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Phillip T Young Recital Hall
October 14, 2017
It is one of music's little ironies that composers themselves are not always the best judges of their own work.
Consider the case of Camille Saint-Saëns: in February 1886 he was in retreat at a small village in Austria, licking his wounds after a less-than-successful concert tour of Germany.
It was during this stay that he composed what would eventually become his best-loved work, The Carnival of the Animals, yet despite a number of well-received private performances, Saint-Saëns insisted that the work not be published during his lifetime, fearful that it would undermine his image as a serious composer.
Saint-Saëns died in December 1921 and the Carnival was first performed publicly in February 1922, and published in April of that year. It rapidly became one of his most popular works.
Connoisseurs of irony will appreciate one further wrinkle: Saint-Saëns confessed to his publisher that composing the Carnival was such fun ("mais c'est si amusant!") that he was neglecting his major compositional work of the time, the Symphony No.3. In the last few decades, the symphony has gone from a seldom-heard rarity to one of classical music's Greatest Hits (albeit largely because its grandeur is a splendid vehicle for demonstrating HiFi systems) and today is probably performed at least as often as the Carnival.
Saturday's concert closed with an exuberant performance of the Carnival; from the glittering opening two-piano flourishes to the scintillating finale it was a performance which smiled and made its audience do likewise.
A detailed description of all fourteen movements would be far more tedious than necessary, so I shall limit myself to a few highlights, while remarking that the performance was really one long highlight.
I loved the lugubrious Tortoises, with its ponderous, slow-as-molasses quoting of the Galop infernal (Can-can) from Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld.
For Stravinsky, elephants danced the polka, for Saint-Saëns, it was the waltz. Two of the several musical quotations enshrined in the work can be heard here and, in keeping with the frivolous nature of the entire work, they are two of the most non-elephantine pieces imaginable: The Dance of the Sylphs from Berlioz' Damnation of Faust and the scherzo from Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream. This is the only item on Saturday's programme that I have ever dared play in public, but Alex Olson's marvellously lumbering performance reached heights I could only dream of.
Marie-Perle Broadley's flute was exquisitely delicate in Aviary and Donovan Waters' laconic rendition of Ogdon Nash's verses, complete with cringe-inducing rhymes ("boomerangs / kangaroo-meringues" ouch!) was perfectly pitched.
I mean no disrespect to the other performers, who were uniformly excellent, when I say that Pamela Highbaugh-Aloni's rendition of The Swan (which Saint-Saëns did allow to be published as early as 1887) was worth the price of admission alone. Her playing here was, as I had fully anticipated, immaculate.
Igor Stravinsky's L'Histoire du soldat is based on a Russian folk tale, which clearly has links to the Faust legend. While usually today performed as a purely instrumental work, the original was designed to be "read, played and danced" by three actors, one or more dancers and seven musicians.
Saturday's performance dispensed with Terpsichore and reduced the speaking parts to a single narrator.
Owen Underhill directed a superb performance of a work which is far from easy, as witness that fact that, despite the presence of only seven players, it is usual for the work to be conducted.
From the eerie and spiky beginnings the performance reminded at least one listener of just how original this music was.
Although there were one or two places, most noticeably in the Royal March, when it threatened to became apparent just how difficult this music really is, for most of its duration the performance struck me as superlative.
If we are to single out individual musicians, always an invidious task, then clearly Ann Elliott-Goldschmid's dazzling playing of the virtuosic violin part must be mentioned. But so too must Merrie Klazek's playing of what was written for the cornet, but is frequently played on a regular trumpet. Unless I am mistaken, she did use a cornet and rarely have I heard it played with such mellifluousness and fluency.
Gregor Craigie narrated, using the version written by Douglas J. Penrick; in his own words this was "shortened and altered" from the original text by CF Ramuz. Although balances between the excellent narration and the music were not always perfect, I did wonder if it is possible for them to be so. And I felt a distinct frisson as the narration underlined the link to the central European legend with a direct quote from Christopher Marlowe's Dr Faustus: "This is hell — nor am I out of it".
Cultural fashions are as strange as any other and people get swept up in them in much the same way. How else can one explain the success, in the Paris of the First World War, of the supposedly Liberian Les Poésies de Makoko Kangourou with a verse which begins "Honoloulou, pota lama!" Did nobody really think they might have been a hoax?
Certainly the singer contracted to take part in the first performance of Poulenc's Rapsodie nègre in 1917 was less than impressed, telling the composer "at the last minute" that "it was too stupid and that he didn't want to be taken for a fool".
As a result, the eighteen-year-old composer sang the words himself — in uniform. "You can imagine the unusual effect produced by a soldier bawling out songs in pseudo-Malagasy!"
In fact, only two of the five movements involve the voice and I strongly suspect that Benjamin Butterfield, here making his baritonal debut, could not bawl out anything even if he tried. He treated the nonsense texts as if they were profound and meaningful, which is probably the only way to do it, in the same way that comedians who laugh at their own jokes are rarely funny.
Gibberish (albeit fluent gibberish) aside, the music on several occasions had me in mind of Poulenc's senior, Maurice Ravel (the work's opening certainly suggested that Poulenc had at least heard Ravel's Piano Trio, composed a few years earlier) and clearly shows a composer still finding his feet.
This was music I had certainly never heard before and may well never hear again.
Which being the case, I am more than grateful for having had this opportunity, especially in view of the quality of the performance.
As a way to mark the University of Victoria's School of Music's fiftieth anniversary this could not have been bettered. And the season promises more delights in prospect.
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