Volume 22 Issue 2 - October 2016

Beat by Beat | Classical

Beat by Beat | Classical & Beyond Schween and Fialkowska, Yoo and Wang PAUL ENNIS The venerable Juilliard String Quartet opens Music Toronto’s 45th season October 13 with a typically strong program - Bartók’s String Quartet No.1 and Beethoven’s String Quartets Op.95 “Serioso” and Op.59 No.1 “Rasumovsky.” And a first. In its 71st year, the quartet has hired a woman; cellist Astrid Schween has replaced Joel Krosnick, the quartet’s cellist since 1972, who was the last link to its original members. With characteristic elegance, the Juilliard introduced Schween by including her as the second cello in Schubert’s String Quintet in C, playing alongside Krosnick last year (violist Roger Tapping had done a similar thing in 2013, performing with outgoing violist Samuel Rhodes). A member of the Lark Quartet for two decades, Schween studied with Jacqueline du Pré for seven years during school holidays and summer breaks. She spoke about their relationship in a recent interview in Strings shortly after being hired by the Juilliard. “Jacqueline was one of my idols, and I had every recording she made. Her playing captivated my imagination, and I spent countless hours listening to these recordings and trying to work out what lay behind her extraordinary tone colour, long singing lines and sheer power. When I was actually with her, we would spend quite a bit of time listening to these recordings, analyzing her interpretations and discussing the secrets behind those wonderful colours. There was also time for plenty of stories and anecdotes. She had a wonderful sense of humour.” Janina Fialkowska opens Music Toronto’s piano section with an all-Chopin recital October 25. Winner of the first Arthur Rubinstein International Master Piano Competition in 1974, Fialkowska went on to be mentored by Rubinstein who helped her establish an international career. Born to a Canadian mother and a Polish father, her natural affinity for Chopin has long been apparent. In a Music Toronto masterclass at Mazzoleni Hall, October 29, 2014, she had much to say about her relationship to her countryman. “Chopin didn’t wear his heart on his sleeve,” she told one of the RCM students. “Sing! as if you were a great singer,” she continued. “In Chopin, never shorten a dotted note; if anything elongate it.” “Don’t eat all the chocolates in the box at once,” she said to a student whose performance had no shape and too much rubato, making it self-indulgent; she went on to help him shape the piece by emphasizing its long lines and making it sound spontaneous and simple. She mentioned that Rubinstein was very intellectual; his goal was to make everything sound simple and natural. She revealed that he would put down the soft pedal when he played Chopin so he could play louder and she noted Rubinstein’s great sense of rhythm, especially in the Mazurkas (three of which she will be performing in the Jane Mallett Theatre). Fialkowska mentioned that Liszt said that Chopin rubato was like a tree in the forest with the trunk barely moving and the leaves fluttering in the breeze. There will be ample opportunity to see these precepts in action in her varied program that includes a Nocturne, an Impromptu, a Ballade, the Polonaise Fantasie, two Waltzes, two Scherzos and the Op.50 Mazurkas. (Fialkowska performs the same recital for the Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber Music Society on October 23 and gives a masterclass at Mazzoleni Hall the morning of October 26). Esther Yoo. BBC New Generation Artist, Korean-American Esther Yoo was 16 when she became the youngest prizewinner of the Sibelius Violin Competition in 2010. Two years later she won a prize in the Yuja Wang Queen Elisabeth Competition. Vladimir Ashkenazy, who conducted her Deutsche Grammophon recording debut of the Sibelius and Glazunov violin concertos, said she was “without any affectations” in a YouTube video preview of that recent CD. On October 8 and 9 she joins the TSO under the baton of Karina Canellakis (the 2016 Georg Solti Conducting Award winner) whose exuberant conducting has been celebrated over the last two years when she was assistant conductor to the Dallas Symphony. She leads the TSO in Mozart’s thrilling Marriage of Figaro Overture and Beethoven’s underrated Symphony No.4. Yoo is the soloist in Tchaikovsky’s ever-popular uber- Romantic Violin Concerto. Yoo grew up in a musical household, took up the piano at four and was “really inspired by music from a young age,” she said in a BBC Radio 3 YouTube post. “The most important thing is that you love and are passionate about what you choose to do,” she said. “I think being exposed to a lot of different activities, be it in culture or in studies or in sports, it all comes together to inspire you and to help you grow as a person and all of that reflects in your playing and in your music, so to be exposed to many different opportunities and experiences is really important.” Yuja Wang. Yuja Wang, the 29-year-old, Beijing-born pianistic marvel, turns her sharp mind and impeccable technique to Bartók’s haunting and complex Piano Concerto No.3 when she makes her fourth appearance (and seventh overall in Toronto) with the TSO since 2011. Krzysztof Urbański returns to the TSO as guest conductor to lead the orchestra in Grieg’s Peer Gynt Suite No.1 and Dvořák’s evergreen Symphony No.9 “From the New World.” Wang is known for her unerring accuracy, prodigious memory, consummate musicianship, slinky dresses and four-inch heels. According to Janet Malcolm in the September 5, 2016, issue of The New Yorker, she may be undergoing a kind of midlife crisis, one which has led her to new repertoire away from the Romantic Russians that brought her early fame. When Malcolm asked Wang’s close friend Gary Graffman, the 87-yearold former head of the Curtis Institute where Wang studied, how Wang compared with the other prodigies at Curtis, he said, “She was remarkable among remarkable students. She didn’t play like a prodigy. She played like a finished artist.” In an interview with Michael Enright for CBC Radio’s The Sunday Edition broadcast on June 14, 2013, she spoke about being “very surrounded by music in her childhood.” Her father was a percussionist, her mother a dancer. The first thing she remembered hearing was Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake; she began piano at six. She talked about virtuosity being a tool for the music: “I never think of technique. I failed if the audience pays attention to how fast I can play or how powerful I can play because in the end I’m trying to portray the music’s character, the mood, the atmosphere and also the logic of how the composer is structuring the piece. All of that is a completely different level of how to listen to music rather than how fast can one play.” Enright commented on her small hands, wondering if they could stretch an octave. Wang told him they can stretch a tenth on the keyboard and that her thin fingers (which can fit between the black keys) gave her great accuracy, though occasionally in big Russian pieces, she would need more arm weight to compensate. Early in 2014, Yang sat down at the piano in conversation with LIVING THE CLASSICAL LIFE EPISODE 14 18 | October 1, 2016 - November 7, 2016 thewholenote.com

