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Phillip T Young Recital Hall
February 14, 2010
"If music be the food of love, play on / Give me excess of it".
Whether Shakespeare's Duke Orsino had in mind the kind of music performed on Sunday night I cannot say; nor, I imagine, would most couples view an evening with Aventa as the perfect "date concert". But for the music-lover who wants to hear contemporary music impeccably performed, Aventa are indispensable and unmissable.
With a single exception, all of the music in Sunday's concert was composed during this century and much of it was being performed for the first time in Victoria.
The exception - in terms of currency - was Gilles Tremblay's eponymous À quelle heure commence le temps?, composed as long ago as 1999. Both it and Sunday's opening work, Wolf Edwards's Altus were previously performed in Victoria, by Aventa (of course) some five years ago.
Altus opened the concert with a bang. A work which is commendably short and anything but sweet, it combines massive sonorities with wonderfully dense textures (made even denser by the use of quarter-tones). Noise? Perhaps, but organised noise - which is surely one definition of music.
Great fun and distinctly cathartic, Altus was, of course, superbly played.
Quebec composer Simon Martin is a new name to me. His Poème d'appartenance is slow moving and also concerned with textures. The opening, in particular, shows a composer with a fine sonic imagination: slow, single strokes of some slightly metallic percussion instrument gradually giving way to a single high pitch on the piano, a note which was initially muffled by several pieces of cloth inside the instrument, which were removed one at a time, providing a fascinating gradation of tone colour.
I must confess that I found the music meandered somewhat, but Martin is still a young composer; he clearly has great potential.
Strangely enough, there is a precedent for Simon Steen-Andersen's Chambered Music, a work for conventional instruments played unconventionally, in the shape of Peter Racine Fricker's Waltz for Restricted Orchestra, from 1958.
The intentions of the two works, however, are very different: Fricker's was intended to be (and is) humourous - it was, after all, composed for a Hoffnung concert.
Steen-Andersen's piece, on the other hand, is intensely serious - and remarkably difficult for the performers.
Trombonist Martin Ringuette was sequestered offstage, muted and his playing modulated with the sound of a human voice (as eventually became apparent); the voice in question (I had to ask) is that of Nelson Mandela, reading from his prison diaries.
Although the composer deliberately withholds this information from the audience, his music is totally successful in conveying a sense of isolation and separation against a backdrop of skittish, scurrying, barely perceptible sounds.
This was an astonishing piece, and the performance did it complete justice.
Gilles Tremblay is oft-described as the "doyen of Canadian composers", but one gets the distinct impression that this is a kind of lip-service from those who do not really care for the kind of music he writes.
Perhaps, in part, this is due to the fact that his music tends not to make its full impact on the listener immediately; certainly I have found that the more I hear of Tremblay's music, the more I appreciate it.
Hearing a piece for the second time (so dreadfully rare with "new" music) also helps considerably, especially when the soloists are this good.
There is a considerable solo piano part in this work and Aventa regular Miranda Wong was her usual, spectacular self; and it is in the sparkling piano passages that Tremblay most reminds one of Messiaen, with whom he studied in the 1950s.
There is no doubting, though, that the main focus of the work is on the vocal soloist and I can honestly say that baritone Vincent Ranallo gave one of the most remarkable vocal performances - of anything - I have ever heard.
Although the accompaniment - at times overpoweringly dense, at other times delicately fragile - is fascinating, the music is a tour-de-force of vocal technique. Ranallo is one of those singers who could sing a shopping list and make it interesting; indeed, as I was not following the text in the programme (although full marks for printing it), there were occasions when, for all I knew, he could have been singing a shopping list (or his last Visa statement).
But what struck me most forcibly was the distinct flavour of the chanson which Ranallo brought to the part, firmly placing Tremblay within the great French musical tradition.
A remarkable evening's music-making. Aventa are a local - no, a national - treasure.
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