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Phillip T Young Recital Hall
July 27, 2010
Until roughly four decades ago - when it was unceremoniously toppled from its throne - John Philip Sousa's most famous single piece was almost certainly The Stars and Stripes for Ever. (The toppling came about when the rather less well known Liberty Bell march was chosen for Monty Python's Flying Circus, thus ensuring its instant recognisability even in places where they have never heard of Sousa).
Even today, especially within beer-can-hurling-distance of an English football (soccer, if you must) stadium, the Stars and Stripes can still be heard, albeit it in truncated form and accompanied by the deathless lyrics "Here we go, here we go, here we go" (this is the total libretto, repeated numerous times), so that many in the UK habitually refer to it as "The earwig song" (trying singing it aloud while dropping the initial aspirate).
And it was with a splendidly vital, not to mention jolly, account of the Earwig Song that the official programme of Basses Loaded XIV closed on Tuesday evening.
One of the (many) delights of Basses Loaded is the way in which the same formula can be the source of endless variation; one can fairly easily summarise that formula: start with a Bach chorale prelude, proceed with the ensemble playing a number of arranged works, have some music played by smaller sub-ensembles, then a brief Karr-Lewis duo recital and end with frequently well-known and less-than-completely-serious pieces from the full ensemble again.
Oh yes, I must not forget the mandatory and greatly anticipated appearance of the two Karr-Lewis canine accomplices during the final piece.
But no matter how formulaic the programme may appear each year, somehow ennui never sets in.
This year, for example, the first half of the evening featured music from five composers, all of whom were born in the same decade (1681 to 1690); one, Giacobo Cervetto, even lived to the ripe old age of 101 - remarkable to think that he was born three years before Bach and Handel and died a mere eight years before Mozart.
Bach and Telemann were the "big" names of this group, Cervetto, Veracini and Durante (I'd love to discover that he was an ancestor of Jimmy) the lesser-known.
The opening Bach chorale prelude is perhaps the Basses Loaded signature piece (not that we hear the same one every year) and the joys of apparently sitting inside a single huge instrument have been well-enough adumbrated by myself and others in the past. This year's performance of "Erbarm' dich mein, O Herre Gott" was up to the usual high standard.
Cervetto's Sonata IV, played by the full ensemble, had a lumbering elegance all its own; Durante's Vergin Tutto Amor was beautifully plaintive.
Gary Karr and Hector Tirado gave a wonderful performance of an aria by Telemann, made even more remarkable by the fact of Tirado's deafness.
Karr and (Victoria Symphony principal bassist) Mary Rannie gave a delightful performance of Sonata VII by Veracini which culminated in a deliciously lively 6/8 allegro finale.
More Veracini - the Sonata IV - closed the first half of the evening performed by Karr and longtime partner Harmon Lewis. I thought the opening largo e nobile particularly fine, even if (because?) it bore a superficial resemblancee to "Ombra mai fu" - or Handel's Largo as it was still known when I learnt to play it (very badly) on the piano.
After all of this early-18th-century music, the opening of the second half - a divertimento by Haydn - came as almost a shock. It was marvellously played by Karr, Noriko Okamoto and Airi Shoda, with some enchanting diminuendo and pianissimo playing in the minuet's trio.
It was a performance to remind one once again what a great, great composer Haydn was, to be able to produce music of this quality in such quantity (I suspect that this may well have originated as one of the 176 trios he wrote for the baryton).
Although there are age-limits for admission to KarrKamp - eighteen to (for some bizarre reason) ninety-seven - as Karr admitted, he is prepared to make the occasional exception.
Bazelaire's (who?) Aria di Chiesa was performed by three of those "occasional" exceptions: Daniel Carias, Milad Daniari and Moe Winograd, all of whom are just seventeen years old.
It was a sombre piece and played with much feeling, even if a (presumed) lack of small-ensemble playing meant that there were infrequent minor infelicities in synchronisation.
For many of the audience, I am sure, a - if not the - highlight of the evening is the performance by the Karr-Lewis Duo; in this case they gave two pieces by birthday boy Robert Schumann, the Romanze, Op.28 No,2 and Abendlied, Op.85 No.12.
These were the kind of performances which silence criticism: each of the pair is a magnificent musician in his own right but their duo is more than the sum of its parts. I look forward every year to these few minutes more than I can say.
After which the entire ensemble trooped back onto the stage - for some more Schumann.
Northern Song certainly had the air of something from the Baltic and Wild Horsemen was bouncy and great fun.
At which point we shifted to North America with Down at the OK Corral by T. Osborne - the only composer of the evening who is still with us - a decidedly cheerful piece, given the association most of us have with the name "O.K.Corral", full of nods in the direction of Copland and even a hint of the theme from Bonanza.
Some real Copland followed - the Hoe-Down from Rodeo - and then Leonard Bernstein's paean to the joys of 6/8 time: America from West Side Story ("Everything's free in America - for a small fee in America"), taken at a somewhat deliberate tempo, but not lacking in propulsion.
And finally, the aforementioned Earwig Song, enlivened by Karr's dazzling playing of the fluting (actually I think the original uses the piccolo, but there is no such word as "piccoloing") descant somewhere in the nosebleed section of his bass's fingerboard.
For some reason I always leave the hall on these occasions with a mild feeling of regret that I ever gave up the bass; but it is inevitably tempered with the knowledge that, even on my best days, I never had one iota of the talent displayed by the people on stage on Tuesday evening.
Basses Loaded is an institution; long may it flourish.
Bass: Philip Ambuel, Richard Backus, Natalee Binning, Daniel
Carias, Milad Daniari, Jane Heise, Gary Karr, Sara Klein, Noriko
Okamoto, Rob Oxoby, Mary Rannie, Jilian Read, Günter Rohde,
Gabriel Garabini Sakamoto, Zachary Sempers, Airi Shoda, Keira
Tideman, Hector Tirado, Moe Winograd.
Piano: Harmon Lewis.
Basso canino: Shinju, Shiro.
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