Some contemporary composers push the boundaries of organized sound. Others play with the elements that make up music. Young Torontonian Riho Maimets has a much less tangible and infinitely more elusive goal: to connect his listeners with the eternal.
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Usually this sort of declaration would come across as pretentious, arrogant or presumptuous. But Maimets is so earnest and modest in how he explains himself that one can’t help but respect his point of view.
Two of Maimets’ recent compositions are being offered up to Torontonians as proof of his intentions and ambitions in the coming days.
On Sunday evening, the Ensemble Contemporain de Montréal and violinist Véronique Mathieu, under conductor Véronique Lacroix, present Maimets’s Beatitude at the Music Gallery. Maimets is one of four young Canadian composers in the Ensemble Contemporain’s annual “Generation” project, which this year includes a seven-city, cross-Canada tour as well as a concert this Friday in the group’s hometown. (For details on the concert, which is being presented by New Music Concerts, click here.)
The other three composers on the bill are Ottawan Annesley Black, Nova Scotian Marielle Groven and Quebecer Gabriel Dharmoo.
Maimets is also represented at a Music Gallery concert next Thursday (Nov. 15) featuring composer and double-bass player Adam Scime and the Ton Beau String Quartet. (In case you don’t know Scime, he’s the musical side of last season’s notorious Rob Ford: An Operatic Life, presented at U of T.)
This Ton Beau Quartet’s portion of the concert includes the Second String Quartet by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s new associate composer Kevin Lau, and a performance of Sanctus, a substantial and haunting work for string quartet that Maimets submitted to an online new works competition organized by the British Villiers String Quartet earlier this year. (Concert details here.)
Sanctus won the British competition. “Arvo Pärt’s mysticism is clearly evident in Maimets’s work,” wrote critic Edward Clark on the Villiers’ website. “Maimet’s Sanctus was the deserved winner. It had a greater depth and sincerity than the other two works. It demonstrated an ability to work with original material and keep the attention of the audience, as shown by the rapt silence at its end.”
The graduate of the Claude Watson School for the Arts is only 23, but he already has nearly three-dozen works to his credit, including a new piece for string quartet and guitar due Friday for this work towards a composition diploma from the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. Although he is touring with professional musicians, homework can’t wait. He is one of six budding composers among the 166-person student body at Curtis this year.
He just received his Masters’ diploma from University of Toronto, where he worked closely with Christos Hatzis, and where work began on Beatitude.
The religious allusions in the titles of these pieces are deliberate, Maimets says. The roots of this are in the time he spent in Talinn, Estonia, where he earned his undergraduate degree. Many of the composers he met and learned from in his ancestral country have connections to sacred music. He has especially fond memories of a long visit with Arvo Pärt at his home overlooking the Baltic sea.
“I think music in the end is deeply spiritual, and it’s the reason I’m a composer,” says Maimets. “I just feel a very strong spiritual connection when listening to my favourite music.”
This includes Pärt, J.S. Bach, as well as Anton Bruckner and many Renaissance masters.
Maimets says the Beatitudes express universal love — which is best rendered in music. “I’m also terrified that my piece is not doing it justice,” he adds.
The composer admits that his terror extended to the first rehearsal he attended with the Ensemble Contemporain. “The first rehearsal is always traumatic,” he explains. After the group’s leader, Véronique Lacroix, had received his finished score, she immediately called and told Maimets that the ending needed to be rewritten. “This was a week before the first rehearsal,” he recalls. He added a cadenza for Mathieu, and quickly realised how much better the work was, as a result.
Maimets speaks highly of Lacroix’s input. “She really cares about every single piece and gives very good feedback. She is present in the final result, but she also gives you full aesthetic freedom,” he says.
The composer describes the evolution of his personal style, from a focus on timbre alone, to the gradual introduction of the traditional elements of Western music — melody, harmony and counterpoint — to a growing awareness and inclusion of musical elements from other cultures. He says his personal aesthetic alternates between “purity and fusion” these days.
It’s an aesthetic he has been exploring with his advisor, composer David Ludwig, at Curtis. Maimets says Ludwig and he have had long talks about everything under the sun in order to help Maimets fully appreciate himself so that he can, in the old cliché, to his own self be true. Also, the six Curtis composition students have now been taken down to New York City twice by Richard Danielpour so that they can roam the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for hours at a time.
Van Gogh has, so far, left the deepest impression on Maimets. “He kept making art even though he was so unsuccessful in selling it.”
“One of the meanings of life is for humans to be able to make contact with something that’s divine and pure,” he continues. “I think that’s why people love Van Gogh or Bach. It’s because they can feel that very special presence. It could be that they don’t believe in the divine, from the rational point of view, but they are still attracted to that.”
“I couldn’t be a composer if I didn’t believe in God,” he adds.
Above all, Maimets wishes for the expression of his ideas to be clean and honest. “Sincerity is just beautiful in itself,” he says.
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Here is a short background video on Maimets prepared by the Ensemble Contemporain:
And here is a quarter of Sanctus, as performed by the Villiers Quartet for their competition. A full recording of this piece is joined by a collection of Maimets’ other works on Soundcoud, here.
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
