Members of Les Voix Humaines

We don’t sing like robots, but accept that a violin or a piano can be played with mechanical precision. I scratch my head at how 20th century audiences accepted the latter in the performance of the music of J.S. Bach, more so when I hear alternatives in three new albums that open aural doors to finer seduction.

This richer spectrum of expressive possibility is laid out neatly by Montreal’s Voix Humaines, British violinist Rachel Podger and her Brecon Baroque ensemble, and violinist Viktoria Mullova and Italy’s Accademia Bizantina, all relying on historically informed techniques and period instruments.

We speak of period performance as a single category, but it it represents a mindset, not a fixed formula. For some, the mindset means a strict adherence to rules. For others, period performance is an excuse to indulge in all sorts of fantastical meanderings.

For me, true enchantment comes from Les Voix Humaines and their foundation-cracking, world-upturning take on The Art of the Fugue.

Podger & co. are transparent grace and elegance, while Mullova & co. represent how much one can achieve even in the most rigorously modern-minded of approaches — both drawing from the concerto repertoire, with an overlap in the C minor Concerto for Violin and Oboe (BWV 1060), which appears in its later form for violin and harpsichord on Mullova’s disc.

In all three instances, the musicians treat Bach’s music as if it were being sung — with a clear sense of phrasing, of dialogue, of breath, of slight alterations in tempo. It is music animated by a beating human heart, with its constant changes of speed and rhythm, rather than a strict mechanical timekeeper.

Off the spectrum in radicalness is the work of Les Voix Humaines: viola da gamba players Susie Napper and Margaret Little, augmented by Mélisande Corriveau and Torontonian Felix Deak. This album was released by Montreal’s ATMA Classique.

From the opening measures, where Bach lays out the short musical theme that he would use and reuse in the 20 fugues and canons in his unfinished compositional last will and testament, The Art of the Fugue, we are transported to a new-old world.

Napper and her quartet are playing on viols, instruments that were pretty much obsolete by the time Bach wrote this music. But the sweet, mellow contours of sound the viols produce is, as the group’s name suggests, very much like the human voice. And these four players make no apologies for adding all sorts of nuance to each sequence of notes.

Bach never specified instrumentation for the Art of the Fugue. We don’t even know if his exercises were meant to be more than technical examples of his prowess, laid out carefully for the envy of future would-be composers.

We usually hear the music done with the same rigorous mathematical precision that informed Bach’s ingenious modulations and inversions. But the Voix Humaines treat everything they see as pure dialogue across the wide, rich range of timbres that run from the high pardessus de viole to the bass viol.

The result at once is historically informed while tossing history and tradition out the window, declaring that this is something completely different and equally valid.

The album sits in my most prized personal-listening shelf, and should be offered up to anyone who has any doubts that Bach, the indescribable genius on paper, was a real, flesh-and-blood human being with music to match.

You can find all the details on this album here.

Rachel Podger, who made such an impressive Toronto début with Tafelmusik at the start of this past season, brings her special light and grace to Bach’s well-loved double and triple concertos. One of the things that makes this album special is how the ripieno parts (the members of the orchestra backing up the soloists) are also played by single instruments, giving the sound a beguiling lightness and transparency.

Podger’s band is Brecon Baroque, her own, hand-picked consort of soloists, who play as is possessed of one mind yet conscious of the need to express each part as a unique conversation in a larger theatrical-musical conversation.

You can find all the details on this Channel Classics album here. And this is a backgrounder video:

Much more conventional, yet no less worthy of attention is the collaboration between Viktoria Mullova and the Accademia Bizantina under its leader Ottavio Dantone.

The four concertos here are very nicely played with much brio, but the overall interpretations are, despite their dynamic range, quite buttoned down conversationally. This is period performance for people who think they prefer modern instruments and interpretations.

You’ll find the details on this Onyx album (with a really unfortunate cover photograph) here.

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To show a range of what Voix Humaines does with music, here are some highlights from a 2012 summer festival performance from the Montreal area, featuring soprano Suzie Leblanc, who sends us on our way with a beguiling reading of “Summertime” from Porgy & Bess:

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Andrew Ager (Tara McMullen photo).

One of the benefits of having Andrew Ager back in Toronto and back at St James Cathedral is also having more of his music around, like at a concert starting there today at 6 p.m.

On the programme are two of Ager’s works, with the composer at the piano: Divertimento for Cello and Piano, written in memory of Bruce Kirkpatrick Hill, with Mary-Katherine Finch as soloist; and four Goethe Lieder, with mezzo Vicki St Pierre.

