In today’s Record

You can count on two things with the DaCapo Chamber Choir: an expertly controlled English cathedral choir sound and thoughtful programming that embraces abstraction while steering well clear of pretension. Saturday’s concert at St John The Evangelist, Kitchener was yet another example of how this choir is getting it right.

Entitled Reaching Beyond, the program explored the ideas of love and eternity through music that, according to the notes, “frees us from this muddy vesture of decay.”
Saxophonist Willem Moolenbeek joined the choir for the evening and it was he that began the concert with a perambulatory improvisation in the chancel. The choir entered from the back of the church, humming a pianissimo drone. The result was something quite meditative and focused the audience’s attention more sharply than a traditional entrance.

Conductor Leonard Enns created something quite unique in the first half by interlocking Healey Willan’s Lady Motets with Canitcum Canticorum by Ivan Moody. The two compositions were presented as one larger piece with improvisations by Moolenbeek functioning as a sort of ribbon weaving through the movements to hold them together.

The Lady Motets are Willan’s most popular pieces and it there is no question as to why: they are simply stunning. Da Capo outdid themselves, exhibiting such control that it often sounded as if there were only four voices singing instead of 21. The closely spaced dissonances in Moody’ Descendi in hortum meum caused some intonation wobbles but these were a small aberrations in an otherwise outstanding performance.

A more major problem was the saxophone. Intellectually, the ribbon idea is brilliant but on a practical level, it was rather distracting. The soprano sax combined with the smooth jazz style of Moolenbeek’s improvisation left the unfortunate impression that someone had forgotten to switch off their Kenny G tape in the dressing room. The endeavour was the most successful when the saxophone was a link between movements rather than an obligato.

The Magnificat and Nunc dimittis are the standard texts for Evensong in the Anglican Church. In cathedrals, the service is sung every day, making these texts some of the most heard out of all liturgy. Herbert Howell’s setting is exceptionally expressive, a feature Da Capo exploited to the full. As good at top volume as they are pianississimo, the choir have unlimited colours available and know how to use them to maximum effect. Excellent solo work by tenor Chris Everett and sensitive accompaniment by organist Marlin Nagtegaal rounded out a superb interpretation.

Moonset, written by Da Capo bass Jeff Enns, is quite a special piece for the choir and their emotional connection to the music was palpable. Enns knows the choir from the inside out, which allows him to create a piece that really highlighted the ensemble’s strengths.

As part of winning the 2008 Polyphonous Choral Composition Competition in Seattle, Leonard Enns was commissioned to write a piece on the theme of time. I Saw Eternity, heard Saturday night for the first time in Canada, is based on a 17th century text about the intersection between time and eternity.

Throughout the piece Enns made brilliant use of stereophonics, dividing the group into five mini-choirs to shift the sound. In places it sounded as if everyone is singing in unison but on a different pitch. In orchestra, this effect can sound harsh and uncomfortably dissonant but the effect with a chamber choir is quite different. The dissonance is not an affront but rather a densely woven wall of sound that after a while becomes almost meditative.

DaCapo will be celebrating its 10th Anniversary next season. Here’s to many more years of top-drawer music making.

In today’s Record

When you go to 40-plus concerts a year, it is not often that you are surprised.

Some are life-altering and some are disappointing but most are a pleasant way to spend an evening. The very best scenario is having your expectations transformed into something altogether more interesting.

Wednesday night’s concert, the last concert of the Kitchener Waterloo Symphony’s Back to Baroque series, did precisely that. did precisely that.

The concert opened with the ubiquitous Canon in D by Pachelbel, a piece that has about as much artistic merit as a cameraphone snap of the neighbour’s cat. Alain Trudel, conductor of the soon-to-be-defunct CBC Radio Orchestra, did a remarkable job of making something out of nothing. Phrases were nicely shaped and the sprightly tempo gave the forward momentum the piece desperately needs. The rarely played Gigue that accompanies the Canon provided a nice balance.

Horn concertos are played far less often than they should be but, on this night, we were spoiled for choice. The first one, played by the symphony’s principal horn Martin Limoges was the lovely Horn Concerto in D major (TWV 51:D8) by Telemann. The first and last movements are jolly enough but the real gem of the concerto is the largo. It is, for all intents and purposes, an opera aria perched at the very top of the horn’s range. There is no room for error in this part of the instrument and Limoges triumphed with beautifully expressive tone to boot.

Georg Muffat’s concerto grosso Cors Vigilans was relatively unremarkable, with the last movement allegro the most interesting of the bunch. Its weak beat accents gave the whole thing the feeling of walking on land after spending a long time at sea.

