Recorded as part of the 7th Kinoteka Polish Film Festival

Does anyone really like the accordion? Those that play it are certainly talented but there seems to be very little music between the extremes of Myron Floren schmaltz, drunken Oktoberfest polkas and sad clown melancholy. (Think Joanie in last season’s Mad Men or the Amélie soundtrack)

The Motion Trio from Poland knows the instrument can be energetic, expressive, mischievious, subtle and intense and this collaboration with Michael Nyman does a great deal to convince the rest of us to get on board the accordion train.

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

All of the pieces except the last one are written by Michael Nyman and arranged by Motion Trio leader Janusz Wojtarowicz. The Pole chose wisely and all the tracks survive the poaching with their dignity intact.

Nyman’s brand of minimalism rewards performers that are willing to play up the its inherent warmth and lyricism rather than regard the pieces as mechanical exercises. Surprisingly, the accordion’s natural emotional pull has a good home in this music.

Nyman plays the piano on most of the tracks and about half include trombonist Nigel Barr. Colourwise, the group makes quite a pleasant ensemble with the piano providing incisiveness, the trombone warmth in the bass and the three acoustic accordions a delicious reedy texture.

[Audio clip: view full post to listen]

At only 45 minutes, the album doesn’t wear out its welcome and leaves Miss Mussel wanting to investigate other Motion Trio collaborations.

Tracks: In Re Don Giovanni | Knowing the Ropes | Trysting Fields | Wedding Tango | Come Unto These Yellow Roads | If | Chasing Sheep | The Heart Asks Pleasure First | Miranda | Silence*

*written by Janusz Wojtarowicz

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My first encounter with Paul Simon’s 1984 album Graceland was in a university music history classroom. We were so deeply engrossed in discussing the album’s depiction of other and the ethics of appropriation that I actually didn’t really listen to much of the music. Saturday night at the Registry, I got a chance to hear what I had missed the first time round.

It turns out that Paul Simon is a rather gifted songwriter. Consecutive dispatches from the Department Of The Bleeding Obvious are considered poor form for a reviewer but sometimes we have to take one for the team. Guitarist Kevin Ramessar is exceptional.

Saturday’s concert — called Return To Graceland — was a tribute to Simon in the best possible sense. The group re-invented rather than re-created Simon’s songs, making the evening a musical event in itself rather than a trip to the museum.

The band consisted of Ramessar on guitar, Paul DeLong on drums, Matthew Lima on bass and saxophonist Jeff King, as well as a pianist and violinist whose names I’m embarrassed to admit I forgot to write down.

Throughout the evening, the idea was to use Graceland as a jumping off point from which to explore the entire Simon songbook. Although the music was never jazzy, extended solos by most all the band members except Lima were the norm. Most of the time, they seemed like completely natural extensions of the song, quite a feat considering how well-known the originals are.

The pianist was the most jazz-influenced, although he revealed his classical training in one of his most-used improvisational devices: octaves.

Rather curiously, the violinist used a mute throughout the evening, which made his instrument sound more like a soprano saxophone than a fiddle. The smooth texture was blended well in the ensemble but the brightness of an unmuted instrument would have been a nice contrast on occasion.

One of the most mesmerizing arrangements was Scarborough Fair. Ramessar showed some of his classical skills, intertwining the lines horizontally rather than in a vertical manner more typical of chorded guitar. The heavily reverbed false harmonics in the violin solo were also a nice touch.

Giselle Sanderson joined the group for 50 Ways To Leave Your Lover and Gone At Last. Her voice is immediately arresting and these two songs were some of the best of the night. The band plays well together but they outdid themselves in Gone At Last, transforming it from the hillbilly picking of the original to the slick gospel rock you might find on the Gaither Gospel Hour.

Ramessar’s alternate harmonization of Bridge Over Troubled Water shows that he knows his way around a theory textbook as well as he does a fretboard. It was just the right blend of new and familiar and succeeded in making me hear an old classic like it was the first time.

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One of the most beguiling things about the DaCapo Chamber Choir is that their director, Leonard Enns, assumes audiences can handle an intellectually substantial and emotionally difficult program. It is an approach more novel than it might initially seem.

