Review: Gilles Apap/KW Symphony/Outwater
This review appears in today’s Mercury. [Actually, as it turns out, it's in tomorrow's paper]
The battle between high and low is one of The Arts’ oldest and most discussed tropes. In the field of music, a subculture that seems to thrive creating dichotomies by the bucketload, there is hardly an issue that ignites the passions like a discussion of classical versus popular music. Those in the folk music camp point to the immediacy and accessibility (read: fun) of their style, while classical adherents (rather unhelpfully) tend to trot out their high horses and pontificate on the spiritual and intellectual superiority of high art.
On Friday evening at the River Run, the Kitchener Waterloo Symphony with the help of violinist Gilles Apap tried to solve the argument by presenting a program that asked “What if it was just all music?” Removing qualifiers like classical, folk etc, requires evaluation of each piece on its own merits rather than by its category. It’s more work for the listener, but ultimately, more rewarding as new discoveries are made and new perspectives formed.
Apap’s classical training and insatiable curiosity about the music of other cultures make for quite the original program. Rather strangely labelled Unaccompanied Violin Solo in the notes, Apap began the concert with the first Double from JS Bach’s Partita No.1 in B minor for solo violin. He started playing backstage then emerged and meandered his way to the front of the orchestra as the movement progressed. Apap’s elision of the Double and the following fiddle tune was the first intimation of the evening’s question. If it’s all just music, then perhaps having a fiddle tune follow on rather than the next movement of the Partita should be no surprise at all. Perhaps as a result of my habit of having my iTunes perpetually on random, the transition seemed quite natural.
The orchestra, which had up until now been quiet, provided robust pizzicato accompaniment for the fiddle tune, with the violin section doing their best to impersonate a ukulele orchestra by keeping their fiddles on their laps.
Next up was the Scottish Fantasy by Max Bruch. More famous for his Violin Concerto, Bruch based each of the three movements on a Scottish folksong. The piece is completely over the top and unabashedly Romantic, a style that found Apap a little out of his element. He chose a very wide vibrato to emphasize the heart-on-your-sleeveness of it all but his interpretation lacked the intensity to match and the result was a little closer to parody than he likely intended. After some initial wobbles in the winds, the orchestra settled in nicely and provided appropriately lush accompaniment.
After a quick trip to Romania, Apap presented some Gypsy music in the form of Pablo Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen. A showpiece through and through, Zigeunerweisen is the aural equivalent of watching someone do a tumbling pass to get across the room when simply walking would have sufficed. Apap is no slouch in the technique department and delivered a sizzling performance throwing off false harmonics and other tricks as if they were as easy as making a sandwich.
The orchestra got its turn in Béla Bartók’s Rumanian Folk Dances, a suite made up of the music Bartók collected while on his ethnomusicological expeditions throughout Eastern Europe. He was the first classical composer to take such a keen interest in what had previously been dismissed as low art and was, along with Zoltán Kodály, the founder of the academic field of ethnomusicology. It was nice to hear the orchestra step out of its backing band role for a few minutes. Excellent wind solos by Ross Edwards (clarinet) and Carolyn Clappison (piccolo) were a definite highlight.
The final item on the program was the third movement of Mozart’s Violin Concerto No.4 K218. The concerto was really an excuse to get to the cadenza and although Apap’s cadenza was original, it’s length made the rest of the concerto seem like a bit of an afterthought. Showing how a classical theme can be easily transformed into an Irish fiddle tune or Indian raga is interesting in its own right and doesn’t need to be legitimized by a concerto movement.
The Intersections series, of which this concert was a part, was created by conductor Edwin Outwater with this goal in mind. He admitted from the stage that a large part of his motivation for creating the series was to find a place to fit Apap into the season. It was well worth the effort.
The next Intersections is called The Composer Is Dead and is a whodunit introduction to the instruments of the orchestra narrated by Lemony Snicket. The shows are March 27th at the River Run and March 28 at the Centre In The Square.
