Imaginary Worlds - Hubcaps & Tail Lights
Sunday, September 21, 2014
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| Zuwakan |
Some time ago I found
a wonderful reference to one big difference between the web and
magazines/newspapers. It was something like this, “Space in magazines is
limited, and on the web the real estate is infinite.”
What that means to
this blogger is that I can write to whatever length I want and since I am my
own editor I can ignore what a real editor would say to me if he (No he/she, I am a
stickler for my 1979 third edition of William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White – The Elements
of Style) were to edit what follows with, “Get to the point.”
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| Jonathan Bernard tuning the tronbong |
On Friday I attended a Turning Point Ensemble Concert - Imaginary Worlds, with my friend Graham Walker. Since both of us are into shoes we noticed two
salient facts. One, the only male musician not wearing black shoes was cellist
Ariel Barnes. His brown shoes looked expensive. Lan Tung, playing an erhus and a gaohu, wore beautiful, blue, classic, silk Chinese slippers in the first half
but for the second she wore what looked like patent-leather sandals with
low heels. The concert was at the just right and less claustrophobic venue to that black box in the bowels of Simon Fraser
University’s downtown campus, Vancouver Playhouse.
With the exception of
Johan Strauss’ Emperor Waltz nothing in the program woke up my memory banks. It was
all new. I did not know what to expect.
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| tronbong |
Everybody in Vancouver must know that
VSO Artistic Director (née the conductor) Bramwell Tovey is warm and likes to
palaver. We all love him for it and he is even more appreciated in New York City for his
summer concert series there with the NY Philharmonic.
Fewer might know that
Turning Point Conductor Owen Underhill is much shier but also much sweeter than
the Artistic Director. In fact I would say that Underhill is as sweet as a man
can be and when he told us before the concert that the Arnold Schoenberg-arranged
Strauss Kaiserwalzer would take us back to another era, he was absolutely
right.
But he would never
have suspected that I did not go back to Vienna.
I have never been there. I went to the Mexico
City movie house el Cine Roble where in 1956 I saw Grace
Kelly, Alec Guinness, Louis Jordan and Agnes Moorhead in Charles Vidor’s The
Swan.
I know that the music
of the film was composed by one Bronislau Kaper. But in spite of that fact I have
always thought (but erred) that Grace Kelly and Louis Jordan dance to a waltz and
that the waltz had to be the Emperor Waltz.
Turning Point
Ensemble, with that first song took me back to a time when I had an unabashed infatuation
for Grace Kelly (and particularly her neck). When the film came out her
marriage to that Monaco
interloper was a done deal. I was devastated so I finished a huge bag of
pistachios. I was so sick that I did not eat them again until two years ago.
The musicians playing
the waltz were all smiles. They were having lots of fun while I was melancholic and morose.
The rest of the
program was one surprise after another. Would-be music fans usually avoid new music,
or contemporary music. They cite its remoteness or some sort of inherent
atonality or dissonance.They like their tried and true. They like their four seasons of entertainment and culture without storms.
I would tell these
people that some music has to be seen and heard. If you are not an opera buff
listening to a CD of Il Trovatore with Plácido Domingo is going to do
nothing for you. But, if like me, you heard Domingo back at the Bellas Artes in Mexico City in the early
70s you could learn to appreciate opera.
The same applies to
new music, particularly the kind that Turning Point Ensemble plays. Their
smiles, and their passion quickly overpower you like a virulent flu.
Two pieces, Hua Yan-Jun’s
Er Quan, arranged by Mark Armanini and Armanini’s
Gallop both played by Lan Tung on a lower register erhu and a gaohu (the latter piece with
soloist percussionist Jonathan Bernard) revealed to me the warmth of an ancient
Chinese instrument that I used to find unpalatable. Seeing it being played made
that difference. I am now a fan of the instrument and if you look closely (you
must be up close, as we were on the front row) you will note that the sound box
at the bottom of the long neck gets its sound from the vibration of a stretched
python skin!
Of late there have
been several articles in our Vancouver
Sun that have helped to separate and antagonize the oriental community and
those of us who are not part of it. Mark Armanini is single handedly doing the very
opposite. Rudyard Kipling wrote in 1892:
"Oh, East is East, and West is
West, and never the twain shall meet.”