Most programmers labour under the assumption that audiences aren’t interested in anything unpleasant or unfamiliar. If bums in seats is the metric by which artistic success is measured, then Enns’ formula works. DaCapo concerts are almost always packed and Saturday was no exception.

The first and last concerts in the 2009/10 series explore the hope/despair dichotomy and the many faces of love. While still quite abstract, the fundamental nature of these ideas makes them immediately resonant. Who among us hasn’t experienced at least some facet of love and loss?

Saturday’s concert at St John The Evangelist Church in Kitchener tested the limits of how equivocal a theme can be and still provide focus and continuity. The concert was designed to explore the possibilities of the in between, the “connective tissue,” as Enns described it in his opening remarks.

In most other DaCapo concerts, Enns uses an instrumentalist to connect the pieces together with short improvisations. Saturday’s collaboration with percussionist Carol Baumann was the most effective to date. Concentrating on colour with bowed vibraphone, tam-tam, cymbals and shakers, Baumann created sonic palette cleansers that were completely unaffected. She was careful to avoid any specific rhythm or harmonic commitments and wove the starting pitches for the choir in so subtly, they were almost unnoticeable.

The ethereal aesthetic and compound harmonies of modern choral compositions are enchanting. When taken in large quantities however, pieces tend to melding into an ascetic wall of pleasant but ultimately meaningless dissonance. For most of the first half it was difficult to find anything to connect with on an emotional level.

Technically, DaCapo wasn’t quite up to their usual excellence. Some disagreement on interval width in the sopranos and a few sloppy ensemble moments are worth mentioning only because it is so unusual.

The opening piece of the second half, Past Life Melodies by Australian Sarah Hopkins, was different from the first notes. DaCapo is becoming quite accomplished at overtone singing and the gossamer harmonics brought to mind the big, starry skies of the Outback. As often happens when you look up, I found myself contemplating the interconnectedness of life – surely the point of the whole exercise.

Although DaCapo’s remit is 20th and 21st-century pieces, Enns has been extending the choir’s repertoire ever so slightly in recent concerts It was these additions that grabbed my attention most firmly.

Bring us, O Lord God gave the choir a chance to leave behind the quiet restraint most modern music requires and luxuriate in the full acoustic of St John’s. The soaring climax in the last line was fantastic in the way that only Anglican church music can be.

Locus iste, a jaw-droppingly gorgeous motet by Anton Bruckner closed the program. In the notes Enns apologized to Bruckner for taking liberties in the last section. He needn’t have. When the score is an inspiration rather than a shackle, magic can happen.

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KW Symphony Music Director Edwin Outwater has made no bones about his desire to add some new pages to the playbook. Orchestra concerts are as ritualized as any liturgy and while that can be a beautiful thing, remaining obstinately stagnant is a one-way ticket to irrelevance. That Outwater is making headway at all speaks volumes about his ability to get people on board and the KW Symphony’s willingness to try out ideas that may not yet be clear winners.

While the theme on Friday night, An Italian Journey, is as ho-hum as they come, the content more than compensated. Like a carefully prepared mezze or tapas, the program was a genuinely interesting mix of colour and flavour.

Monteverdi’s Vespers is one of those rare gems that sounds as fresh 400 years after the fact as it must have done at its premiere. The full setting is rarely performed, so even a little taste is a treat worth ferreting out. Sancta Maria: ora pro nobis, sung by the Inter-Mennonite Children’s Choir, was just such an amuse bouche.

A more focused sound would have helped the choir soar above the orchestra in the final sections but there was something rather touching about their unaffected timbre. Larry Larson and Daniel Warren captured wonderfully the light, bright sensibility of natural trumpets.

It was an absolute pleasure to hear a non-seasonal Vivaldi selection; a short sonata that flipped deliciously between major and minor. The smoothness of the upper strings was well complemented by a growling double bass, although a poorly placed harpsichord meant the texture didn’t achieve optimal crunchiness.

