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St. Mary's Anglican Church
July 21, 2017
Composers have long used birdsong as a source of inspiration: one less-well-known example being the second movement of Mozart's A Musical Joke, K.522, believed to be based on the singing of the composer's pet starling, who also, apparently learned to sing the finale of the Piano Concerto K.453, albeit substituting a G sharp for a G natural. So attached was Mozart to the starling that when it died, he held a funeral at which he read aloud a poem he had written for the occasion.
I imagine that, for the last half-century or so, the real challenge to any composer wishing to incorporate birdsong into their music is the risk of sounding like second-hand Messiaen.
Happily, I can report that in Field Guide, Emily Doolittle has — aside from a few brief passages which, if transcribed for piano, might well sound like a missing page from Catalogue d'oiseaux — admirably avoided this pitfall and has produced a work of interest and originality.
Doolittle, born in Canada, currently based in Scotland, describes herself as a "zoomusicologist". She points out that while the three birds portrayed within "aren't currently endangered, they depend on the wild land of the US National Parks and Forests", an organisation which, of course, is currently endangered.
Field Guide was commissioned by the Fair Trade Trio and was receiving its second performance (less world premiere, more world deuxieme) at Friday's first concert of Oak Bay Music's Summer Serenade series for 2017.
While the opening movement (depicting the Horned Lark) and the finale (the Western Meadowlark) were certainly enjoyable, the former with its short bursts of song interleaved with longish pauses, the latter a feast of chirps and chirrups, it was the second movement, based on the song of the Sage Grouse, which really caught my imagination.
Played almost entirely pizzicato, one could easily imagine a conversation between two Sage Grouse, going something like this:
A third Sage Grouse joins them.
And so the day wears on...
Yet, despite the sparse nature of the music, the trio conveyed an excellent sense of its pulse and even a certain "swing".
Despite my flippancy (and the fact that the music inspired me to be flippant should be taken as a positive) this was an extremely enjoyable piece, whose length was judged to perfection and which was played with dedication and consummate artistry by the Fair Traders (if I may make so bold).
Another composer to add to my, already lengthy, "must investigate further" list.
As the Fair Trade Trio have a self-imposed mandate to champion the works of living female composers, it was no surprise that the second half of their concert opened with Molly Herron's Nelson, a work all of three years old.
The work's title remains mystery: is it inspired by the Hero of Trafalgar? (this sees unlikely) or perhaps the town in British Columbia (which seems even less likely) or the city in New Zealand. (I think that the rock band founded by the twin sons of singer Rick Nelson is an even more unlikely inspiration and well outwith the scope of this review.)
For the first minute or so of the piece, I felt distinctly indifferent to its sporadically-spaced descending glissandos; but gradually (well, not that gradually, as the piece was not that long) I was sucked in by the increasing sense of events moving at different speeds and a gradually ratcheting intensity. Slow glissandos (some now ascending) brought us into microtonal territory and finally glissando harmonics brought the piece to a subdued close, by which time I would happily have had it last for several minutes more.
Once again the trio played the music superbly and with admirable commitment.
That list just keeps getting longer.
The other two works on the programme were, in the vernacular, by "dead white guys", but I don't think we should hold that against either Beethoven or Dohnányi.
Although Beethoven's last string trio, Op.9 No.3, is not his first published work in C minor (that would be the piano trio Op.1 No.3), it is nevertheless a strong indicator that this particular key would have special meaning for him; and if it does not exactly foreshadow the most famous C minor works (the "Pathetique" sonata, the third piano concerto and, most famously of all, the fifth symphony), it is still a deeply serious piece.
The Fair Trade trio closed their concert with a very fine performance of the trio. From the opening bars the composer's identity was never in doubt and they gave the music, which in some ways is more "advanced" than most of the Op.18 quartets, precisely the right weight. I was grateful for their observance of the first movement repeat and particularly enjoyed the propulsive development and resonant final bars.
The slow movement was particularly lovely, its theme played with great poise. The scherzo — and this movement is most definitely not, even slightly, a minuet — was full of life, with a nicely-contrasted, more relaxed trio and closed with a subtle bounce.
The finale, lithe and very quick, is perhaps the least strong movement: Beethoven was arguably still working on his approach to finales (and, in his defence, it should be pointed out that the finales of his predecessors were frequently fairly lightweight). I especially admired the trio's control of the almost-breakneck pace and the diminuendo ending.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, composers tended to fall under the spell of either Brahms or Wagner. (Until, that is, Debussy showed that there was a third alternative.)
Ernö Dohnányi, being of a fairly conservative turn of mind, musically-speaking, found it hard to escape the influence of Brahms.
This was evident in his Serenade, Op.10 for string trio, a work dating from 1902, when Dohnányi was in his mid-twenties.
A charming work, the nationality of its composer would remain complete opaque were it not for one passage in the opening movement (which recurs in the finale), in which the viola unleashes a drone accompaniment over which the cello plays a high, keening, decidedly Magyar-sounding melody.
The Fair Traders opened Friday's concert with an excellent performance of a work which would, I suspect, be more popular were it not for two factors: the unmemorability of most of its melodic material, with the exception of the scurrying main theme of the finale (which was still bouncing around my head a couple of hours later), and, of course, the fact that string trios, as a genre, are far less frequently heard than quartets.
Throughout the work, as indeed throughout the evening, they imbued the music with captivating tone colours and first-class ensemble.
Having enjoyed their previous Victoria performance, almost exactly two years ago (review here) I was greatly looking forward to this.
I was not disappointed.
Here's to the next time.
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