Volume 24 Issue 7 - April 2019

DISCOVERIES | RECORDINGS REVIEWED
DAVID OLDS
Some of my favourite memories are from road trips taken with
my dear friend André Leduc. We met in the lobby of Jane
Mallett Theatre at the intermission of an Esprit Orchestra
concert sometime in the mid-1980s. I was already well versed in
the 20th-century canon, and was quickly drawn to the outgoing
personality of this musical naïf whose curiosity about the subject
seemed boundless. I told him about my radio show Transfigured
Night on CKLN-FM and he told me about his work as a commercial
photographer. We became fast friends and later travelling
companions. Our journeys most often have contemporary
music at their heart – Montreal for the founding of the Canadian
Electroacoustic Community, Ottawa for QuartetFest, Montreal
again (and again) for a number of festivals and conventions –
although our trip to Quebec City and on up the north shore to
Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré and beyond to see the arrival of the snow
geese, was strictly a pleasure outing as I recall. But there is always
an aspect of modern art involved too, with gallery visits an integral
part of our adventures. One memorable trip around the turn of
the new millennium combined these two shared loves in a most
wonderful way. The timing of our visit to Montreal on that occasion
coincided with a retrospective tribute at the Montreal Museum of
Fine Arts to Jean-Paul Riopelle who had died earlier that year, and a
concert by Quatuor Molinari featuring one of our shared favourites of
the genre, Lutosławski’s String Quartet.
An unintended highlight of that trip was meeting the artist who was
the namesake of the quartet, Guido Molinari and spending time in his
studio. This was at the instigation of founding first violinist Olga
Ranzenhofer who, charmed by my friend, encouraged us to “give Guido
a call” when she found out our interest in contemporary visual art. We
did, and found him to be a most amiable host, generous with his time
so long as we were willing to wait while he put a few more brush
strokes on “before the paint dries.” That is when André took the photo
seen here of Molinari at his work bench. On many of our trips, and
during two decades as photographer for New Music Concerts before
retiring, André captured some of the most significant musical voices of
our time. You can find his book of Canadian composer portraits,
Composers In My Lens, at musiccentre.ca/node/144800.
I believe it is safe to say that the Molinari
String Quartet is the most active chamber
ensemble in Canada devoted almost exclusively
to the performance and propagation of
contemporary music. They have just released
their 13th disc on the ATMA label, as well as
having contributed to portrait recordings of
Jim Hiscott and Otto Joachim over the years.
In addition, the Molinaris have been a prime
factor in the development of the genre by
hosting, since 2002, a biennial international string quartet competition
for composers under the age of 40. Three of their ATMA discs
have been devoted to early laureates of the competition.
Their most recent release, following discs of music by international
luminaries Gubaidulina, Kurtág and Schnittke, features four works
written between 1988 and 1996 by American John Zorn (ATMA
ADC2 2774 atmaclassique.com/En). The disc begins with what has
become Zorn’s most frequently performed work, Cat O’ Nine Tails, a
pastiche often reminiscent of a Roadrunner cartoon. Although in one
movement, it is constructed of many brief fragments, in the words
of Ranzenhofer: “By turns sparkling or gritty, virtuoso improvisations,
musical allusions, harmonic sequences and sonic mash-ups –
all these components freely combine in this dazzling, disconcerting
Guido Molinari
and droll work.” Zorn himself suggests that the next work, The Dead
Man, is “like the soundtrack of a sordid and sadomasochistic film set
in a gloomy New York or Tokyo basement.” Although divided into
13 movements, again they are brief fragments ranging from 20 to 90
seconds, juxtaposing wild mood swings.
The final two works are much darker. Momento Mori is presented
as an emotional autobiography composed in 1992 and is dedicated
to Zorn’s longtime collaborator Ikue Mori. At 27 minutes it is by far
the most substantial work on offer here. While it too juxtaposes a
plethora of moods, from meditative repose to extraordinary tension,
there is none of the comic flamboyance of the preceding tracks. The
final work, Kol Nidre, was written “in a single 30-minute burst of
inspiration” according to Zorn, and Ranzenhofer says it “uses music
stripped of all impure sonorities to reveal a world of inner peace.” For
its seven-minute duration we are drawn into an almost medieval stasis
of entirely tonal, gentle unison melody more suggestive of Arvo Pärt,
or Shostakovich in his more contemplative moments, than the Zorn
of the earlier works. Throughout the disc the Molinaris are superb,
finding just the right balance between abrasive exuberance, virtuosic
hilarity, quiet desperation and haunting beauty as required.
One of my “trips of a lifetime” on which André did not accompany
me, was a ten-day visit to Iceland in 2012 with my wife Sharon at the
invitation of New Music Concerts’ colleague Robert Aitken and his late
wife Marion. Of course there was music and art involved – Bob seems
to know every composer and musician on the island and is also an
aficionado of modern art – but also museums. Iceland seems to have a
museum for everything, including expected topics like Vikings,
glaciers, volcanoes and whales, but some surprising off-beat subjects
as well, like punk music, herring and penises (Icelandic Phallological
Museum) – we did not visit that one. It was an amazing trip in the last
days of June and early July, with the sun barely disappearing below the
horizon for an hour each night. Although we did not circumnavigate
the island, we did travel to many of the (incredible) landmarks
including Snæfellsjökull, a 700,000-year-old glacier-capped stratovolcano
which was the starting point of The Journey to the Centre of the
Earth in Jules Verne’s novel; Thingvellir National Park, home of
Althing, the world’s first parliament which was convened there in 930
and continued on that site until 1798, and is also the meeting point of
ANDRÉ LEDUC
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