When the trip through Italy stopped at Verdi’s ballet music for Macbeth, the acoustic limitations of 52 players were a problem. In the more densely orchestrated sections, there simply weren’t enough strings to balance the winds and brass. An extra two or three desks of upper strings and a double complement of cellos and basses would transform the sound significantly.

In Rossini’s William Tell Overture, the always excellent Faith Levene outdid herself on English horn with exquisite phrasing and superhuman breath control. The orchestra may have been aiming for a serious depiction of battle in the final section but a quick look around was all I needed to be sure that the Lone Ranger was riding again in the mind of many a middle-aged concert patron.

The filigree of Mendelssohn’s fourth symphony is a much better match for the KWS configuration than Verdi and the winds did a brilliant job of negotiating passages that routinely end up on orchestral excerpt lists. Criticizing Mendelssohn for being too pretty makes as much sense as having a go at a carrot for being orange. Even so, in the fourth movement especially, I wished for more of the abandon promised by the manic dance that supposedly inspired the composer.

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The Vinyl Café crew was in town Wednesday night at the Centre in the Square for their annual Christmas show.

McLean’s voice is as integral to the story as the characters. Its idiosyncratic timbre and cadence is the Pavlovian bell signaling to the audience that more of what it loved was on the way.

Like all good story-tellers, McLean is a keen observer and takes great joy in the small rituals which are the building blocks of social interaction. His eyes twinkle behind half glasses as he recounts for the thousandth time the outrageous but, crucially, still plausible escapades of Dave, Morley and the gang.

Although there were two new stories on Wednesday, much of the pleasure derived from listening to McLean comes from knowing how it’s going to play out. Dave and Morley are fictional but McLean’s gift is making us feel like we know someone just like them.

McLean goes out of his way to give air time to young Canadian artists. For this tour, the talent was east coast singers Jill Barber and Matt Andersen. Each sang one original song and a carol backed by the Vinyl Café trio and then joined forces for a few more seasonal numbers.

Barber’s voice is a curious combination of a smoky jazz alto and a precocious child. It takes some getting used to but in the end it works. Her original song, Chances, was arranged in an early 1950s rhythm and blues style and sung with a 1940s jazz voice. Again, it took a few bars adjust the ears but overall I rather liked the juxtaposition.

The real story of the night however, was Matt Andersen and O Holy Night. For once the critic and the audience were of one mind and the standing ovation was the only sensible choice.

O Holy Night is one of the few carols that gives a skilled singer the scope to show what they can do and as a result has become yet another Christmas cliché – an rather endearing one in the main but one nonetheless.

In light of this, what Andersen accomplished was very nearly miraculous – and also, it turns out, extraordinarily difficult to describe. He is a gifted singer but what made Andersen’s version so great was that, emotionally, he held nothing back. His voice is strong and flexible with a pleasing edge but, most importantly, is unusually expressive.

Here is Andersen singing his own song, So Gone Now.

For many people, the Vinyl Café Christmas show is a holiday tradition and it’s easy to see why. McLean’s observations are astute but not cutting, sentimental but not saccharine and even though he’s told the stories hundreds of times, it is difficult to imagine him ever growing tired. To spend 2 hours with McLean at the Vinyl Cafe is to see the world without malice – delighting in our foibles as much as we celebrate our successes – not a bad thing for which to aim during this season of goodwill…or ever for that matter.

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Thanks to Toronto concert presenter Soundstreams, The Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber Music Society and a Canada Council grant, a top-drawer string orchestra came to town Wednesday night.

The Perimeter Institute brings some great talent to town, but most of the time international musicians touring in Canada give Kitchener-Waterloo a miss.

Although this event was a late addition to the 2009-2010 calendar, it was nonetheless disappointing to see empty seats at the Conrad Centre. Full houses are the best way to convince skittish presenters that there are audiences in the provinces for their artists.

On this tour, the Wurttemberg Chamber Orchestra from Heilbronn Germany has collaborated with Toronto’s Gryphon Trio in a series of concerts programmed to commemorate the fall of the Berlin wall.

Simple Symphony, written by a 21-year old Benjamin Britten, opened the program. The piece is simple in the best sense of the word, and the orchestra trod the line between earnestness and self-parody with aplomb.

