman. The exuberant Mazurka was followed by the Romance, which featured some notable playing by clarinetist Douglas Hawley, oboist Sheila Longton and trumpeter Julia Wakal and finally the Galop, full of "wrong" notes and extremely lively indeed.
I can think of few, if any, better ways for the orchestra to have celebrated its first quarter of a century. Here's to the next 25 years!
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