Leonard Turnevicius

Music for tribute and remembrance

Showtime

What: Haydn’s “Nelson” Mass, Vaughan Williams’s Dona nobis pacem

Who: Mohawk College Singers

When: Saturday, March 8 at 7:30 p.m.

Where: Mohawk College’s McIntyre Theatre, Fennell Ave. and West 5^th

Cost: $20, student/senior $15

Call: 905-526-7938

Stock market got you jittery? Gas prices have you worried? Politicians, candidates, and elected officials giving you the willies?

If you’re feeling a tad anxious these days, relax. You’re not alone. Composers have felt the same way. In fact, what do you think they do when they’re feeling anxious about the times? Write music, of course. And that’s no different whether they lived in the twentieth or the eighteenth centuries.

Take Haydn, for example. He lived out his final years in a Europe engulfed by the Wars of Coalition. During the summer of 1798, Haydn composed a Mass which he later entitled Missa in Angustiis, or Mass in time of affliction, in anxiety, and danger. By the time of his death in 1809, this Mass had already picked up the nickname Nelson, after Horatio Nelson, the British Rear Admiral who routed Napoléon’s French fleet at the Battle of the Nile in August, 1798. That nickname didn’t originate with Haydn, nor did Nelson provide the composer with the generative idea for the work, since news of the British victory reached Haydn’s Vienna after the piece was finished.

Interestingly enough, there is a connection between Haydn and Nelson and Bonaparte. Nelson paid Haydn a visit at the princely court in Eisenstadt in 1800. Haydn and Napoléon never met, but the French Emperor had an honour guard placed in front of Haydn’s Vienna residence when the French forces occupied the city in 1809, effectively making the then gravely ill composer a prisoner in his own home.

Next Saturday, the Mohawk College Singers, under the direction of David Holler, will be presenting the Nelson Mass at the McIntyre Theatre. It’s a work that Holler has always wanted to do, be it as a singer or a conductor, but never had the opportunity. Holler, who did his master’s degree at Westminster Choir College in New Jersey under renowned choral conductor Joseph Flummerfelt, said that the Nelson Mass was one of his professor’s favourite pieces.

In addition to this work, the Mohawk Singers will be presenting Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Dona nobis pacem (Grant us Peace). This work dates from 1936 and incorporates Vaughan Williams’s 1914 setting of Walt Whitman’s Dirge for Two Veterans. The composer had seen war up close, having served in the Royal Army Medical Corps in France in 1916. “He wrote the Dona nobis pacem as a kind of a warning to Europe. Don’t do this (wage war). It’s always bad,” said Holler. “The Agnus Dei begins with this beautiful soprano part, basically begging for peace, and then almost immediately goes into (Whitman’s) “Beat, beat drums!” which is this depiction of this explosive war beginning, that has no mercy whatsoever.”

Billed as Music for a Changing World, Holler says the concert is “an appropriate tribute to our troops overseas,” and will be “an homage to people who have been lost in the war.” A reduced orchestra of about ten musicians including pianist Cécile Desrosiers will be used. Scheduled soloists are soprano Melanie Conly, tenor Rory McGlynn, plus mezzo Deanna Boychuck and bass James Medeiros who are both pursuing performance degrees at the University of Western Ontario.

Normally, one would expect pieces such as these to be performed around Remembrance Day. “Unfortunately because of the way the school year works, November doesn’t give us enough time to practice such large works. So we decided to do it now where we had more time to do these pieces justice,” explained Holler. “It seems we never stop being in ‘times of war.’ This music is intended to comfort as well as to remind us of these terrible times in history.”

HPO fields Fiedler tribute

Showtime

What: HPO Pops tribute to Arthur Fiedler

When: Saturday, March 1 at 7:30 p.m.

Where: Hamilton Place

Cost: $36, $49, $59, senior $32, $45, $54, student $10, high school or younger $5

Call: 905-526-7756

You’ve got your John Williamses. Your Erich Kunzels. Your Keith Lockharts. But no name has been so synonymous with orchestral pops music than that of Arthur Fiedler.