I’m a huge fan of Ager’s aesthetic, which mixes old classical forms with his own tonally slippery idiom — an aesthetic that would have made César Franck and the old masters of the 19th century Schola Cantorum in Paris beam with pride.

For more info about Ager, click here. If you need a taste of Ager’s sensibility, here is Prelude & Fugue, Op. 30, No. 1:

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(Hugo de Pril photo.)

Just about 27, Czech violinist Josef Spacek is already concertmaster of the Czech Philharmonic Orchestra and star of his third CD, an impressive album of sonatas by Leos Janácek and Sergei Prokofiev and two bonbons by Bedrich Smetana for the Supraphon label.

Spacek is one of those remarkable few who can play 20th century music with steely determination while never leaving an easy lyricism too far behind.

He is still in his big-competition years, but plays with a measured maturity that suggests someone with a lot of experience.

The two Smetana pieces are oddities in an album that all about modern musical expression. It’s as if Spacek is telling us, yeah, yeah, I can do this, before his Now listen to this moment, as he launches into the depths of Sonatas for Violin and Piano by Janacek and Prokofiev — and Prokofiev’s breathtaking and fun Op. 115 Sonata for Violin Solo.

The two Prokofiev works were completed within a year of each other, right after World War II, but couldn’t be more different. The accompanied sonata is dark, while the unaccompanied work is all light and brilliance. Both are kaleidoscopic showcases of a player’s technique, which Spacek has in abundance.

The Janácek work is complex as it works its way through four contrasting movements. It is at once austere and rich, and allows Spacek to really play his gift for blending power and lyricism in a display of awesome control over his bow.

In the accompanied pieces, Spacek gets strong support from pianist Miroslav Sekera.

For more information on the album, including audio samples and a cutely awkward promotional video, click here.

Here is Spacek playing Maurice Ravel’s Tzigane at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Belgium last year:

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Isabel Bayrakdarian in the Canadian Opera Company’s season-closing production of Dialogues des carmélites (Michael Cooper photo)

The Canadian Opera Company may have pasted on its brightest official smile while releasing its season results yesterday, but the real news is tragic, not cheerful.

In a small but telling example of what happens when news media let go of experienced journalists, even the most upright of arts organizations can get away with an out-of-context message broadcast and published by people who re-write press releases.

Here is how the country’s flagship opera presenter summed up its season in a press release yesterday:

The Canadian Opera Company has closed another successful opera season by recording an average attendance of 90% for 2012/2013.  A total of 114,133 patrons attended the 61 performances of the company’s seven mainstage productions this season in the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts: Verdi’s Il Trovatore, Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus, Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito, Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, Richard Strauss’s Salome and Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites.

This season, the COC recorded 73,606 subscription tickets and 35,691 single tickets, generating a net ticket revenue of $9.9 million.  The 12/13 season also saw at leas 9,278 of these tickets sold to people under the age of 30.

The COC’s press release continued with a self-congratulatory list of accolades and accomplishments that did not mention how these numbers represent the latest instalment of a steady downward trend that began three years ago.

The long-term numbers are alarming: Since the 2009-10 season, the Canadian Opera Company’s net ticket revenues have fallen by 23.5 per cent, while overall attendance has dropped by 16.7 per cent. The discrepancy in the two declines is testament to the additional discounts that were offered at the box office during the 2012-13 season.

As part of broad cost-cutting moves, the Canadian Opera Company presented six fewer performances in 2012-13 than during the previous year — a 9 per cent drop — but ticket revenues decreased by $1.9 million — 16 per cent in absolute terms.

Because ticket demand outstripped supply at the opening of the Four Seasons Centre for the 2006-07 season, ending up with 90 per cent of seats sold six years later still looks good on paper.

But you can bet that there are some pretty serious discussions taking place behind closed doors regarding the prospects for 2014-15 (since next season is already cast in stone).

Will the company be able to sustain even a 60-performance season with reduced revenue? Will the organization be able to continue to eek out the slimmest of surpluses, thanks to transfers from rainy-day funds?

Does this mean that the prospect of seeing a new mainstage Canadian opera on the Canadian Opera Company season roster become dimmer than ever?

The COC has been doing an amazing job of not just supporting but showcasing our incredible crop of Canadian opera singers. Also, whether you like them or not, you have to admit that the company has also been taking some necessary risks with directors and productions.

