Well, that was a pretty cool way to start the festival off!
First off, a confession: I missed the first 2 pieces because I was stuck in traffic. There are some things I hate about this city... Alice Ho's Kami sounded pretty cool from the vestibule, but that's as close as I got to it.
We heard a real variety of music tonight, spanning almost a century. The highlight of the night for me was undoubtedly George Antheil's Ballet Mechanique, performed by members of the U of T and McGill percussion ensembles, plus a quartet of pianos. I've heard this piece in recording a number of times, but never live, and what a treat! It was remarkably well-performed, by a mostly student group, nonetheless! The version tonight was Antheil's edited (read: shortened) version, but still clocking in at almost 20 minutes it's a feat of accomplishment for the performers. The precision involved is staggering, and to watch it makes one appreciate it all the more.
Another highlight was Liam Teague playing the steel pan. Teague has brought this instrument to an entirely new level of virtuosity. He started with a solo piece of his own composition, which I was really thankful for. The instrument is almost irrevocably tied to its usual context of tropical beaches. That connection stayed with me for the first maybe 30 seconds or so, but he manages to break the connection fairly quickly - eventually you hear the instrument for what it is. Which was great to set the stage for the next piece, Michael Colgrass's Pan Trio. This piece, for steel pan, harp and percussion (largely vibe and marimba), is a brand new work, and the first thing you hear is brand new sounds and colours. Key to this piece, I think, was the dialogue between the different roles taken on by the instruments, and the performers (Teague on pans, Sanya Eng on harp and Ryan Scott on percussion) accomplished this very well.
The evening ended with Rzewski's Coming Together, which featured Bev Johnston narrating. I hadn't heard this piece before, and frankly would be ok never hearing it again. There's lots of good music in there, but like the original version of the Ballet Mechanique, it could use some editing. I just simply found it overly long and repetitive.
I've got some audio interviews with one of the performers, and a few sound clips of the CBC crew which I'll edit up and post tomorrow. I'm off tomorrow but I'll be at Friday's concert so watch for another post then!
http://soundaxis.ca/blog_view.php
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
0 comments:
Post a Comment