Fiedler’s reputation was primarily forged over a forty-nine year period beginning in 1930 as the conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra. With his penchant for musical showmanship and business, he turned light classics into gold. At his death in 1979, the New York Times reported that he had sold upwards of 50 million recordings.

However, all that glittered was not gold. Among those recordings were albums with cheesy titles such as Fiedler on the Roof, Arthur Fiedler “Superstar,” and the ne plus ultra of travesty, Saturday Night Fiedler, an album featuring dreadful disco arrangements of classical pieces such as Musorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain, bastardized as Night on Disco Mountain.

In addition to his passion for music, Fiedler was an avid firefighting buff. He was made an honorary fireman or fire chief in close to 300 cities, including Hamilton in 1972.

Fiedler guest conducted the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra on a number of occasions. The first occurred on April 1, 1972 in McMaster’s Gymnasium where ducats cost $1.25. Other appearances followed in 1975.

With his mane of white hair and thick moustache, Fiedler’s public persona was that of the archetypal grandfather. But what was Fiedler really like as a conductor?

According to Jean-Norman Iadeluca, one of a handful of current HPO musicians to have played under Fiedler, “he always wanted to show you that he was in control.” But sometimes that approach backfired. Iadeluca still remembers his first encounter with the maestro. He’d been tipped off by percussionists in Montréal that Fiedler liked the bass drum heads loosened to produce a booming sound. Iadeluca got to rehearsal early that day and dutifully loosened the heads. What transpired thereafter was like a movie that had already played in Iadeluca’s head. Fiedler walked out on stage, picked up a drum mallet, and slugged the bass drum. “Ah good, usually it’s too tight,” said Fiedler to Iadeluca. Little did Fiedler realize that Iadeluca later tightened the head.

And then there was the time Fiedler didn’t like the sound of the snare drum at an HPO rehearsal. In an effort to please the maestro, the drummer tried another snare drum, but to no avail. Another percussionist then fetched another snare drum from his vehicle. Still not the sound Fiedler wanted. “Maestro, I know exactly what you want. I’ll bring it to rehearsal tomorrow,” said Iadeluca to Fiedler. The next day, Iadeluca made a point of asking Fiedler about the snare drum. Fiedler had forgotten all about it, but had the drummer play the “new” snare. The drummer, who had earlier been instructed by Iadeluca to play a loud, vigorous military-like rhythm on the snare, hit the mark with Fiedler. “That’s it. When I come here I want that drum,” exclaimed Fielder, who was totally unaware that it was the first drum he’d turned down the day before.

“We used to joke, two dynamics: loud and louder. He liked it loud and it had to be kind of showy,” said Iadeluca of Fiedler. “He was not like a Zubin Mehta, or a real classical music conductor. He was good at communicating what he wanted, but there wasn’t too much finesse.” There was one thing, however, in Fiedler’s favour. “You knew when he was here it was going to be very entertaining. And you’d sell out the place,” added Iadeluca.

On Saturday March 1, the HPO presents a Fiedler tribute. Thankfully, there won’t be any discombobulated discofied classics. But the concert will follow Fiedler’s traditional and entertaining programming manner. In the first half, there’ll be classics such as the Polonaise from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, Saint-Saëns’s Havanaise featuring the HPO’s new principal second violinist, Bethany Bergman, as well as items by Rossini, and Johann Strauss Sr. and Jr. The second half, of lighter fare, will include Leroy Anderson’s The Typewriter, and Bugler’s Holiday, a Sousa march, plus selections from My Fair Lady. If you clap long enough, you just might get the Colonel Bogey March as your encore. Hamilton based conductor Daniel Swift will be on the podium.

Bach Elgar sings the sins of Old Rococo

What: Rossini’s Petite Messe solennelle

Who: Howard Dyck and the Bach Elgar Choir

When: Saturday, February 16, at 8 p.m.

Where: Melrose United Church, 86 Homewood Ave.