The COC continues to maintain its educational outreach programmes, which this past season reached nearly 16,000 children with the Xstrata Ensemble Studio School Tour alone. The Toronto Symphony Orchestra, also facing financial pressures has, meanwhile, eliminated most of its in-school programming for next season.

Will the Canadian Opera Company be able to afford its summer opera camp and after-school opera programmes in the future?

Our city’s musical bounty sits perched on a knife’s edge.

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Here are some hard numbers for comparison purposes — all drawn from Canadian Opera Company press releases:

2012-13: 114,133 tickets sold to 61 performances (1,871 per show). Net box office revenue: $9.9 million.
2011-12: 125,238 tickets sold to 67 performances (1,869 per show). Net box office revenue: $11.8 million.
2010-11: 129,450 tickets sold to 66 performances (1,961 per show). Net box office revenue: $12.3 million.
2009-10: 137,000 tickets sold to 69 performances (1,985 per show). Net box office revenue: $12.94 million.

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As we wait to see how thinly the Toronto District School Board can doll the financial dough before its music programs crumble into insignificance, British cellist and experimental composer Peter Gregson has formulated a justification for music in the classroom that really resonates.

I have to admit that I’m tired of all the studies that show how music lessons improve overall learning. We’ve known that for years, and school boards still keep cutting music education. Clearl,y the argument is not persuasive enough.

So why not appeal to the most pervasive form of instant entertainment we possess — the video game? (If you doubt this, look around your subway car or streetcar at the people playing Candy Crush on their phone.”

Gregson argued in an interview in yesterday’s Observer magazine in the U.K. that music, like computer coding, takes an awful lot of work before there are tangible results and that the purpose of coding a video game — the ability of a player to get an instant adrenaline fix — should never be confused with the act of making music.

“I don’t think [an equivalent to] a computer game has the ability to inspire a child in the same way an enthusiastic, patient teacher can,” said Gregson to interviewer Tom Lamont. “If a computer game gets too difficult, you put it down. But in music that’s the point when the real learning starts. The notion of software democratising musical education leaves me cold. I get cold feelings when I see: ‘Log on to our website and learn to play the violin.’ ”

The interview’s concluding paragraph says everything we need. And even the most un-musical person in the room should be able to grasp how important this is:

It’s a holistic thing. It’s team-building. It’s about sharing. The best thing about music education is simply that it teaches you to think and listen in a sensitive way, and not jump to conclusions in exchange for instant gratification. Real life doesn’t give you 10 points when you cross a bridge. And that is a super-important thing. If we game-ify an art form, we risk losing its most valuable facets.

You can read the whole interview here.

The latest petition to pressure the Toronto District School Board to abandon its planned cuts can be found here. As of this writing, it was 351 signatures shy of 10,000.

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He’s an accomplished pianist, among other talents, and uses it to good advantage here:

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Classical music at a pub? Yes — every Sunday night, if you’re in Toronto.

A rainy day and the end of the concert season are the perfect excuse to try something a little different — like one of these three concerts/events for the last Sunday of a soggy Toronto spring:

• Benjamin Britten’s Holy Sonnets of John Donne at St Thomas’s Anglican Church, Huron St. at 6:30 p.m.

Britten set these nine deep, melancholy poems for his partner, tenor Peter Pears in 1945, at the end of World War II, following a tour of German concentration camps with violinist Yehudi Menuhin. It seems as if every ghost of a horror Britten witnessed burned its way through into these powerful songs.

In case you’re not familiar, here they are, sung at a 2002 concert in LaJolla, Calif by soprano Jennifer Bates. The pianist is Caren Levine:

Soprano Merry-Anne Stuart is the soloist this evening, accompanied by Jeanne Yuen at the piano. The 25-minute cycle is, after a few minutes’ break, followed by Evensong, which includes this salve of a motet tonight, the magical setting of Ubi Caritas by Maurice Duruflé.

Here is is sung by the Cambridge Singers:

• Little Oak Animal at the Array Space, 155 Walnut Ave., at 9 p.m.

To launch the Somewhere There Summer Series at the Array Space, Toronto visual artist Robert Cruickshank has a fascinating collaboration going with sound artist Dafydd Hughes, as Little Oak Animal. Hughes creates and mixes sounds — many taken from the ambient sounds of the city’s streets — on his laptop as Cruickshank creates and mixes projected images from slides and Super-8 film.

