This blog is a daily challenge to meet a new friend every day. It's my little journey of discovering Canada, its rich culture, nice people and beautiful places.
In my third and last part talking about the New Creations Festival concert I attended last Friday, I'm delighted to write about St. Lawrence String Quartet who played with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, the 3rd part of the concert, conducted by the great Composer, Conductor and Creative Thinker John Adams, who appeared with the world’s major orchestras in programmes combining his own works with a wide variety of repertoire ranging from Beethoven and Mozart to Ives, Carter, Zappa, Glass, and Ellington. Adams presented a Canadian Premiere, "Absolute Jest" for String Quartet and Orchestra.
Here is the background of the St Laurence String Quartet: Geoff Nuttall, violin Mark Fewer, violin Lesley Robertson, viola Christopher Costanza, cello
Established in 1989, the St. Lawrence String Quartet has developed an undisputed reputation as a truly world class chamber ensemble. The quartet performs over 120 concerts annually worldwide and calls Stanford University home, where the group is Ensemble in Residence.
Lesley Robertson and Geoff Nuttall are founding members of the group, and hail from Edmonton, Alberta, and London, Ontario, respectively. Christopher Costanza is from Utica, NY, and joined the group in 2003. Mark Fewer, a native of Newfoundland, begins his first season with the quartet in 2014, succeeding violinist Scott St. John. All four members of the quartet live and teach at Stanford, in the Bay Area of California.
The harmony between the four of them was remarkable, and their performance was outstanding leaving the audience in awe and asking for more.. And the combination between the Quartet, the Orchestra and Adams's energy in conducting made it an unforgettable night and the least they deserved a stand ovation with lots of applause that kept running for more than 10 min.
I hope I'll get to see the Quartet playing again, get to know great Canadian Artists and embrace more the wonderful local culture.
In my post yesterday, I was talking about the New Creation Festival, and the concert I attended at the closing night of the festival, where the first part of the concert, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra played the Three Pieces for Orchestra from Brian Current, and then the second part of the concert, the Orchestra played, and always conducted by Peter Oundjian, four pieces from the Composer Vincent Ho.. Beautiful four pieces (Dusk, Overdrive, Nighthawks and New Dawn)..
In writing his cello concerto, City Suite, Vincent Ho counts as his chief inspirations the Canadian cellist Shauna Rolston, whom he had in mind as the performer of the work.
And from Vincent notes on how Toronto inspired him to write his City Suite:
The first movement of City Suite, “Dusk”, he describes as “inspired by a melancholy evening I had in Toronto...sitting in front of my hotel window taking in the view of downtown. As dusk settled, a feeling of “coldness” crept in as I watched the city transform into its darker alter ego. Emotionally speaking, this movement represents the initial turmoil I felt many years ago that begun my period of sadness.” The second movement, “Overdrive,” was inspired by the fast pace of urban life, while personally, it “represents the anger I felt that followed the turmoil I spoke of in the first movement.”
The third movement is named after Edward Hopper’s famous painting, which Ho encountered in a book of the artist’s collected works. As Ho describes, “The sadness and desolation it evoked immediately resonated with me... I knew I needed to compose my own musical interpretation of the image. This movement also represents the next stage of the emotional process I was undergoing: sadness.” The final movement, entitled “New Dawn”, evokes the joy of a new day of life in a city. “This feeling of a fresh start provides a sense of comfort and a degree of optimism...as well as the closure I feel when I leave the day before behind. It also represents the reconciliation I needed to reach after all these years of carrying my inner conflicts.” As the Award-Winning Canadian cellist Shauna Rolston, she injected more life to Vincent's music with her wonderful performance, so for a while I lost focus on the whole Orchestra and I was simply mesmerized by her, by her cello and this amazing relation between them.
I was so happy to discover in one night great Canadian artists and tomorrow I'll be writing about the third and last part of the concert.
I got a message from my friend David, asking me if I'm interested to attend a Classical Music Concert presented by Toronto Symphony Orchestra, part of the New Creations Festival at the Roy Thomson Hall. Without any hesitation I accepted his invitation and got super excited to see the Orchestra playing in this wonderful venue. It was the closing night of the Festival, and 3 conductors were on the program of that night. Peter Oundjian, the internationally sought-after Music Director and Conductor and the host of the night, introduced the first composer: Brian Current. Brian was born in London, Ontario, in 1972.. He composed in 2013 three pieces for Orchestra. And from Brian's notes about these pieces: Like many composers, I like to put up drawings around the piano while working. These are just an impulse at the time, but when unpacked later, I am surprised at how clearly they articulate the central idea of the music. One little sketch, a single line under a cloud of densely tangled lines, ended up describing much of Earth So Much Like Heaven, Heaven So Much Like Earth. In the music, the two layers are always present and are always inseparable. I’m not really a religious person, but the relationship between these two layers has increasingly become a metaphor to me for heaven and earth. The string orchestra plays the lower, simple line, and a group of instruments (percussion, harp, piano, solo violins and flutes) play the upper texture. In many of these patterns I am trying to create music that is very active and very calm at the same time, like water or like sunlight.
The title of the second piece, Without Grace The Universe Is Just An Explosion, is from a text by the Canadian poet Christian Bök. This title seemed appropriate as it described the music I wanted to write—a piece about violence and beauty—and also spoke to why we might need music and symphony orchestras in the first place. Overlapping gestures fade in and out throughout the piece, and many sounds are inspired by electronic effects.
The final piece is called Motion Is The Default State. This sentence was another impulse taped to the piano when trying to describe the music in early stages. The first half is about assigning separate overtones to different instruments to create huge, pulsating blocks of colour. These get progressively bigger until we explode out into a middle section inspired by the fist-pounding energy of rock music. The final section features enormous, pin-wheeling arcs of colour, which grow and overlap with one another into a celebratory finish.
The 18 minutes passed like a dream, and the music left me in awe.. hypnotized me and totally captivated all my senses. I'll be definitively looking for more magical music from Brian and was so happy to discover this great Canadian talent.