Limoges returned with second horn Katherine Robertson, for Telemann’s Concerto for 2 Horns in D (TWV 52:D2). The thematic material is significantly less interesting than the first concerto, likely because it was written for amateur players more accustomed to chasing foxes than playing indoors with an orchestra. Nevertheless, it was lovely to hear Robertson in a solo capacity. Her sound is focused but warm in all parts of the horn and it is a shame we don’t get to hear more of it.

In the first movement of W.F. Bach’s Sinfonia in F major, Trudel opted for an approach that highlighted the silences. It was a good idea in theory, the effect, however, was somewhat spoiled by sloppy ensemble. The andante is overlong but Trudel’s emphasis on beautifully shaped phrases kept it interesting and his efforts to emphasize the rests here were more successful. The third and fourth movements are extremely pleasant, making the whole Sinfonia well worth a trip to the record shop.

J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 1 (BWV 1046) could well be called, without much exaggeration, the third horn concerto of the evening. Scored for strings, two horns, three oboes and bassoon, the Concerto is a marvel of Baroque orchestration.

Horns, oboes and strings are treated as separate voices, which, for technical reasons having to do with the original instruments not having any valves, means the horns have to spend a significant amount of time in the stratosphere. The piece is notoriously difficult but Limoges and Robertson were up to the challenge, shining brightly in the last movement. James Mason, Richard Dorsey, Faith Levene and Cedric Coleman also distinguished themselves in the first trio of final movement, scored only for three oboes and bassoon.

The ensemble suffered in the second movement, perhaps due to Trudel’s eschewing of a baton, but overall, the piece was full of life and an exciting finale for the Back to Baroque season.

Note to local readers: Subscriptions for the 2008/09 Baroque and Beyond Series are available now.

In today’s Waterloo Region Record

It was billed as a battle of epic proportions.

In the red corner, an enormously powerful Kney confident that 37 years experience would be enough to secure a win.

In the blue corner: the young Makin anxious to make his mark and show the old guy how it’s done.

Giant screens were set up to make sure the crowd could follow the action from all angles and the air was thick with anticipation as they waited for the main event to begin.

The crowd went wild, as the contestants took their places and prepared for a Saturday night fight to the death in the Battle of the Organs at First United Church in Waterloo. Jan Overduin and Ian Sadler were the instruments’ handlers for the evening.

Overduin started on the 44-stop Gabriel Kney pipe organ situated in the balcony while Sadler piloted his Makin digital pipeless organ from the front of the nave.

With such enormous power at their fingertips, it seemed odd that the first four pieces were so subdued. Granted, not every piece needs to blow the hair back but it was rather like getting in a Porsche and being permitted to use only the first gear.

It was J.S. Bach to the rescue in the sixth piece, a setting of Now Thank We All Our God from cantata number 79.

Overduin played the orchestra part while Sadler filled in the choir bits with gusto. The result was spectacular and whoops from the audience after the fact confirmed that I wasn’t the only one chomping at the bit.

While the two instruments are a decent match when played simultaneously, the alternating strategy employed in the Toccata and Fugue in d minor gave a clear edge to the pipe organ. Sadler’s Makin contains digital samples of organs from all over Europe and can recreate the right amount of reverb for the space but its nine speakers are still a fair distance away from eclipsing the mass of sound produced by the Kney.

Dividing up the piece in bits results in an exponential increase in the degree of difficulty. An organ doesn’t speak immediately when the keys are depressed reducing the effectiveness of the console video monitors as a togetherness tool. Ears are not totally reliable either because of the reverberation of sound and distance between the players.

On the whole, the pair overcame the problem quite skilfully but toward the end, as the divisions got as small as one measure, the overarching lines became choppy and the piece lost a good deal of its momentum. The less intricate pieces, such as The Swan, Trumpet Voluntary and Bist du bei mir, fared much better when played with alternating phrases.

For brief period in late 19th century France, the organ symphony was popular due largely to the instruments created by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll. In the compositions with orchestra, the most famous of which is Camille Saint Saëns’ Symphony No. 3, the organ was regarded as a separate orchestra rather than a support to the existing ensemble.

The Introduction and Allegro from Alexandre Guilmant’s Symphony No.1 in d minor was a spectacular showpiece enhanced further by the video projection in the chancel of the two consoles. Organists are usually tucked in a corner or up in the gallery, so the bird’s eye view of the fancy footwork required of Sadler in the solo part was a delightful novelty. Overduin was a brilliant orchestra.

