Volume 28 Issue 4 | February - March 2023

internationally renowned Israeli violist Rivka Golani who made her
home in Toronto for some years. Favour for viola and live digital delay
controlled by the performer was composed in 1980. Sarabande was
composed to address the issue of the complicated set-up required for
the live electronics aspect of Favour, here replaced by a single playback
track for the performer to play against. Favour was originally
released on Golani’s Viola Nouveau (Centrediscs CMCCD 0883), still
available from the Canadian Music Centre, providing a rare opportunity
to compare two interpretations of a contemporary Canadian
piece. By pairing these two works we are presented with Jaeger’s
“second take” on the same material and also a second performer’s take
on them both. It’s great to see a new generation of musicians taking
up the mantle and championing existing works along with the new.
Mid-career American super-star composer
Missy Mazzoli "inhabits an exquisite and
mysterious sound-world that melds indierock
sensibilities with classical traditions…
[equally at home in] concert halls,
opera houses and rock clubs." Dark with
Excessive Bright (BIS-2572 missymazzoli.
com) is a portrait disc spanning 15 years
of Mazzoli’s international career, featuring
Norwegian violinist Peter Herresthal. Once again, we are presented
with a composer’s alternate takes on several works. The title piece
was originally a concerto for double bass and string orchestra that
at Herresthal’s request Mazzoli reworked for violin, “essentially flipping
the work upside down.” Dark with excessive bright is a phrase
from Milton’s Paradise Lost, a surreal and evocative description of
God’s robes, written by a blind man. Mazzoli says: “I love the impossibility
of this phrase and how perfectly it describes the ghostly, heartrending
sound of strings.” It appears here twice, bookending the
disc, opening with the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra conducted
by James Gaffigan and closing with a reduced version for solo violin,
string quartet and double bass performed by members of Norway’s
Arctic Philharmonic under the direction of Tim Weiss. Both versions
are extremely powerful, with a sound palette that belies the all-string
instrumentation, and it’s hard to comprehend that in the latter all
that sound is being created by just six players. Vespers for Violin is
a reimagining of the earlier Vespers for a New Dark Age, in which
“sampled keyboards, vintage organs, voices and strings from that
composition, drenched in delay and distortion,” are used to create an
effective work for a solo violinist. Full orchestral resources are utilized
in Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) with music “in the shape of a
solar system.” The title draws on two meanings of the word sinfonia:
a Baroque work for chamber orchestra and the old Italian term for a
hurdy-gurdy. Mazzoli describes it as “a piece that churns and roils,
that inches close to the listener only to leap away at breakneck speed,
in the process transforming the ensemble into a makeshift hurdygurdy,
flung recklessly into space.” There’s a Toronto connection in
Orpheus Undone. It’s an orchestral suite, fragments of which have
their origins in Orpheus Alive, a work composed for the National
Ballet of Canada back in 2019. In its present form, it depicts “a single
instant in Orpheus’s life, in the immediate aftermath of his wife
Eurydice’s death. I have used the Orpheus myth… to explore the ways
traumatic events disrupt the linearity and unity of our experience of
time.” It was composed in 2021, no doubt in response to the trauma
of COVID-19. Concert Note: Speaking of Toronto, Mazzoli’s Dark
with Excessive Bright will be performed in its original double bass
version by the Toronto Symphony and guest conductor Kerem Hasan,
with TSO principal Jeffrey Beecher as soloist on March 1 and 2 at Roy
Thomson Hall.
We invite submissions. CDs, DVDs and comments should be sent
to: DISCoveries, WholeNote Media Inc., The Centre for Social
Innovation, 503 – 720 Bathurst St. Toronto ON M5S 2R4.
David Olds, DISCoveries Editor
discoveries@thewholenote.com
STRINGS
ATTACHED
TERRY ROBBINS
Vagues et ombres (Waves and shadows),
the latest release from the Montreal string
ensemble Collectif9 features music by
Debussy and Canadian-American composer
Luna Pearl Woolf (Alpha Classics 858
collectif9.ca/en).
The central work on the disc is Woolf’s
Contact, an extremely effective and fascinating
piece described as “a sonic view into
the underwater world of beluga whales in the St. Lawrence Estuary,”
including the impact of human actions.
It’s the Debussy selections that steal the show, however, in quite
brilliant arrangements by Thibault Bertin-Maghit, the group’s bass
player. Four piano pieces – Étude No.4, Des pas sur la neige, and
Passepied and Clair de lune from the Suite Bergamasque open the
CD, the increase in players and the resulting expansion of textures
being balanced by the challenge faced in reducing Debussy’s orchestral
masterpiece La Mer to nine players. The latter is an astonishing
reinterpretation that draws quite remarkable playing from the
ensemble in music in which – as they note – timbre and colour are
paramount. It’s breathtakingly brilliant in all respects.
Baroque violinist Gottfried von der
Goltz is the soloist on Mozart Violin
Concertos Nos.3-5 with the Freiburger
Barockorchester under Kristian
Bezuidenhout (Aparté AP299 prestomusic.
com/classical/products/9364986--mozartviolin-concertos-nos-3-5).
The three concertos – the G Major K216,
the D Major K218 and the A Major K219 –
are “presented in a new version: in accordance with practices of the
time, Bezuidenhout improvises a pianoforte part, while conducting
the orchestra… A totally new and exciting approach to these works!”
Well, don’t get too excited about the resulting impact – the pianoforte
is almost totally inaudible, although it may well be subtly adding
to the texture; if I hadn’t known I would never have noticed it, except
possibly in a few moments in the D Major concerto.
No matter, for these are superb performances any way you look at
them, beautifully judged and balanced, with faultless solo work and
orchestral playing that is full of life on one of the finest Mozart discs
you will hear.
The brilliant Norwegian violinist Vilde
Frang is in top form on Beethoven
Stravinsky Violin Concertos, with
The Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie
Bremen under Pekka Kuusisto (Warner
Classics 0190296676437 vildefrang.com/
beethoven-stravinsky).
Kuusisto, himself a violinist makes his
debut recording as a conductor, and what
a debut it is, forming a perfect partnership with Frang. There’s a
decided chamber orchestra feel to the performance with the timpani
48 | February & March, 2023 thewholenote.com