Here a sample of their work:

• Classical Social at Fionn MacCool’s Pub, 181 University Ave., 8 p.m.

The mix of drinks, snacks, conversation and classical music has turned into a Sunday-night fixture at University and Adelaide. This will be 18th such Sunday night convivial — no better place to spill some hot wing dipping sauce on a classical musician. You can find their Facebook site here.

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Benjamin Britten rehearsing the War Requiem in 1962.

At 2 p.m. Eastern today, the Berlin Philharmonic will begin a live broadcast of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem led by Sir Simon Rattle, in honour of the composer’s centenary. Judging from dress rehearsal video posted on the orchestra’s Digital Concert Hall site, it should be a fantastic performance.

The soloists are wonderful: soprano Emily Magee, tenor John Mark Ainsley and baritone Matthias Goerne.

The Berlin Philharmonic normally charges admission to its Digital Concert Hall, but in a deal with Gramophone magazine, is offering free viewing to people who register and enter the code WARREQ79C. This code will be good for post-live-performance streaming, as well, the magazine promises.

The War Requiem is one of the 20th century’s masterpieces, and is deeply moving.

Gramophone earlier this week published reminiscences by John Culshaw, who helped make the original Decca recording. He is still thankful that the original performance at the re-dedication of Coventry cathedral 51 years ago wasn’t recorded: “the BBC transcription provides pretty strong evidence against those few critics who still insist on the sanctity of live performances transferred to disc. No amount of talk about ‘atmosphere’ will alter the fact that a great deal went sadly awry in Coventry that night. That the War Requiem survived such a series of understandable – and, in the case of a single performance, unimportant-mishaps is a tribute to its resilience. ”

Culshaw reserves his most powerful tribute to the piece to the end, in a message that speaks directly to what separates any great piece of music from something that is merely good:

Of the work itself I can only say that, having lived with it very closely for about four months, and having heard it upwards of 50 times, its profound impact has not lessened for a moment; on the contrary, like all great music, it yields different values on each hearing. It is a very disturbing piece. The contrasts and indeed contradictions between the three planes of its structure give the War Requiem an extraordinary tension; and their conjunction in the final section of the work is anything but a facile reconciliation. Over these final pages stand, unheard and unset, the words of Wilfred Owen with which Benjamin Britten prefaced the score: ’All a poet can do today is warn.’

You can read the full article here and go directly to the Berlin Philharmonic’s Digital Concert Hall here.

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Toronto pianist Frank Horvat likes to do things his way, not anyone else’s. He ignores genre boundaries and isn’t afraid to mix politics with art. Tonight at Gallery 345, he is also mixing in some visuals with his solo playing.

With Luminato in full swing downtown, Horvat’s performance becomes a hype-free zone, where it’s just the artist and you.

The programme mixes his own work with that of John Adams and late Toronto composer Ann Southam — all accompanied by visual projections.

Details here.

This is “Poverty,” one of Horvat’s own creations. In my imagination, the music is a powerful blend of “grinding poverty” and “quiet desperation,” and it’s also strangely seductive:

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Magician Miguel Puga and pianist/straight person Paz Sabater on stage at Mazzoleni Hall on Friday (John Terauds phone photo).

Luminato failed to show its hand with the first of its magic-themed shows, which opened at Mazzoleni Hall on Friday night. The title is Concerto for Piano and Pasteboards. It’s a fine show.  But it has almost nothing to do with pianos and everything to do with card tricks.

It’s a short, sweet magic show where the assistant doesn’t mutely stand at the magician’s side in a sequined suit but plays a grand piano instead.

The show’s Spanish creator and star is magician Miguel Puga, a fun guy who made me think of every family’s oddball uncle who every year pulls something funny and unexpected at Thanksgiving dinner.

His little bit of tomfoolery involves card tricks of all shapes and sizes — with a little bit of something different at the very end of the 90-minute show, something Puga calls a “Sonata for piano and strings.”

The pianist is Paz Sabater, who does fine work tickling the ivories and acting as Puga’s all-purpose straight person. Just don’t expect a piano recital,or more than a passing glance at some favourite pieces by Manuel de Falla.

At a festival that prides itself on creativity, there is something down-homey and old fashioned about Piano and Pasteboards, right down to the cue cards that announce each act and long-suffering stage assistand Luis Britos. It’s also a show the whole family can enjoy — and may even be called to participate in.

You can find the Luminato blurb and ticket information here. Performances continue to Sunday evening.

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