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| Jane Hayes |
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| Owen Underhill |
I will be up front, since I am an 82 year-old-man, that I do not want to ever listen again to Bach’s Double Violin Concerto or Vivaldi’s Four Seasons (exception the Winter Largo).
This is why I love going to performance of new music or never performed music of the 20th and 21st century. In Vancouver the usual sources are Marc Destrubé’s Microcosmos Quartet, Yarilo Music and the Turning Point Ensemble.
While the music of the Turning Point Ensemble could be categorized as avant-garde, its Musical Director Owen Underhill, has a pleasant gentility that somehow softens the music for me and makes it listenable.
Because of my advanced age, and because I am an Argentine, I obsessively think like Jorge Luís Borges with questions like, “Will I open that door again? Will that mirror reflect my face for the last time?” So statistically all the music in last night’s program at the Annex Theatre, music I had never heard before, will be music that I will never hear again.
Every composition in the program took me to my personal memories.
José Evangelista’s Spanish Garland made me think of El Cid Campeador and his horse Babieca. I heard quite a few sounds that were Moorish. I thought of my Valencian grandmother.
The Ostinato Chimney Suite by Mariah Mennie made me think of the face of the enthusiastic bassist David Brown which last night was full of smiles. His playing through the night was for me the best. And, somehow Jeremy Berkman, whose family once lived in Amherst, Massachusets, connected me to the poems of Emily Dickinson who was from Amherst.
AK Coope’s performance of Mathew – John Knight’s Abstraction took me back to when my eldest daughter and Coope both were at York House School. It was in that school where they learned a sophisticated sense of humour that last night involved removing high heeled shoes on a small Persian carpet.
Undine Smith Moore’s, The Afro-American Suite, transported back to my Austin, Texas St. Edward’s High School in 1957. We were one of the few schools around that was integrated.
The Octet by Barbara Pentland featuring four young boys playing brass made it obvious that in this 21st century, so full of mediocrity, there is room for excellence. When they become adults, they like the Masons of yore will perform the reading of music just as difficult as building cathedrals. You either can or you cannot. The could and did last night.
Owen Underhill’s the force that through the green fuse drives the flower made me understand that behind his calming face, he, too, like most of us has to go through a troubling family illness. That it took him long to compose the piece only shows the commitment of our city’s musicians.
When Jane Hayes finished Before I’d be a Slave (Undine Smith Moore) by banging her right fist on the piano keyboard, I understood that Hayes damn well knows that the piano is a percussive instrument.
Trikala Jati by Curtis Andrews, featuring just percussion and a dancer, to me proves that dance and music will always work together. In Vancouver this can be a rare event. I would love to see Jane Hayes perform on the piano with a lone modern dancer. A percussionist would not be needed. My dream would be for her to play John Cage's 4'33" with no fist allowed.
The last composition of the evening Sergei Prokofiev‘s, Quintet in G minor, showed the virtuosity of violinist Domagoj Ivanovic, David Brown, etc but I was particularly lown over by Mexican oboist Gerónimo Mendoza (you guys forgot that important accent!).
While listening to Prokofiev my mind wandered into visions of watching Evelyn Hart dance to his Romeo and Juliet Ballet. And Particularly in that moment when she dances slowly to the sleeping poison and then in doubt, tiptoes backwards.
