Liebeslieder

The Vancouver Cantata Singers celebrated Valentine’s Day yesterday with a delightful performance of Johannes Brahms’ Liebeslieder Walzer, as well as other songs addressing the subjects of love and infatuation. It was my first experience with the performing space of Vancouver’s Orpheum Annex, next to the historic theatre that is the home of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. The inside of the hall is somewhat industrial looking, with a narrow balcony wrapped around the sides and back of the hall.

Artistic director and conductor Paula Kremer and the choir began the concert with Victor Young’s beautiful When I fall in love, arranged by choral conductor Cortland Hultberg. I was immediately captivated by the choir’s immaculate blending of the voices as well as its richness of the sound. I have long loved the lyrical interpretation of this song by singer/pianist Nat King Cole, but the VCS certainly gave us a different and very beautiful “take” on this ever-popular song.

The concert continued with four very different songs of love – Simon Carrington’s arrangement of Robert Burns’ O my love is like a red, red rose, Gustav Holst’s arrangement of I love my love, Healy Willan’s setting of Rise up, my love, my fair one (words from the Song of Songs) and Så tag mit hjerte by Gisli Magnússon. The four very different songs truly and fully exploited (in the best sense of the word) the abilities of this choir. The singers in the VCS rose to the musical and technical challenges admirably. Magical moments there were many, like the true pianissimo the choir achieved in O my love is like a red, red rose, and the delicious dissonance at the end of the line, “(H)e flew into her snow-white arms, and thus replied he”, from I love my love.

In the performance of the Liebeslieder Walzer, the VCS was joined by the Bergmann Piano Duo. As much as the hall worked wonderfully well acoustically for voices, the piano came off sounding rather dry and brittle. I was later informed that the lid of the piano had to be closed in order to balance the sound with the choir. I believed that part of the problem was the clarity in texture that the duo pianists were trying to achieve. Perhaps the problem could have been overcome by a more generous use of the pedal. In any event, the choir as well as the two pianists were one in their interpretation of this, Brahms’ most charming score, with just the right hint of schmaltz. The energy that the performers conveyed in the Hungarian-sounding eleventh waltz and the vigorous twelfth waltz was infectious. All in all, it was a performance as rich as the coffee and chocolate torte from Vienna’s Hotel Sacher!

After the interval, pianists Elizabeth and Marcel Bergmann played for us a beautiful rendition of One hand, one heart, from what I consider to be Leonard Bernstein’s greatest work, West Side Story. Here the piano sound had a palpable warmth that was somewhat lacking in the Brahms.

The Bernstein work served as a perfect interlude between the Brahms and the other major work of the concert, Canadian composer John Greer’s Liebesleid-Lieder, a 20^th century homage to the Brahms work and a more contemporary and, I thought, rather cynical look at love. The choir, the solo singers from the group as well as the Bergmann duo, reveled in and perfectly conveyed the humour so evident in the score. Particularly memorable for me were the warmth and richness of the harmony in Live and love, the dark, almost Brahmsian harmony in Reuben’s children, the mock sentimentality in A very short song, written as a Sarabande. It is an extremely clever score that really captured the deadly humour of the poems, especially the ones penned by Dorothy Parker.

The concert ended with Liebeslied, a brief work by American composer John Corigliano. The work consists of the words “I love you”, tossed back and forth between the different sections of the choir, and with some delicious colouratura flourishes sung by solo singers from the choir.

What a wonderful way to celebrate Saint Valentine’s Day!

The Vancouver Cantata Singers is surely in very good hands under the direction of Paula Kremer, and I look forward to more performances by this talented group of singers.

New and Old Friends

It’s always exciting to witness the debut of a young conductor. This past Saturday, conductor Alondra de la Parra, who is making quite a name these last couple of years, made her debut with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra.

On top of the familiar repertoire that made up the bulk of her programme, she was given the task of the Canadian premiere of composer Edward Top’s Symphony Golden Dragon. It is difficult to judge a work based on a single hearing, but Saturday’s performance of the work reinforced for me the question of the role of the composer in today’s society. Mr. Top’s work seems to be made up of a series of climaxes, where the composer, in his own words, “pulled out all the stops”, and challenged the skills of especially the percussion section of the orchestra. I could not help but wonder whether a piece like this would be played after the premiere, or would it be filed along with many pieces like it in the shelves of the Canadian Music Centre. That said, I can say that Ms. De la Parra did her best to bring out the strengths of the rather colourful, if soulless music.

It is always a treat to hear pianist Angela Cheng perform. For me, there is a refreshing lack of ego in her playing. For this visit, she essayed Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 in D Minor, K. 466. Ms. Cheng has always been a wonderful Mozart player, and her performance on Saturday was no exception. She brought out the dark undercurrents of the music to perfection, but contrasted them with the sunnier aspects of the music. She was not afraid of injecting boldness and colours to the music, while balancing it within the realm of classical constraint.

The Romanze, with a stormy middle section bookended by a simple but sublimely beautiful opening and closing, was magnificently realized. In the third movement, there seemed to have been a bit of tempo discrepancy between soloist and conductor. Ms. Cheng set quite a lively tempo in her opening, but Ms. de la Parra clearly conducted the orchestral response more slowly. Soloist and orchestra eventually came to some agreement in terms of tempo, but I could not help but sense a slight stylistic tug-of-war between conductor and soloist. Sometimes this kind of tension makes for an exciting performance, as was the case on Saturday.

There was much to admire in the conductor’s reading of Brahms’ Symphony No. 4 in E Minor, Op. 98. I especially enjoyed the passion that she brought to the third and fourth movements of the work. In measure 88 of the second movement, there was a palpable warmth and beautiful glow in the strings that one does not always hear from this orchestra except under the best guest conductors.

I must confess a disagreement with the conductor’s choice of tempi for the first two movements, which she took rather slowly. It was not the slowness of the tempi that I quibble, but the fact that her choice of tempi for the first two movements disturbs, or disrupts, the tempo relationship with the final two movements of the symphony. She conducted the symphony beautifully, even brilliantly, but I feel that when viewed as a whole, there was a feeling of lopsidedness to the structure of the symphony in her reading.

Ms. de la Parra is clearly a musician with a voice, and a conductor with strong convictions. She is, I feel, a young artist who is still finding her way, but better this than taking the easy way out. It would be very interesting to witness her development in the next decade. I very much look forward to future visits by these two outstanding artists.