Volume 23 Issue 9 - June / July / August 2018

Beat by Beat | Classical & Beyond
Summer’s
Premises and
Promises
PAUL ENNIS
Across Toronto, throughout Ontario and into the rest of Canada,
wherever you travel, this summer promises music to suit the
most discerning listener. What follows is meant to augment
our Green Pages supplement, concentrating on the Toronto Summer
Music Festival in particular and highlighting other noteworthy events
beyond the GTA.
Toronto Summer Music
This year’s edition of the Toronto Summer Music Festival (TSM),
July 12 to August 4, commemorates the 100th anniversary of the end
of World War I by focusing on works written during, or inspired by,
wartime. It’s an intriguing premise that makes for some thoughtprovoking
programming. As artistic director and TSO concertmaster
Jonathan Crow put it: “Some of the most beautiful, emotional and
challenging music has been written during times of war and conflict
as artists struggled to find meaning and give expression to the horrors
gripping the world.”
Borodin Quartet
But the programming is not limited to such works; they become
central to or merely part of a greater whole. For example, the
Borodin Quartet’s two concerts that begin the festival do include
Shostakovich’s intense String Quartet No.8 Op.110 (1960) dedicated
“to the memory of the victims of fascism and war,” but overall spotlight
Russian-themed compositions. So the Shostakovich is followed
by Tchaikovsky’s String Quartet No.1 Op.11, which contains the
famous Andante Cantabile melody. The next evening, July 13 in
Walter Hall, Russian pianist Lukas Geniušas joins the Borodins for
Shostakovich’s justly popular Piano Quintet in G Minor, Op.57 written
in 1940 as WWII was just beginning. Geniušas opens the program
with Rachmaninoff’s 13 Preludes (1910) then moves to Prokofiev’s
Sonata No.7 Op.83 (1942). When I interviewed Geniušas two years ago
he called the Prokofiev one of the central pieces of 20th-century piano
music: flawless in form and matchless in its violent brutality inspired
by the outrage of WWII.
The overall arc of this year’s TSM ranges widely over the musical
spectrum, encompassing a myriad of chamber music offerings, big
band vocals, early music, gospel music, the pianism of Angela Cheng,
lyric tenor Christoph Prégardien and a multi-disciplinary musical
journey into the life of Francis Pegahmagabow, the renowned Ojibwe
WWI sniper and decorated officer of the Canadian military. And of
course, a series of concerts by art song and chamber music academy
fellows is back, spotlighting a core element of TSM’s mandate in
which musicians on the cusp of professional careers are mentored by,
and perform with, seasoned artists.
There are many instances where the war theme yields a bounty
of masterpieces. Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat (1918), in which a
naive soldier sells his soul (and his violin) to the devil, is an indelible
concoction filled with memorable tunes and asymmetrical rhythms.
Performed in its full version with narrator and dancer, the July 19
Koerner Hall performance presents a rare opportunity to experience
one of Stravinsky’s masterworks. And what does it tell us about
the human spirit that Copland’s sunny Appalachian Spring, with its
unfailing optimism, was written in the last year of WWII? TSM will
present this enduringly popular work, in its original version for 13
chamber musicians, on the same program.
Messiaen wrote most of the Quartet for the End of Time after being
captured as a French soldier during the German invasion of 1940. The
premiere took place in an unheated space in Barrack 27, where the
German officers of the camp sat shivering in the front row. “This is the
music of one who expects paradise not only in a single awesome hereafter
but also in the happenstance epiphanies of daily life,” Alex Ross
wrote in The New Yorker. “In the end, Messiaen’s apocalypse has little
to do with history and catastrophe; instead, it records the rebirth of
an ordinary soul in the grip of extraordinary emotion. Which is why
the Quartet is as overpowering now as it was on that frigid night in
1941.” Take advantage of the opportunity to hear this spellbinding
work when Jonathan Crow (violin), Julie Albers (cello), Miles Jaques
(clarinet) and Natasha Paremski (piano) perform it in Koerner Hall at
10:30pm on July 19.
Crow and pianist Philip Chiu base their tribute to the great violinist,
humanist and teacher Yehudi Menuhin (in Walter Hall on July 30) on
concerts Menuhin performed at liberated concentration camps and
military bases during WWII. The program, anchored by Beethoven’s
Violin Sonata No.9 in A Major, Op.47 “Kreutzer,” includes works by
Corelli, Ravel and Kreisler. More joyous music, in this case represented
by Schubert’s ineffable “Trout” Quintet, seemingly apart from
TSM’s war theme, is the feature of another Walter Hall recital, July 20.
Taking advantage of the presence of art song mentors, tenor Christoph
Prégardien and pianist Steven Philcox, the evening also includes
Schubert’s song, Die Forelle, which is the basis for the theme-andvariations
fourth movement of the quintet. Filling out the program are
works by Shostakovich, Rachmaninoff (his unforgettable Vocalise) and
Paul Ben-Haim (who fled the Nazi regime for Palestine).
Another unmissable highlight of TSM’s musical abundance includes
the pairing of two recent American classics in a July 24 concert at Lula
Lounge by the New Orford String Quartet: Steve Reich’s haunting
Different Trains, which contrasts the composer’s nostalgic feelings for
the trans-American railway trips he made as a child in the early 1940s
with the horrific train rides that Jews were forced to make at the same
time in Europe, and George Crumb’s searing response to the Vietnam
War, Black Angels (1970), written for electric string quartet. The
following day, July 25 at the Church of the Redeemer, Jonathan Crow’s
soloist role in Vivaldi’s Four Seasons is paired with Biber’s Battaglia
(1673), a realistic instrumental depiction of war.
Beethoven’s Sonata No.31 in A-flat Major, Op.110 and Chopin’s
Ballade No.1 in G Minor Op.23 are major pillars of the piano canon.
Angela Cheng performs them July 31 at Walter Hall before being
joined by her husband Alvin Chow for three contrasting French works
for piano four-hands by Debussy, Milhaud and Ravel. Ravel put all his
disillusionment with the horror of WWI into La Valse, which takes
an elegant waltz and ultimately twists it into madness and mayhem.
Brilliant.
The New Orford String Quartet and pianist Pedja Muzijevic’s
program (July 27) mixes Debussy’s Sonata for Cello and Piano,
written in the early days of WWI, and Beethoven’s “Serioso” String
Quartet, which may have been influenced by Napoleon’s occupation
of Vienna the year before it was written, with Elgar’s expansive Piano
Quintet, completed just as WWI was ending.
Chiu, along with violinists Aaron Schwebel and Barry Schiffman,
18 | June | July | August 2018 thewholenote.com