Cost: $30, senior $25, student $15

Call: 905-527-5995

For the last thirty years of his life, Gioachino Rossini lived in the lap of luxury. He’d amassed a fortune, 2.5 million francs, from the almost forty operas he’d composed between 1809 and 1829. Retired from public life, he spent summers at his villa in Passy, then situated on the outskirts of Paris. For all intents and purposes, he was the patriarch of Italian opera, dubbing himself “Old Rococo,” a sobriquet conjuring up a period that had vanished long before he was born.

It was in Passy in 1863 that Rossini committed what he described as “the last mortal sin of my old age.” But what was he referring to? A duel at dawn? A daylight theft? A midnight tryst?

To these tempting trespasses, one must raise a threefold ‘no.’ The so-called “mortal sin” was his Petite Messe solennelle, Old Rococo stating so in his “confession” on the score’s second title page.

That page also contained Rossini’s odd performance requirements for the work: “Twelve singers of three sexes--men, women, and castrati…eight for the chorus and four for the solos, a total of twelve cherubim.” “It’s a little jab that he’s poking at the (Roman Catholic) church by not allowing women to sing,” said Howard Dyck, whose Bach Elgar Choir will perform the Petite Messe at Melrose United this Saturday. “He wasn’t too keen on the church music tradition of the nineteenth century where there were all these boys singing and women weren’t allowed to sing.”

Rossini’s figures of three and twelve had more to do with biblical number symbolism than performance practice. Case in point, at the Paris première, Old Rococo had twenty singers. Dyck will have about four times that number, and similar to the première, there won’t be a castrato in the bunch. (In case you’re wondering, the last castrato in the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel Choir died in 1922.) The soloists for the BEC concert will be Leslie Ann Bradley, Jennifer Enns Modolo, Eric Shaw, and Sean Watson.

Equally quirky is Rossini’s original instrumentation: two pianos and a harmonium. Dyck located a harmonium tuned to A-440, and used it in the performances of the Messe that he conducted two weeks ago in Kitchener and Cambridge with his Grand Philharmonic Choir. Imre Olah will reprise his duties at the console, though at Melrose, Dyck will use only one pianist, Daniel Durksen.

Though “petite” in terms of instrumentation, its eighty minute duration hardly classifies it as small. And neither is the Petite Messe solemn. “It’s such a cheerful piece,” said Dyck. “It’s a perfect kind of piece for the middle of the winter. It’s so incredibly Mediterranean.”

But the Messe isn’t just some expression of carefree Mediterranean piety, suitable to warm the cockles of hearts in frosty climes. “The opening Kyrie is Palestrina all the way,” stated Dyck. “I have to smile when I’m conducting it because the choir is singing in this absolutely pure Palestrina style and the piano is going um–chug um-um-um-chug. It’s so totally different in a way from Renaissance vocal style.” For Dyck, the double fugues in the Cum Sancto Spiritu and the Credo are the heart and soul of the work. “I think he’s saying to all of us, ‘Listen, I may have written all of these 39 operas, but I’m a lot more sophisticated than some of you may have thought I was’.”

Chopin's passion laid bare

“A cannon buried in flowers,” is how Robert Schumann described the Polish pianist-composer, Fryderyk Chopin. Full of fire and charm, Chopin’s music is a crucible where, on the best of occasions, a performer’s virtuosity and expressiveness ignite to produce sonic poetry.

On Friday, February 15 at 8 p.m., Chopin’s pianistic ‘poetry’ will be on display as the Hamilton Conservatory for the Arts, 126 James St. S., presents The Letters and Music of Chopin with pianist Valerie Tryon, narrator Alan Walker, and speakers Jacqueline Templeton-Muir, and Robert Latimer.

Based on a script written by Walker, the concert-entertainment traces Chopin’s personal and artistic development, from the child prodigy who slept with wine corks between his fingers in hopes that it would widen his hand span, to Paris’s dazzling salons of the 1830s and 1840s where he hobnobbed with de Musset, Delacroix, Balzac, the Rothschilds, and many others. It was in France that Chopin met his muse Amantine-Aurore Dupin, better known under her pen name, George Sand.

