Volume 23 Issue 4 - December 2017 / January 2018

Beat by Beat | Classical & Beyond
A Winter Festival
PAUL ENNIS
The extra coverage in this double issue of The WholeNote has
prompted me to consider its entire nine-plus weeks of listings as
fodder for constructing my personal musical winter wonderland.
You are welcome to come along for the ride!
On thewholenote.com I find the LISTINGS tab and click on the
indispensable JustASK feature. It’s early in planning my journey so I
opt to see the entire listings for the first week in December. (Later in
my wanderings, to refine my search I may
choose to JustASK specifically for chamber
music or piano.) In this case, I decide on a
free RCM event, pianist Francine Kay in a
Sunday Interludes recital at Mazzoleni Hall
on December 3. Chopin’s Barcarolle has
always been a personal favourite and its
rolling rhythms will get my festive juices
running. Besides, the eminent Princeton
University faculty member (and Analekta
recording artist) will be giving two masterclasses
the following Friday in the same
space. Depending on what the students will
be playing, I may sit in.
My next stop brings me to Koerner
Hall on December 5 for a concert I wrote
about in the November WholeNote:
Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time, a
20th-century touchstone, played by some
of the newest stars in Europe’s musical
firmament. I have high hopes for pianist
Lucas Debargue, violinist Janine Jansen,
cellist Torleif Thedéen and clarinetist
Martin Fröst. Next stop, December 10 (and
I still haven’t budged from Bloor Street)
I’m looking forward to the return of Khatia
Buniatishvili. This time she’s opening with
Mussorgsky’s majestic and intricate Pictures at an Exhibition before
moving on to Liszt showpieces. (And while I’m waiting, there’s the
Rebanks Family Fellowship concert December 6 in Mazzoleni Hall,
where young musicians on the cusp of professional careers display
their craft.)
Sorry to say, you’ll have to JustASK for yourself for the balance of
December. That’s because my annual visit to longtime friends in the
cabin they built themselves in the middle of a hundred-acre wood
will take me through the month. A festive Christmas feast of turkey
and trimmings baked in a wood stove will serve all of us well while a
curious, sociable parrot provides live entertainment.
January 4 and 6, Ryan Wang: When Ryan Wang was five years old
he performed at Carnegie Hall in the American Protégé International
Piano and Strings Competition. A charming child with no pretentious
airs, his celebrity shone soon after, in his first appearance on The Ellen
Show. When not playing a concerto with the Shanghai Symphony,
for example, he enjoys biking, road hockey and Harry Potter in West
Vancouver. In a YouTube video made last year, he talks about being a
piano prodigy who began playing when he was four. “Kids in school
think I’m just a famous pianist,” he says unabashedly. “But I’m just an
ordinary kid.” He calls Harry Potter his hero “because he’s brave. And
if you’re brave, you can overcome anything … Sometimes life is really
challenging, but I never give up and never lose hope.”
Martha Argerich debuted at four, Claudio Arrau at five. Ryan Wang
at ten has been on the stage for half his life. The Li Delun Music
Foundation presents him on January 4 at the Fairview Library Theatre
in recital playing Bach’s French Suite No.6 – his Bach on YouTube
is refreshingly without any affect – a Haydn sonata, a Poulenc
Villageoise, Debussy’s Arabesque No.1, the two Chopin Waltzes Op.64
and a Bartók Romanian Dance. An excursion to North York may be
a New Year’s resolution worth keeping. Two days later, January 6,
Wang is the soloist in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.2 with the
Toronto Festival Orchestra conducted by Dongxiao Xu in the Li Delun
Music Foundation’s “New Year’s Concert 2018” at the George Weston
Recital Hall.
January 7, Rachel Barton Pine: She began learning the violin at
three; at five she “self-identified as a violinist.” At ten, she performed
with her hometown band, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra; at 17,
she won the Bach International Competition in Leipzig, Germany.
At 20, her violin case straps caught in the closing doors of a Chicago
commuter train; the accident cost her part of a leg and mangled a
foot. Her determination and discipline from her years of violin study
brought her all the way back musically.
On January 7, she performs the first
Adrian Anantawan
Sunday Interludes concert of the year in
Mazzoleni Hall.
January 10 to 21, Mozart @ 262: I’m back
on Bloor again for some of this next part
of my private winter festival. I am about to
come face to face with the TSO’s Mozart
@ 262 Festival that begins January 10; it
will be the TSO’s 14th annual celebration
of that prodigy’s genius, and the final one
with Peter Oundjian (the festival’s creator)
as TSO music director. Roy Thomson Hall
(three performances), Koerner Hall (two)
and the George Weston Recital Hall (one)
will all be involved. On January 17 and 18
concertmaster Jonathan Crow and principal
violist Teng Li will be the soloists in
Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante for violin
and viola K364/320d in what might very
well be the single highlight of the festival.
Oundjian’s sole conducting gig, however
(January 19 to 21), is the one program I’m
most focused on, though (and the only
one that’s in all three venues). Anchored
by Mozart’s exhilarating final symphony,
No.41 in C Major “Jupiter,” the concert showcases two talented young
Canadian artists. Charles Richard-Hamelin will weave his colouristic
alchemy in the Piano Concerto No.23 in A Major K488 – the understated
grandeur of its Adagio served as the main theme of Terrence
Malick’s film The New World, underscoring the pristine beauty of
its first act. And Adrian Anantawan will be the soloist in the Rondo
for violin and orchestra K250/248b “Haffner,” and the Adagio for
violin and orchestra K261. Anantawan, who grew up in Toronto, was
born with no right hand, only a stunted appendage with tiny stubs
instead of fingers. At nine he took up the violin, which proved to be a
great equalizer for him. Needless to say, it changed his life. Now in his
early 30s, he works with cutting-edge technology to help others; he’s
also given a TED Talk. He told CNN in 2013 that “it’s never about the
technique or technology that is important, but the desire to live life
authentically and creatively. We often forget even ‘traditional’ musical
instruments are technological adaptations in their own right – they
are tools to manipulate sound in a way that we couldn’t do with our
bodies alone.”
January 11, Brentano and Dawn Upshaw: I plan on abandoning
Mozart to take advantage of a rare opportunity to hear Schoenberg’s
pivotal String Quartet No.2 when Music Toronto presents the Brentano
String Quartet and soprano Dawn Upshaw in the Jane Mallett Theatre.
Completed in 1908, the quartet’s extreme late-Romanticism loses
its harmonic bearings by its final movement, a change that can be
considered the beginning of atonal music. The third and fourth movements
are settings of poems by the symbolist poet Stefan George.
Alex Ross in The Rest Is Noise talks about the extraordinary moment
18 | December 2017 / January 2018 thewholenote.com