MEDICI.TV Living the Classical Life (available on YouTube). As she answered questions she casually and effortlessly played excerpts from Rachmaninoff’s Paganini Variations and Concerto No.3, as well as Prokofiev’s Concerto No.3 and Art Tatum’s arrangement of Tea for Two. She said that once she’s learned a piece she no longer practises it: “Just keep it as it is, just not touch it, see what kind of magic I can do with it on stage.” Then she played parts of Chopin’s Waltz Op. 64 No.2, the first piece she performed in public; the Gluck-Sgambeti Melodie dell’ Orfeo from Orfeo ed Euridice Act 2; and Liszt’s arrangement of Schubert’s Gretchen am Spinnrade. “It’s the emotion of the music of those pieces that catches me so much; I feel like I own those pieces…Life and music and what I do has to be intermixed, has to be together. Otherwise I just feel like I’m not alive, like I’m wasting my time. Even though I love sauna, tanning, shopping, movies.” (She laughs.) Denis Matsuev. Winner of the 1998 International Tchaikovsky Competition at age 23, virtuosic Russian pianist Denis Matsuev makes his third Koerner Hall appearance under the Show One banner on October 15. This recital nicely underlines Show One’s string of Tchaikovsky prize winners which began earlier this year with a unique joint concert by Lucas Debargue and fellow 2015 Tchaikovsky runner-up, Lukas Geniušas, Denis Matsuev April 30, and which continues with the 2015 Gold Medallist, Dmitry Masleev, the newest Russian virtuoso, at Koerner January 28, 2017. Just announced! Marc-André Hamelin only concert in Toronto this season. Thursday, March 23, 2017 at 8 pm Haydn, Feinberg, Beethoven, Scriabin, Chopin Holiday sale pricing from October 1st to December 31st General sale from January 1st, 2017 Full-time students of any age – accompanying non-student FOR THE It’s no wonder that Matsuev is back so soon; his recital on January 30, 2016, was ecstatically received. The enthusiastic, large Russian audience component made for a totally different experience than the usual Koerner gathering. Matsuev was presented with an enormous bouquet of flowers just before intermission, four bouquets after the concert, which included the pianist signing an autograph, two more bouquets after the first encore (Liadov’s charming The Musical Snuff Box) and one more autograph after the second of four encores. The fourth, in the style of Kapustin or Earl Wild, was Matsuev’s scintillating version of Ellington’s Take the A Train. The January recital began with Schumann’s Kinderszenen (Scenes from Childhood,) suitably small-scale and wonderfully understated where appropriate, followed by Schumann’s Kreisleriana, with an emphasis on lyricism (lovingly played). After intermission, a selection of Rachmaninoff’s Études Tableaux Op.39 preceded Rachmaninoff’s Sonata No.2. The whole evening seemed to have been a warm-up for the latter’s profusion of melody and technique set off by a simple lyrical phrase. Matsuev fell into the sonata’s beginning almost before he sat down, like casually plunging into the deep end of the pool. It was bravura playing at its finest. There will be more Schumann (Symphonic Études) in the October 15 recital, as well as Beethoven’s euphoric Op.110, Liszt’s wildly popular Mephisto Waltz No.1, Tchaikovsky’s Meditation Op. 72 No.5 and Prokofiev’s dramatic Sonata No.7. It’s a major program by a major artist. The Isabel. Russian pianist Georgy Tchaidze, 2009 Honens International Piano Competition First Prize Cathedral Bluffs SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Norman Reintamm Artistic Director/Principal Conductor 1. saturday november 12 8 pm sEasOn OPEnER 2. saturday december 17 8 pm acclaimed pianist VaLERIE TRYOn TRYPTYCH COnCERT & OPERa 3. saturday February 11 8 pm featuring the critically-acclaimed TRYPTYCH COnCERT & OPERa 2016-2017 Season 4. saturday March 11 8 pm Bruckner Symphony no. 4 in E flat major Tchaikovsky Suite from Swan Lake Beethoven Leonore Overture no. 3 Mozart Piano Concerto in C, K.467 Menotti Amahl and the Night Visitors Puccini Capriccio Sinfonico Tchaikovsky Elegy for Strings Puccini Suor Angelica Fauré Requiem in D minor, op. 48 Mozart Requiem in D minor UnIVERsITY OF TOROnTO sCaRbOROUGH CaMPUs COnCERT CHOIR saInT JOsEPH’s R.C. CHURCH PaRIsH CHOIR (Hamilton) and GRand RIVER CHORUs (Brantford) 5. saturday May 27 8 pm sEasOn FInaLE featuring Canada’s baLLET JÖRGEn presenting favourites from ballets such as Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty and other well-known masterpieces. Subscribe Today & Save! cathedralbluffs.com | 416.879.5566 thewholenote.com October 1, 2016 - November 7, 2016 | 19