The Chopin-Sand affair is a love story gone bad, a relationship that soured when Chopin took the side of Sand’s daughter Solange in the sordid intrigues surrounding the latter’s marriage. Among the correspondence Walker has included is the letter Sand wrote to Chopin dismissing him from her life. “It’s vicious,” said Templeton-Muir of Sand’s letter. “She’s very unkind.” In spite of Sand’s big kiss-off, Templeton-Muir is convinced of Sand’s earlier influence on Chopin. “I’m sure she gave him a wonderful confidence. She brought a lot out that wouldn’t have come out had it not been for her.”

Included among the works that Tryon will perform are the Revolutionary Etude, the G Minor Ballade, the Nocturne op. 55, the Polonaise in A Flat, and the Barcarolle op. 60. “He was a wonderful composer for the piano,” said Tryon whose three CD set Chopin: A Chronological Journey was recently released on the Appian label. “There’s a certain tunefulness, but also a clarity of thought that comes through. It’s a direct form of communication. It’s not frilled up with things even though he does lots of technical stuff around the tunes.” Tickets are $27, senior $22, student $15. Call 905-528-4020.

Look for a lively Dead House: There's an interesting backstory to this Czech opera

Showtime

What: Janacek’s From the House of the Dead

With: Alexander Briger and the Canadian Opera Company

Where: Four Seasons Centre, 145 Queen St. W., Toronto

When: tonight at 7:30 p.m., running until February 22

Cost: $60 - $275, youth $30 - $275

Call: 1-800-250-4653

Alexander Briger comes by his interest in Leos Janacek honestly. No, the thirty-seven year old Australian-born London-based conductor isn’t related to the Czech composer. But Briger is the nephew of Sir Charles Mackerras, the renowned Australian conductor and Janacek specialist.

Last season, Briger shared podium duties with his uncle for the English National Opera’s staging of Janacek’s The Makropulos Case. Earlier, the two had worked together on the Royal Academy of Music’s production of Janacek’s The Cunning Little Vixen.

“At rehearsals for any of these operas, he (Mackerras) would always get me to conduct the piano and the singers at production calls,” said Briger last week from Toronto where he was readying to conduct the Canadian Opera Company’s production of Janacek’s From the House of the Dead which opens tonight. “He would always sit behind me and tell me, ‘Give a bit of time here. That’s difficult for the third horn, give him a good cue.’ He’s taken me through the scores and explained to me exactly what Janacek was going through, all about the orchestration, the whole bit. Talking to him is like talking to Janacek himself. It’s incredible how he just seems to know everything about this man, and what everything’s supposed to represent within the music.”

While Briger admits that he learned much from his uncle just by watching his rehearsals, he considers composer-conductor Pierre Boulez more his teacher. In 2000, Briger was selected to participate in Boulez’s masterclasses in Aix-en-Provence, France with the Ensemble Intercontemporain. “He took a shine to me for some reason,” said Briger of Boulez. “He taught me how to do contemporary music, and also just the basic techniques of conducting. He’s so clear.” Briger noted that Boulez, too, had now taken up conducting From the House of the Dead, chalking up eleven performances last year in Vienna, Amsterdam, and Aix-en-Provence.

Janacek’s opera is based on Dostoyevsky’s Memoirs from the Dead House. Set in nineteenth century Siberia, Dostoyevsky’s fictional account of the lives and tales of prison camp inmates progressed from one character sketch to the next. Janacek wrote his own libretto, though made changes to Dostoyevsky’s text for dramatic effect. Goryanchikov (Robert Pomakov in the COC’s production) is a political prisoner, and not a murderer as in Dostoyevsky. At the end of the opera, he unexpectedly receives his freedom. In the novel, he serves out his ten year sentence. In Act III, fellow prisoner Shishkov (Pavlo Hunka) sings a lengthy monologue of how he murdered his lover Akulka after she was supposedly dishonoured by his rival, Filka (Robert Künzli). In a twist not found in Dostoyevsky, Janacek’s Shishkov suddenly recognizes that the inmate Luka, who has just died on a nearby bed, was actually Filka.

