Volume 23 Issue 7 - April 2018

CANADIAN DEBUT
Alma Deutscher
THIRTEEN YEAR OLD
COMPOSER, VIOLINIST, PIANIST
KOERNER HALL
TORONTO, ON
FRIDAY APRIL 13, 2018. 8 PM
HPMOON
Gian Carlo Menotti (left) and Samuel Barber in the
summer of 1936 from Absolute Beauty
“Alma wows Vienna with the
opera she wrote aged 7”
— TIMES OF LONDON
“A force of nature.”
— SIR SIMON RATTLE
“Everything that cannot be learned, you already
have.”
— DANIEL BARENBOIM
A SPECIAL CONCERT IN HONOUR OF THE
TWELFTH GLENN GOULD PRIZE JURY
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youthful memories.
Moon took the film’s title from Leonard Bernstein: “I’ve always associated
Sam’s music in my mind with Plato – I think, in terms of what
Plato called the Absolutes, he’s a Platonic composer… the concept that
there is an absolute truth and an absolute beauty and the absolute
rightness of things… that all Sam’s music has tried to form one version
or another of absolute beauty.”
The documentary begins with the transfixing melancholy of Dover
Beach Op.3, written for baritone and string quartet (from the poem
by Matthew Arnold) when Barber was 21 and still a student at the
Curtis Institute. “Barber found the profound essence of the poem in
very small motives,” Thomas Hampson says. The film moves through
Barber’s compositional output from the Cello Concerto, Symphony
No.1, the justly famous Adagio for Strings, the Piano Sonata (written
for Horowitz, a frequent visitor to Barber’s Mt. Kisco home), Hermit
Songs (and his collaboration with Leontyne Price) et al, ending with
his 1966 opera Antony and Cleopatra and its misplaced stage direction
by Franco Zeffirelli that blinded the critics to its musical qualities.
Conductor Leonard Slatkin, one of Absolute Beauty’s roster of talking
heads, says that he was enchanted listening to the opera on the radio
when he was 22.
Barber wrote very little after those negative reviews and spent the
last years of his life without his longtime partner Gian Carlo Menotti.
Unable to afford Capricorn, their country home with its sylvan setting,
Barber moved back to New York City where a Fifth Avenue apartment
was of little consolation. He left us with a legacy of blissful melancholy
as Absolute Beauty’s moving soundtrack depicts.
Absolute Beauty is available for purchase through Amazon and for
rental at watch.samuelbarberfilm.com and at
https://vimeo.com/156522774.
TSO and Friends
Up-and-coming violinist Ray Chen is the soloist in Bruch’s beloved
Violin Concerto No.1; Sir Andrew Davis leads the orchestra in Sibelius’
magnificent Symphony No.2 Apr 5, 7 and 8. Christian Tetzlaff
performs Berg’s ineffably beautiful Violin Concerto; Kent Nagano
leads the OSM in Bruckner’s ever-popular Symphony No.7 Apr 13.
Violinist Blake Pouliot, recently named Women’s Musical Club of
Toronto’s 2018 Career Development Award Winner, plays Beethoven’s
lyrical Romances 1 and 2 as part of an all-Beethoven program under
the baton of resident conductor Earl Lee that also includes the iconic
Symphony No.5 Apr 14 and 15. The Associates of the TSO perform two
of the greatest string chamber works: Schubert’s Quintet in C D946
and Brahms’ String Sextet No.1 Apr 23. Bramwell Tovey conducts the
1993 concert version of Leonard Bernstein’s brilliant musical Candide
(essentially Bernstein’s 1989 recording with a few excisions) Apr 26
and 28. The legendary pianist Leon Fleisher brings the wisdom of his
89 years to Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.12; Peter Oundjian conducts
24 | April 2018 thewholenote.com