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University Centre Auditorium
November 3, 2019
"Music is the literature of the heart; it commences where speech ends."
I imagine that few, if any, music-lovers would wish to disagree with French poet and politician Alphonse de Lamartine.
Yet his point was brought home to me, with a vengeance, during Sunday afternoon's excellent opening concert of the 2019-20 season from the Greater Victoria Youth Orchestra and conductor Yariv Aloni.
The precise music in question was the second, marked Allegretto grazioso, of Edvard Grieg's Symphonic Dances, Op.64. During the slow introduction, which returns to close the movement, I felt a lump in my throat and even a tear or two making its leisurely way down my cheek.
Perhaps oddly, I can tell you exactly why this happened; it was not the music itself, delightful though that may be; nor was it the playing of oboist Anna Betuzzi, marvellous though that was.
No, the reason for my sudden overwhelming feeling of nostalgia can be summed up in three letters: BBC.
During the 1950s, the BBC serialized E. Nesbit's The Railway Children twice and each time the closing credits rolled out to the accompaniment of this music. Of the TV programmes themselves, I can recall nothing whatsoever, but it only takes a couple of bars of this music to make me feel seven years old again. Or perhaps, to wish that I were...
Happily, from the point of critical listening, I am not affected in the same way by any of the rest of this particular Grieg, which closed the concert in splendid fashion. The opening dance was lively and buoyant (to mis-quote Walt Whitman), featured another fine oboe solo and several tricky tempo changes adroitly handled by Aloni and his players.
The central, no-lump-in-my-throat section of the second dance was far jollier than the wistful music which unmanned me so and again featured some delicious wind playing; the third, in a slightly lumbering triple-time was exuberant and its close was particularly sonorous; the final dance, after its pregnant introduction, built to a terrific climax and the dramatic close was very well done indeed.
It might come as something of a surprise — it certainly did to me — to learn that the Technicolor film process was invented over a century ago, in 1916.
But perhaps Leopold Stokowski was inspired by it when making his transcriptions (some thirty-seven are known) of music by J.S. Bach. Music with which, as a former organist, in the late nineteenth century, before he had acquired his "Polish" accent (Stokowski was born in Marylebone, London), he was intimately familiar.
And you could hear some of Stokowski's background as an organist (he was elected to the Royal College of Organists at the age of sixteen) in the way that he orchestrated certain passages as if using the manuals of the organ: the alternation between strings and wind, for example, in the opening of the fugue.
Aloni led a decidedly Romantic performance of music to give a purist the vapours; but how else could you perform this? A big sound and a Romantic interpretation are, in this context, thoroughly "authentic".
As a concert opener this was a superb "amuse-bouche", but you would most certainly not want to make a meal of it.
When Franz Liszt declared that his sole remaining ambition was to "throw a lance into the boundless realm of the future" it is unlikely that he had in mind composing any part of a national anthem, especially for a country which did not exist.
And yet I wonder how many of us could not help but associate the words "God keep our land glorious and free!" with the main theme of Festklänge, the seventh of Liszt's symphonic poems, composed in 1853, over a decade before Confederation and almost thirty years before the music of "Oh Canada" was written.
It is fairly uncommon in this day and age to hear any of Liszt's dozen symphonic poems (a form he created) with the exception of Les préludes (after Lamartine — you think the opening of this review was chosen by accident?) and so the opportunity to hear any of the others (and Festklänge is one of the least performed of them all) was welcome, especially in a reading as well-played and committed as this one.
True, the music tends to the discursive, but there are many points of interest and there was much to enjoy in this account, from the dramatic trumpet calls and crashing tutti of the opening to the resounding climax. Along the way, there were numerous excellent solo contributions from concertmaster Rebecca Reader-Lee, second violin Jessica Carter, cellist Lexie Krakowski, clarinetist Alex Chernata, bassoonist Wilson Kyne, horn player Allie Bertholm and (again) oboist Anna Betuzzi (I hope I have all the correct names).
At the risk of repeating my remarks from last year (and the year before and...) the Greater Victoria Youth Orchestra continues to go from strength to strength, despite their annual turnover of around thirty per cent of the players.
Another of life's little mysteries, but one I am more than happy to be puzzled by on an annual basis.
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