Their conductor, Ruben Gazarian, didn’t fare so well.

Extravagantly sweeping gestures and faux-intense messiah poses were comical in their frequency and tragic in their ineffectiveness. The Wurttembergers listen intently to each other, but were left in the lurch whenever they needed a traffic cop.

One of the evening’s attractions was Berliner Konzert by Paul Frehner. Conceived as a triple concerto (piano, cello, violin), the piece was a collection of snapshots, each reflecting on a different event relating to the wall.

Frehner’s colour palette and harmonic dialect are easy on the ears and very expressive. The trio looked as if they had interesting lines but their position at the back of the orchestra meant that for a great deal of the time, they might as well have been miming.

The Gryphons were left on their own for Old Photographs, an excerpt from Constantinople by Canadian composer Christos Hatzis.

It is a piece the trio has performed many times, and for which it obviously has great affection. There was a fantastic sense of push and pull between players. Watching the Gryphons at play made me wish they were afforded a more prominent role in Frehner’s piece.

The Elgar serenade presented after the interval was pleasant enough and the Wurttembergers played well; but considering the length of the program, I could happily have done without an excursion to the English countryside.

An arrangement of Shostakovich’s eighth and most famous quartet followed. Quintupling the forces results in more volume, but it also softens the edges. While the playing was committed and focused, I prefer my dystopian angst served with a bit more bite.

The sound is still extremely dry in the Conrad Centre, but the all-string band was spared the balance problems that go along with shoehorning a full a symphony orchestra into the space.

From the second row, the Wurttemberger sound was remarkably warm. That they weren’t shy to embrace double-wide vibrato on occasion certainly didn’t hurt. The real pleasure, however, was watching an ensemble at the top of their game.

// There wasn’t space to mention it in the review but one of the violists was using a carbon fibre viola – the first time Miss Mussel has seen that in an orchestra. It was visually strange because the charcoal finish blended in with the player’s tail coat but otherwise, no difference, inasmuch as you can hear a difference in a group of 20 players, was detected.

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Saturday evening was the the DaCapo Chamber Choir’s opening concert and it was, in a word, brilliant. Their concerts are always beautifully sung and thoughtfully programmed, but at Saturday’s concert at St. John the Evangelist Anglican Church in Kitchener, the stars aligned to create something truly special.

This is my third season covering DaCapo and in each concert director Leonard Enns has gently and quietly experimented with the traditional piece-applause structure. Themes are usually big ideas (love, fire, the number three), which gives Enns tremendous flexibility when choosing repertoire. Saturday’s concert was called “Cry Out — music of lament and the struggle for hope.”

In an effort to keep the concerts from becoming too abstract, Enns often uses a solo instrumentalist as a sort of palate cleanser.

Sometimes these ideas work better in theory than practice. Saturday night demonstrated the rewards of seeking out these types of collaborations.

Cellist Simon Fryer opened the concert with the Prelude from Bach’s Cello Suite No.2. Seated in the middle of the church in front of the Quire, Fryer let the piece unfold as if it was an improvisation.

Two settings of the Psalm text Hear My Prayer followed; the first by Enns and the second by Canadian composer Stephanie Martin. Enns knows his choir well and trusts them with the most delicate pianissimos.

Martin’s piece was more traditional in its voicing with shades of Benjamin Britten in the harmony.

Fryer joined the choir again for Exaudi by another Canadian composer Jocelyn Morlock. It’s also a setting of the Hear My Prayer text but this time the In Paradisium part of the Requiem Mass is tacked on the end, adding a sense of finality to the piece. The cello is set against the choir and at first occupies the furthest reaches of dissonance. As the piece progresses, the two groups come closer and closer harmonically until they meet at the last line — may you have eternal rest.

Iranian composer Iman Habibi explores the futility of war and questions its glorification in his piece None But Death. Habibi shuns the contemporay choir cliche and scores the ensemble the way one would for an instrumental concerto. The soloist in this case was DaCapo soprano Cher Farrell. Pitch perfect throughout her entire range with tone that is both warm and clear, Ferrell is a rare find in the world of amateur singing.