In a Battle of the Organs, size clearly matters and with 3,000 pipes ranging in length from one inch to 32 feet, First United’s 1971 Gabriel Kney 3 manual mechanical action organ went home a winner.

In today’s Waterloo Record

The Zapp Quartet from the Netherlands was in town Monday to give a concert at the Music Room with Canadian clarinetist James Campbell. The Quartet specializes in jazz repertoire, so the usual suspects for this combination (Brahms, Mozart and Weber) were given the night off in favour of John Scofield, Mike Keneally and Allan Gilliland.

Peculiar, a John Scofield composition, was first on the program. Cellist Emile Visser laid down the one bar ground bass with the other members imitating the sound of a guitar and a hi-hat with pizzicato and slapped strings. In keeping with Scofield’s post bop style, the piece was a collection of sounds and motivic cells ripe for improvisation, a circumstance exploited to great effect by the Quartet.

In Gita Minor by ex-Frank Zappa guitarist Mike Keneally, the Quartet transformed themselves into an electric guitar. The imitation was spot on but like almost all efforts in the axe-thrashing genre, the piece was without strong direction, overlong and rather self-indulgent.

Campbell joined the group for Picasso and Lump by Zapp’s violist Oene Van Geel. Lump was Picasso’s Daschund and the piece is based on their relationship as captured by photographer David Douglas Duncan. As such, it is fully of whimsy and figures of easy contentedness. The players’ ability to effortlessly go from accompanist to soloist was truly remarkable.

After a delightfully sweet version of Debussy’s The Girl With The Flaxen Hair, the group played another piece by Van Geel, entitled Hamer, reminiscent of the casually tuneful style of Reinhardt and Grappelli.

Joined again by Campbell, Zapp closed out the first half with Jazz Suite by Canadian composer Allan Gilliland. The second movement, Waltz for Mr Evans, was particularly lovely with a lush bed of compound chords providing the perfect frame for a gently tragic clarinet melody.

The ease with which Gilliland switches between idioms was even more apparent in Wind Machine. Flitting between bluegrass, tango, minimalism, Penderecki-style dissonance and a cool walking bass groove is normal practice for Zapp and as a result, the piece was one of the highlights of the evening.

The Debussyian sensibility of La Blues by Canadian composer Gene Dinovi showcased well Zapp’s ability to make beautiful ensemble sound. The piece went for a walk in the middle before returning again to the opening material.

Unseen Variations by Van Geel was mesmerizing. It was without rhythmic pulse or harmonic direction, instead featuring the small motivic figures most often found in the music of Berg. Zapp exhibited excellent control throughout and expertly created a whole soundscape with precisely calibrated changes in tone colour.

As an encore, Campbell joined in for a deliciously off-the-cuff rendition of I’ve Got Rhythm.

What was most captivating about Zapp was their entirely unaffected approach to music. It is not entirely uncommon in the classical music sphere for groups that market themselves as “different” to take great pains in emphasizing that fact. The idea playing a few jazz chords makes them less inhibited and therefore inherently better than musicians who slave away trying to perfect Mozart. This is a tiresome approach and one often used by ensembles that have very little to offer but their “difference.”

Based on Monday evening’s performance at the Music Room, Zapp is of the opinion that there is room for everyone at the table and are happy to borrow from all manner of improvisatory styles. This means jazz, blues, country fiddling and Tin Pan Alley standards but also 19th century art song. It’s classic postmodernism at its best and a whole lot of fun to boot.

an edited version appears in today’s Record

Friday night was the third of the five Dinner Concerts on offer at the Perimeter Institute this season.

When I arrived, the chalkboard covering the side wall of the Black Hole Bistro was covered with a series of numbers ranging from 802-1776, grouped in five columns of varying length. Thinking them to be leftovers from an impromptu lunchtime breakthrough, my friend and I spent some time puzzling over their significance. String theory? Fluid dynamics? Fibonacci series? 1066, 1215, 1776 and a program entitled “Music of Historical England” finally clued me in. The numbers were simply a list of important dates in English history up until the Declaration of Independence.

A hyper-efficient wait staff noted our choices from the fixed menu almost immediately, so all this thinking was fuelled by a stupendous mixed baby green salad with shaved fennel, toasted pine nuts and goat cheese, drizzled with a roasted shallot dressing. The cold candy cane beet slices were a lovely foil to the distinct flavours of the salad. My friend’s selection, a Jerusalem artichoke veloute, could have done with a pinch more seasoning but was otherwise flavourful with an elegant velvety texture. The appetizers were just the first part of a menu that was a fresh, modern incarnation of traditional medieval banquet fare.