Through his music Armanini is fighting
back. I can only recall former Lieutenant Governor David Lam as someone who wanted to help join the communities.
Claude Vivier’s Et je
recerrai cette ville étrange (1981) was a fresh composition by a Canadian
composer that this blogging idiot had never heard of. From the program notes I
read that the piece was entirely monodic. This means that every musician was
playing the same exact melody. And yet, I would have never known. It was
haunting.
False Ceiling (2012)
by Tajic-Swedish-Canadian composer Farangis Nurulla-Khoja born in Dushanbe (Tajikistan)
was a tad more difficult to understand but I soon found that understanding is
not all that important. The piece featured solo violinist Mary Sokol Brown and
percussionist Brian Nesselroad. The dramatic lighting of just these two in a darkened
Playhouse stage added to the drama of the moment. I wish I had brought my
12-year-old granddaughter Lauren who is studying the violin. She would have
been amazed at the sounds and noises that Sokol Brown got out of her violin. It
was also fascinating how Nesselroad balanced playing the vibraphone, the various
percussion instruments while turning his extra wide sheet music and doing his utmost
not to drop it when he shifted it to one side. The rustling noise of the
falling music might have ruined it all!
The second composition
by Farangis Nurulla-Khoja, a world premiere commissioned by Turning Point
Ensemble, Le jour ma nuit, had an interesting premise which I state here from
the notes.
It is an attempt to
create a labyrinth of time and memory through subtle transformations of timbre
and gesture, and the mixing of particular sonorities with ragged rhythms. Sensa
misura (without metre) sections in the piece continue for a while, eventually
drawing the listener into the complexity of the sound through slight
imperfections. This trance-like listening state aims to erase one’s conscious
memory of preceding details in the piece, leaving behind only a disturbing
sensation.
The above reminds me
of some of the poems of former Canadian Poet Laureate George Bowering who uses
many methods (none involving drugs) to find ways of writing randomly.
The last composition
Gougalon (Scenes from a Street Theatre) (2009-2011) by composer Unsuk Chin a
South Korean composer (and since most of you, as I, don’t have a clue about
that first name Unsuk, I must reveal here that the composer is a woman and that
she has a fine and very dry sense of humour. Consider the six titles of her
piece”
1. Prologue –Dramatic Opening
of the Curtain
2. Lament of the Bald
Singer
3. The Grinning
Fortuneteller with the False Teeth
4. Episode between
Bottles and Cans
5. Dance Around the
Shacks
6. The Hunt for the
Quack’s Plait.
Watching all those
musicians (pretty well most of Turning Point Ensemble including Peggy Lee on
cello but not the bass trombonist Sharman King) with big smiles and noting what the composer
wrote:
Gougalon does not
refer directly to the dilettante and shabby music of that street theatre. The
memories described above merely provide a framework, just as the movement
headings are not intended to be illustrative. [!]
I cannot stop here
without first mentioning that my favourite Vancouver pianist, that percussive Jane Hays
with lovely big hair, in Claude Vivier’s composition tackled simultaneously
the piano, with her left hand, and the celeste with her right. At the interval
I asked her about it. It seems that the score lists two players but this was
purely done to save money. Then she added (and I had not noticed) that with her
left foot she handled the piano pedals and with the right the celeste!
In Gougalon, Hayes was
helped by bassoonist Ingrid Chiang who can also play a mean piano. The piano
was a special Tom Lee Music instrument that had screws and other stuff attached
which Hayes scratched and banged while the bassoonist took care of the ivories.
All in all a concert
to savour in one’s memory. As I left I spotted Turning Point Ensemble’s bass
trombonist, Sharman King/ I mentioned what a pity that the concert was played once and
probably the program would never be played again. It was then that inspiration
hit me:
If a miracle happens
more than once it isn’t one.
Addendum: Vancouver's all powerful union of percussionists Bang Chapter II would have objected in seeing so many string, wind and brass musicians also shaking maracas, etc. Permission was requested and granted so there were no pickets outside the Vancouver Playhouse.
