Turning Point Ensemble, Forbidden Music - A Tuba & A Glockenspiel
Monday, October 28, 2013
My matinee experience on Sunday’s Turning
Point Ensemble performance of Forbidden Music was stellar. To begin with I was
in the company of a gorgeous soprano, Alexandra Hill, elegantly dressed in
black. We arrived early enough so that we could
sit front-row-centre and be perhaps only five feet away from conductor Owen Underhill.
The reason for sitting in the front row is
that if you are near a smallish ensemble you can listen clearly every
individual instrument by just looking at it.
How often can you enjoy the sound and
sights of a beautifully new-looking tuba (Peder MacClellan)? Or how about a contrabassoon in
which the horn points downward (Ingrid Chiang wearing killer fishnets), two
trombones, muted and unmuted (Jeremy Berkman and Sharman King on the awesome bass
trombone), an impressive bass clarinet (Caroline Gauther, who in spite of
wearing black pants I was able to discern some elaborate filigreed black
stockings) and all this and much more such as…Adrián Verdejo on guitar and banjo sporting facial
hair that made him resemble a cross between d’Artgnan and Paganini while
nearby, Jane Hayes and her wonderful hair did not manage, this time, to
demolish her piano?
It is interesting to
point out that many musicians are not content to rest on their laurels, of
playing the usual, but are part of the Turning Point Ensemble because they feel
they must push the limits of the contemporary repertoires. There is Marc
Destrubé on violin who has been fronting the Microcosmos String Quartet that is
playing Benjamin Britten and Bella Bartok quartets in exquisitely performed
concerts in beautiful Lower Mainland homes. The couple, Mary Sokol Brown,violin,
David Brown, bass, and cello player Ari Barnes could very well find themselves
busy with their performances for the VSO but deem it personally necessary to play for the
Turning Point Ensemble.
In short all these
stellar musicians including David Owen on oboe and François Houle on clarinet
combine to make an extremely tight and virtuoso ensemble that can one minute
make a largish ensemble as they did for Kurt Weill’s Little Threepenny Music
(1928) or can pare down to a four in Pavel Hass’s (1899-1944, was gassed in Auschwitz)
Wind Quintet op. 10 (1929).
While our detailed
program notes informed us that composer Erwin Schulhoff (1894-1942), the
Ensemble played his Concerto for String Quartet and Wind Orchestra (193) had
mastered and incorporated jazz in his compositions, I noted that Hass, sounded
wonderfully Jewish (Klezmer-like) and I could have sworn that many of the notes
in the second movement of his Quintet, Preghiera: Misterioso e triste were
extremely blue!
But it was the first piece of the
afternoon, Paul Hindemith’s (1895-1963) Chambermusic Nr1 composed when he was
25 that was the pleasant shocker. The dissonance may have been there. It was,
but seeing (and hearing) it played is much different and accessible to being
exposed to it in a living room stereo or on the radio. And then there was that
beautifully melodic third part Quartet – very slow and with feeling, in which
François Houle, clarinet, Elizabeth Mee, bassoon, Brenda Fedoruk, flute and
Martin Fisk on glockenspiel went back and forth in what seemed to me a sonic
heaven.
The only sad note for
me was the realization that few if any who were not there at the concert might
ever have the chance of listening to those pieces, banned by Hitler and
Company, this 21st century. It is a pity that such beautiful music of that last 20th
has been relegated to an obscurity as cruel as Hitler’s.
More Turning Point Ensemble
More Turning Point Ensemble