Empty plates were whisked away immediately and we readied ourselves for our first musical course of the evening. Mezzo-soprano Laura Pudwell, violinist Julie Baumgartel and guitarist Terry McKenna arranged a program that matched the tenor of evening to perfection. The music was light and fun and, most notably, not drawn from the abyss of bad taste that is background music. All three musicians are accomplished professionals and their commitment to a high level of artistry, when they have skated through on much less, really made the performance something special.

The main piece on the program was the five-part The History of England from the Close of the Saxon Hierarchy to the Declaration of American Independence in Familiar Verse, Op.11. Created by Benjamin Carr, the piece is a send-up of the history of English monarchs set to various popular tunes including Adeste Fidelis, a hunting Chorus, Roast Beef of Old England, Hail Columbia, the Duke of York March, bits of Haydn and Mozart and the spectacularly named Bloody Minded Pirate.

Benjamin and his father Joseph were music publishers who emigrated from London to Baltimore in the last few years of the 19th century. They specialized in arrangements of popular tunes and original compositions that could be played by amateur musicians at dinner. In the days before records, radio or cinema, these little concerts played themselves out in hundreds of thousands of sitting rooms throughout Europe and America. Carr’s editions were so popular that several were found in Thomas Jefferson’s personal collection.

On Friday evening, both McKenna and Baumgartel were using period instruments. Pudwell, perhaps feeling a bit left out, was quick to inform us that she was also using a period instrument of mid-20th century vintage. The first three sections of the History of England, marked in the score as a “means of improvement for juveniles and students” were done with Pudwell using a spare bow as a pointer on the date-filled chalkboard. Splitting up the work was the right thing to do, as the poetry is wordy and although humorous could easily have fallen prey to the Twelve Days of Christmas syndrome.

The “back of the hall” mentality that plagues many opera singers in small venues was pleasantly a non-issue as Pudwell expertly modulated volume, vibrato and diction to match the character of the piece and size of the space.

Two movements of Sonata in A major (after K331/332) by Mozart arranged for guitar and violin by Andreas Traeg followed. This can be a difficult combination to balance but small space and muted sound produced by the violin’s gut strings meant that McKenna’s tiny Classical guitar was an equal partner in the ensemble.

The next course of food was the main. I opted for venison while my friend went for Cornish hen. Game has become a favourite of mine these past few years, and this was by far the best venison I have ever tasted. It was moist and tender in a way I never thought possible and complimented by a extraordinary apple leek confiture. The accompanying sweet potato mash was a bit disappointing in the texture department but the overall flavour was good.

Since my skills as a sommelier leave quite a lot to be desired, I relied on my server to recommend an appropriate wine. It turned out to be a smart move as the cinnamon and spiced berry notes of the Domaine Magellan Shiraz/Grenache ($8.25/$37) brought out the very best in the venison.

Truffled potato mash was the star of my friend’s dinner. The small bite I was afforded was so delicious it is difficult to describe. Shitake mushrooms and wilted greens worked well with flavour of the roasted Cornish hen but it is fair to say that on this night the humble spud overshadowed the rest of the meal by a significant margin.

While we waited for dinner to settle, Pudwell, Baumgartel and McKenna came back for the fourth and fifth parts of the history lesson. As we sped through Henry VIII, Elizabeth, James I and the Georges I found myself wondering how much more I might have learned in school if we had gourmet lunches instead of dried out French fries and burgers with a questionable meat to cardboard ratio.

After the History was completed, McKenna and Baumgartel stayed on to complete the Mozart they started in the first part of the program. After a very lovely adagio, the duo launched into the famous Rondo a la Turque, where Baumgartel banished any notion that Baroque violinists are somehow technically deficient. A brilliantly played movement culminated in a spectacular final statement of the main theme in octaves.

Pudwell returned for a setting of the Robbie Burns poem My Love is like the Red, Red Rose arranged by Gustav Holst in 1826. Again, Pudwell’s voice was precisely what was required, clear and warm with a hint of melancholy.

The sweet on the menu was sticky bread pudding. A 13th century concoction dreamt up as a way to use stale bread, there was nothing perfunctory about this version. The triangle of white bread cubes soaked in custard, drizzled with a delicately sweet sauce and garnished with fresh fruit was the last just right in an evening full of them.

The next Dinner Concert, entitled French Wine – Swiss Chocolate is on 25th April in The Black Hole Bistro beginning at 5:30pm. Tickets $65 each.