Briger recognizes that even with the opera’s compelling music and arresting orchestration, From the House of the Dead may not be as popular as Tosca which is running concurrently at the COC this month. “The problem with From the House of the Dead, it’s very hard to put bums on seats because everyone’s expecting a love duet. Well, there’s nothing like that. There’s no women in it at all except for a prostitute and she doesn’t last very long,” explained Briger. There is however, a more prominent character, Alyeya, which is a pant role for a soprano (Lauren Segal). “I think audiences are a bit shy of this work,” continued Briger, “plus the fact that it’s so ridiculously difficult to put together."

That said, then why did Richard Bradshaw, the COC’s late general director, program the work? (Bradshaw was to have conducted it, but passed away last August.) “He was quite adventurous, wasn’t he?” opined Briger of Bradshaw. “He loved Janacek. I think he was planning to do a cycle of Janacek. Just by speaking to people, I know that he absolutely adored this opera. He really wanted to do it.”

While the opera’s subject matter may challenge some audiences, that’s nothing compared to the challenges facing the conductor of Janacek’s score. Janacek died in 1928 before being able to check the proofs. That task was left to his students, Bretislav Bakala and Osvald Chlubna, who changed the opera’s ending, and did more than tinker with Janacek’s orchestration. The conducting score that they prepared for the 1930 première was later given to conductor Rafael Kubelik who in 1962 excised some of Bakala’s accretions. Briger says that Kubelik then gave that score to Mackerras, who used it to conduct the English première as well as to record with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. Though Briger has brought that historic score with him to Toronto, he won’t conduct from it. Instead, he’ll use the critical-practical score and parts prepared for Universal Edition by Mackerras and John Tyrrell from Janacek’s original score, a document which Briger says his uncle has in his possession at his London home. This critical-practical score and parts were last used by Boulez. However, Briger has discovered some unpractical surprises therein. “We’ve noticed, even he (Boulez) missed lots of things, lots of wrong notes in it,” stated Briger. “It’s quite incredible. Some things that I found quite shocking in a way. I mean really wrong rhythms and things like that. I don’t know if the players corrected it themselves, but I doubt it very much.” Briger has told Mackerras of these printed errors, and both can only surmise that they were the result of sloppy proofreading. “The job’s mine to make sure that it all goes to Universal Edition, and it gets corrected once and for all so there’s never any mistake anymore,” said Briger. For more on the COC’s From the House of the Dead log onto www.coc.ca.

Classical Calendar

Tomorrow at 7:30 p.m., chamberWORKS! performs at the Dofasco Centre for the Arts, 190 King William St. Tickets: $30, $25, senior $25, $20, student $5. Call 905-522-7529.

This Wednesday at 8 and 10 p.m., Darcy Hepner and the Wednesday Night Big Band play The Corktown, 175 Young St. Cover: $7, student $5. Call 905-572-9242.

On Friday, Feb. 8 at 8 p.m., pianist Valerie Tryon performs at McMaster’s Convocation Hall. Tickets: $17, senior $12, student $5. Call 905-525-9140 ext. 24246. Tryon also plays on Friday, Feb. 15 at 8 p.m., along with speakers Jacqueline Templeton-Muir and Robert Latimer, plus narrator Alan Walker in The Letters and Music of Chopin at the Hamilton Conservatory for the Arts, 126 James St. S. Tickets: $27, senior $22, student $15. Call 905-528-4020.

Also next Friday at 8 p.m., the Arrogant Worms perform at Hillfield Strathallan’s Artsplex, 299 Fennell Ave. W. Tickets: $30, student $20. Call 905-389-1367 ext. 170.

On Thursday, Feb. 14 at 8 p.m., chanteuse Sarena Paton presents A Valentine Celebration at Hamilton Place's Studio Theatre. Tickets: $25 including coffee/tea and dessert. Call 905-527-7666 or 905-627-2038.