Two samplings from the choir’s new disc Shadowlands were an excellent advertisement. There are some new faces in the choir this year, which have strengthened an already excellent group. Each singer is confident in their part and in fine vocal shape. With no technical constraints and a visionary director, DaCapo is easily the best choir in the area.

Many choirs sing great rep, musically and well in tune. DaCapo’s greatest achievement is that rather than singing music for the audience, as is usually the case, it always feels as though we are experiencing the music together — and that’s something very special indeed.

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The immensely popular Back To Baroque Series presented by the Kitchener Waterloo Symphony had its first concert Wednesday evening at First United Church in Kitchener. Although the title is a bit misleading & music from the Baroque period is rarely in the majority & it offers listeners a chance to hear pieces that aren’t often programmed in the more formal Signature Series.

The results tend to be a pleasant-enough hodge-podge of throwaway Baroque and classical incidental music leading up to a larger piece at the end. Wednesday night followed the formula to the letter.

First up was a short sonata by Alessandro Scarlatti. He wrote mostly vocal music and after a minute or two it was easy to see why his instrumental works don’t place very high on orchestra repertoire lists. At its best, music from the Baroque is full of life with twists and turns that defy our expectations. At its worst, its rather like 18th century Musak.

Perhaps not receiving as much rehearsal time as they needed, the string sound was rough and unappealing.
It’s always nice to hear orchestra members in a solo capacity, particularly those that play instruments with little concerto repertoire. Ian Whitman, the young principal double bass, impressed with his sweet, subtle sound in Bottesini’s 2nd concerto.

Concerto repertoire does not adhere to the principles of representation by population, meaning that save a few exceptions that prove the rule, most of good ones are written for violin, piano and cello. The reason is that historically players of other instruments (viola, bass, horn, tuba etc) weren’t very good, largely because their parts were boring, so no one wanted to spend time practicing them.

All this to say, that although the Bottesini has its moments, Whitman had to work hard to sell it. Fortunately, he’s a good salesman and what he lacked in flash, he made up for with considered, musical playing.

Sonata No. 6, a piece of juvenilia by Rossini was a nice surprise. Intonation issues ironed themselves out in the third movement, which was meant to depict a raging storm. Had there been moving pictures in the 1830s it would have made an excellent cartoon score.

The jewel of the concert was Respighi’s Trittico Boticelliano. From the first notes the music was immensely more interesting than anything that preceded it and, more importantly, the orchestra sounded like a completely different band. Engaged and, I suspect, better rehearsed the players were finally cooking with gas.

If there was one factor that irretrievably marred the experience, it was the keyboard. The harpsichord sound used in the first half was, while completely inorganic, at least a reasonable facsimile. Coming in well below the standards for acceptable substitutions was the piano sound used in the Respighi. Considering that First United has a grand piano on the premises for its Tuesday At Noon recital series, the choice to use a twenty-year old keyboard is utterly confounding. Admittedly, it’s a tight fit with full orchestra on stage but there must surely be another way to accommodate everyone without compromising quality.

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Chamber music offers generous rewards to its acolytes, the chief of which is an almost infinite array of instrument combinations. At its core, it is music for friends, so duos, trios, quartets and various other groupings of string, brass and wind instruments all have their place in the canon. Sunday night, at the Music Room it was the turn of the piano quintet. It is a non-standard combination, meaning that there isn’t much repertoire and therefore no permanent quintet ensembles.

Fortunately, the repertoire that does exist is, on the whole, of excellent quality and there are enough string quartets on speaking terms with pianists that occasionally we get to hear some of it. The Madawaska String Quartet from Toronto and pianist Leslie Kinton joined forces on Sunday night to play Shostakovich and Dvorak.

Dmitri doesn’t mess about, preferring instead to ratchet up the intensity from the very first phrase. The MSQ are unabashed in their playing. Usually this is an asset, especially in pieces as fierce as most of Shostakovich’s work but a space the size of the Music Room, it came across as if someone had LEFT CAPS LOCK ON.

Some blame must be placed on the piano. Shostakovich was fond of using extremes in register, which doesn’t suit the Music Room instrument very well. Instead of being grumbly and slightly menacing, the bass is harsh at full volume and unless the pianist has an unusually light touch, the top third of the instrument is shrill at any marking above p.

