Contemporary Classics December 4, 2018 - Vancouver Contemporary Classical Music Performance

Tonight is a celebration of contemporary classical music that I heard while I was in Vancouver, except for the music that I heard at the Modulus contemporary music festival sponsored by Music on Main which will be featured on next week’s Contemporary Classics show.  I was at solo, small ensemble and full orchestral performances.

Claude Debussy  - “Jardins sous la pluie”

"Jardins sous la pluie" describes a garden in the Normandy town of Orbec during an extremely violent rainstorm. Throughout the piece, there are sections that evoke the sounds of the wind blowing, a thunderstorm raging, and raindrops dropping. It makes use of the French folk melodies.  Chromatic, whole tone, major and minor scales are used in this movement.

This work was performed by Danielle Marcinek at a performance at the Holy Rosary Cathedral in Vancouver

Maurice Ravel  - “Une barque sur l'océan”

Maurice Ravel’s Une barque sur l'océan is part of the larger piece Mirrors.  The piece recounts a boat as it sails upon the waves of the ocean. Arpeggiated sections and sweeping melodies imitate the flow of ocean waves. It is the longest piece of the set, and the second-most technically difficult.

This work was performed by Danielle Marcinek at a performance at the Holy Rosary Cathedral in Vancouver

David Amram - Greenwich Village Portraits

Greenwich Village Portraits is a work by David Amram is a celebration of three artists who lived in Greenwich Village based upon the street they lived on: I. MacDougal Street (For Arthur Miller)            II. Bleecker Street (For Odetta) and III.  Christopher Street (For Frank McCourt).   Amram hopes that performances of Greenwich Village Portraits will create the same joyous feeling that he felt when he first visited the Village as a teen-ager during World War ll.  Amram said “When I saw the artists on the street as well as in the coffee houses, sketching portraits while having incredible conversations with their customers and all the passers-by, heard music being played everywhere and was made dizzy by the intoxicating aroma of food being cooked, I knew I wanted this place to be my home someday….and a few years later, in the Fall of 1955, I moved to the Village.”

I heard this as part of a performed by Ken Radnofsky and Yoshiko Kline piano at a concert in the Barnett recital hall of the Music building at the University of British Columbia. 

Let’s also listen to a performance by Ken Radnofsky, saxophone.  Here is a performance of  David Amram’s Trio for Tenor Saxophone, Horn, and Bassoon by Ken Radnofsky, saxophone, James Sommerville, French horn & Richard Svoboda,  bassoon.

Infinitus – “Improvisation  [Bach Remixed]”

Improvisation  [Bach Remixed] is an ingenious remix of Johann Sebastian Bach’s “Double Violin Concerto” featuring this beatboxing trio Infinitus.   I heard this in a performance by Infinitus featuring violist Anthony Cheung, cellist Alex Cheung, and violinist John Littlejohn in a performance at the University Women’s Club in Vancouver.

Maurice Ravel: Gaspard de la nuit

Gaspard de la nuit is a three movement work for solo piano based upon poems by Aloysius Bertrand and was premiered in Paris, on January 9, 1909, by Ricardo Viñes.   The piece is famous for its difficulty, partly because Ravel intended the Scarbo movement to be more difficult than Balakirev's Islamey. Because of its technical challenges and profound musical structure, Scarbo is considered one of the most difficult solo piano pieces in the standard repertoire.

"Ondine" is based on a poem about a water nymph Undine singing to seduce the observer into visiting her kingdom deep at the bottom of a lake and shimmers with the sounds of water falling and flowing, woven with cascades.  There are five main melodies and Ravel prioritises melodic development to express the poetic themes, keeping subordinate the simmering coloration of the right hand. This piece contains a number of technical challenges for the right hand throughout the piece

"Le Gibet" is based upon a poem where there is a view of the desert, where the lone corpse of a hanged man on a gibbet stands out against the horizon, reddened by the setting sun; a bell tolls from inside the walls of a far-off city, creating the deathly atmosphere that surrounds the observer. Throughout the entire piece is an octave ostinato, imitative of the tolling bell, that must remain distinctive and constant in tone as the notes cross over and dynamics change.

The last and the most difficult movement is Scarbo.   This movement depicts the nighttime mischief of a small fiend or goblin, making pirouettes, flitting in and out of the darkness, disappearing and suddenly reappearing. Its uneven flight, hitting and scratching against the walls, casting a growing shadow in the moonlight, creates a nightmarish scene for the observer lying in his bed.   With its repeated notes and two terrifying climaxes, this is the high point in technical difficulty of all the three movements. Technical challenges include repeated notes in both hands, and double-note scales in major seconds in the right hand.

This work was performed by Tony Yike Yang in a concert at the Memorial Auditorium as part of the President’s Concert Series on the campus of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

Dmitri Shostakovich:  Symphony No. 9 In E-Flat Major, Op. 70

It was originally proposed as a massive work for chorus and solo singers as well as an orchestra in the style of Beethoven’s 9^th symphony, but as he started to write it what evolved was more of a short fun bubbly tutti form of work much more in the style of a Haydn symphony. The premiere took place on 3 November 1945 in the opening concert of the 25th season of the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, sharing the program with Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 5 and was broadcast live on the radio.   Initially it received positive reviews but quickly both the Soviet press and government censured the symphony for its "ideological weakness". The symphony, which is in 5 movements, is a playful and vivid musical work, with a neoclassical air that has led to comparisons to Prokofiev's Classical Symphony. Shostakovich himself considered it "a joyful little piece". 

This was on the concert of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, which featured a performance of Korngold Violin Concerto by Scott St. John.