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First Metropolitan United Church
April 21, 2017
"Wagner", Rossini famously wrote in 1867, "has lovely moments but awful quarters of an hour".
One immediate rebuttal to this is to point at the seventeen-minutes-or-so (in most modern performances) of the Siegfried Idyll, quite possibly the loveliest thing Wagner ever composed and arguably strong evidence for the (at least temporary) transformative power of love; the music was composed as a birthday present for his future wife Cosima, who had given birth to Wagner's son (and, let it not be forgotten, Liszt's grandson) some eighteen months previously.
Rather than spend the time wondering how such an unpleasant (and I am being generous) man could have composed such exquisite music, I instead gave myself up to the embrace of the performance which opened Friday night's season-closing concert from the Victoria Chamber Orchestra under their Music Director, Yariv Aloni.
Aside from some very slight hesitancy in the first violins' opening exposed octave leap, this was a performance full of lush sonorities, beautifully paced and exquisitely contoured, with a wonderfully urgent climax.
A truly gorgeous way to open the concert, which only left me wondering why a man who could achieve such results in such a short space of time instead frittered away his musical talents writing little but operatic behemoths: wars have been fought in less time than it takes to perform The Ring.
Mozart's great Sinfonia Concertante, K.364, dates from 1779 and is the last of his concertos for stringed instruments. After this, with the notable exceptions of the four concertos for horn and the luminous concerto for clarinet, all of his concertante music involved his own instrument, the piano.
The Sinfonia Concertante is a finer work than his five concertos for violin alone; in part, this must be because it is a later work, but one cannot help but hypothesize that the presence of the viola, which Mozart himself played, is also a factor. And one can also only regret that he never composed a concerto for the instrument.
The winners of this year's Louis Sherman Concerto Competition, Emma Reader-Lee and Danielle Tsao, were absolutely splendid soloists in a very fine performance indeed.
After an opening pregnant with promise, the pair's delectable opening lines seemed to emerge seamlessly from the background. Their rapport and evident enjoyment in the music were delights to behold (and the latter came through in their playing as much as, if not more than in the smiles on their faces).
The various tempo changes were well managed, Reader-Lee and Tsao's interplay in the cadenza was wonderful and the orchestral pickup excellent. If I have a one, very minor, criticism it is that occasionally, when the viola was playing solo, the accompaniment did get a little over loud.
The slow movement opened with rich, full tones from the accompanying strings and excellent cantilena from both soloists. The music itself is profoundly sad in places — Mozart's mother died in 1778, the year before its composition — and it is quite understandable that the young soloists did not quite fully plumb the depths of the sadness within. Indeed, I should probably have been concerned if they had.
The bouncy finale brought matters to a highly enjoyable close and the audience to its feet.
Emma Reader-Lee and Danielle Tsao are worthy winners of the Louis Sherman competition and I look forward to following their musical careers in the future.
During the twentieth century English composers produced some of the finest music ever composed for string orchestra. At least two of these works — Vaughan Williams Tallis Fantasia and Britten's Bridge Variations — were the vehicles which brought their composers to the attention of a wider public.
The Britten — Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, to give it its proper title — was composed for Boyd Neel's orchestra to perform at the 1937 Salzburg Festival; and not just to perform, but to demonstrate their technical abilities.
To this day, professional string ensembles will use the Bridge Variations as a showcase to display their virtuosity.
To say, then, that the Victoria Chamber Orchestra was ending their season "not with a whimper, but with a bang" (as T.S. Eliot — whose name is, of course, an anagram of "toilets" — did not quite say) would be to understate the case.
And the orchestra rose magnificently to the challenge. Which is not to say that every single musician hit every single note accurately, but I am sure that I cannot have been the only member of the audience for whom the sheer joie-de-vivre and pizzazz of the performance swept all before them, leaving little or no time, and even less inclination, to search for infelicities.
It was a nice touch to have the four section principals — Yasuko Eastman, Sue Martin, Alexis Moore and Mary F. Smith — play the second of Bridge's Three Idylls beforehand, as it is the music from which the theme, admittedly not the world's most immediately recognisable one, is derived. It placed the variations in context and also made a gesture in the finale (of which more later) far more comprehensible. Oh yes, it was beautifully played by the quartet.
The work opens with a dramatic pizzicato, which here was as deep and resonant as one could have wished, before the principals gradually emerge with the theme. The first variation was sombre and rich-hued; the march quick and propelled by the angular lower strings. The Romance was lilting an quite charming; whereas the Aria Italian gave the seconds, violas and cellos full reign to unleash their inner "Django" ("Jimi"?) as they frantically strummed the accompaniment to the sizzling violin melody.
The Bourrée Classique had a determined feel, with excellent solo work by Eastman summoning up the spirit of Vivaldi. The Wiener Waltzer, with its odd accents, has never struck me as especially Viennese, but the cellos line here was especially good.
After the ferocious tremolandos of the Moto Perpetuo, the intensity of the funeral march, and the eerie harmonics and stately violas of Chant, the almost-spectral fugue had everyone on their toes (and, I suspect, frantically counting) until, in a brilliant coup de main, Britten has the four principals emerge from the texture once again playing the Bridge, essentially unadorned. A wonderful moment, leading to a finely tuned close with very good harmonics.
Merely to have survived such a challenging work without ensemble collapsing into an ungainly heap would have been an impressive achievement in itself.
But this was a fine performance indeed and must be accounted a benchmark in the progress of the Victoria Chamber Orchestra.
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