The Intermezzo was the highlight of the piece with Kinton and the MSQ really showing their expressive side. Beautiful without being overly sentimental, it was a much-needed antidote to the preceding Scherzo. Everything was well played and there were several impressive extended unison passages but in the end, it was all just too much.

The Dvorak is, along with works by Schumann and Brahms, one of the crown jewels of quintet literature. As one of the 19th century’s best melodists, Dvorak took full advantage of all the colours available to him and and created 40 minutes of pure joy.

Compared to Shostakovich’s jaded old man railing against the world’s injustices, Dvorak presents a those beautifully innocent years before life’s first great tragedy when everything seems possible.

The MSQ took some of the edge from their playing but never quite settled into the unaffected sweetness the music needs. While the notes were there and the ensemble tight, the nuances and unexpected gestures were missing. The group’s best moments came in the Trio part of the third movement Scherzo. An extended patch of quiet playing, it was beautifully shaded and had me wishing for more.

Kinton shone in the finale, managing several finger-busting passages with aplomb. Dvorak uses less of the keyboard than Shostakovich, so the instrument’s extreme extremes were, for the most part, a non-issue.

The MSQ have only been together a short while and haven’t had a chance to develop the dynamic subtlety that is the hallmark of seasoned quartets. It will come and when it does, the MSQ will be unstoppable.

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Classical musicians, administrators and marketers all over North America are spending an increasingly large amount of time thinking of ways to get younger people interested in classical music. The two basic choices are luring more people into the existing concert hall or taking the ensemble to venues normally used for other types of performance. There are pros and cons to both strategies and each has their place.

An important pro in the alternate venue scenario is the atmosphere. When the music is removed from the heavily ritualized concert hall, the relationship between audience and musicians becomes more horizontal than vertical. The acoustic sacrifice required by these venues is often tempered by stronger sense of shared experience.

The Kitchener Waterloo Symphony played the first concert in their newly acquired space in downtown Kitchener. The rather grandly named Conrad Centre For The Performing Arts seats in the neighbourhood of 250 people, with the performance area just big enough to hold a full orchestra. As with all new spaces, there are growing pains, the chief of which on Wednesday evening was balance. The brass were particularly problematic not because they were playing too loudly but rather that the room is too small and the audience too close to allow all the sounds to mix together before hitting the ear.

American composer Nico Muhly programmed the concert around the passacaglia, which is a piece with a repeating bass line like that favourite of budding pianists everywhere: Heart and Soul. More broadly, the evening was about repetition, or in Muhly’s rather endearing vernacular, “piles of things that are the same.”

An instrumental arrangement of anthem by Purcell called Rejoice in the Lord Alway was a highlight of the first half. Its delightful opening is written over a ground bass derived from the descending scale that begins all bell-ringing in England and is responsible for the piece being nicknamed The Bell Anthem. The pattern functions like a pace car in auto racing in that is it repeated until all the bell ringers are suitably warmed up and ready to set off on the more complicated change-ringing patterns.

Richard Reed Parry‘s new piece For Heart, Breath and Orchestra showed great imagination and was at its best in its busy moments. The premise was that each player wear a stethoscope and play according to the rhythm of their own heart.

It may be that my ears just took a while to get used to the idea but since most people’s resting heart rate is roughly the same, at the beginning it seemed as if the musicians were just playing with poor ensemble rather than purposefully not together. The introduction of harp and celeste in the second movement immediately made everything more palatable & those instruments usually do & and by the end I was 100% on board.

Rather than wait for everyone to be seated after the intermission, a quartet started playing an excerpt of David Lang’s Sweet Air. Rather than feeling contrived or consciously barrier-breaking, the piece formed a charming bridge between the intermission chatter and the second half.

Two motets by William Byrd, arranged for orchestra by Nico Muhly, opened the second half proper but did not fare well in the dry acoustic. The arrangements introduced novel instrument combinations but even the new colours couldn’t help the lack of natural reverb that is such an intrinsic part of liturgical music.

Esther of Obohemia was there too.

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