SNS offers huge works by Brahms, Charke
09/04/11 15:10 Filed in: Press
By STEPHEN PEDERSEN
Concert Review
© Sat, Apr 9, 2011, Chronicle Herald, Halifax
Derek Charke and Bernhard Gueller Backstage after the premiere of Symphony No. 1
It was blockbuster night for Symphony Nova Scotia on Thursday at the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium.
Only two pieces filled the program, which will be repeated Sunday at 2 p.m., the world premiere of Derek Charke’s Symphony No. 1 Transient Energies and the great Brahms Violin Concerto.
Both challenged the limits of possibility, though by now the Brahms, written in 1878 and initially considered unplayable, is standard repertoire for college level violinists.
Certainly concertmaster Robert Uchida made it sound, well, not easy, but formidable still, though he transformed each of the profound technical challenges into artistic opportunities for ever-deeper musical expression.
Charke’s challenge was to integrate sounds associated with energy production from wind, water, oil and internal combustion, into a contemporary symphonic palette of instrumental colour, rhythmic invention and electronic manipulation.
And he had to guide his audience’s attention span, challenged even by the sweetly sonorous soundscape of the Brahms and much more so by contemporary music where the safety rope of intelligible melody has been heartlessly swept away.
Charke took care of this, partly, by means of unexpected changes of direction and tireless building and rebuilding musical momentum, all packaged into a tightly knit, four-movement score of unusual length.
His ear for instrumental tone as well as the shimmering timbres of natural sounds of automobiles, wind turbines, flowing water, gurgling oil, shovelled coal and the clatter of trains over buzzing steel rails is amazingly acute and all-inclusive.
Charke’s ability to extract rhythmic episodes from subtle sonic hints was paid for with hours of listening and the compilation of 450 sound files, some reproduced as recorded, others subjected to state-of-the-art digital manipulation, and all of it accumulated into a mind-boggling mass of musical material.
Consistently and forcefully, Charke marshalled them into order, while maintaining firm artistic control of imagery, shape and playability.
Moments of extraordinary tranquility, as in the mystical vision at the end of the hectic fourth movement, echoed through the Mahler-esque cello solo, played so expressively by principal cellist Norman Adams in the melancholy first movement.
The sound image of cars swooping by on a busy Highway 101 outside Kentville began the first movement and returned at the end of the fourth to diminish into the silence of vanishing momentum, a strangely sad sound.
The orchestra played the score like the musical Olympians they are when meeting such a challenge. Bernhard Gueller, the symphony’s music director, maintained control with an extremely light but unalterably sure touch.
Resident conductor Martin MacDonald sat at a small table back of the cellos, furnished with a notebook computer screen and a controller with eight pads on it that allowed him to play the prepared electronic score with the timing of a trained musician.
After intermission, the opening measures of the Brahms concerto, radiant with warmth and dark-tone colour, took us into the 19th century sound world as quickly as a click of the mouse on a computer.
Before long Uchida, Gueller and the orchestra revealed the details woven by Brahms into musical tapestries alive with subtle colour and melodic variation.
The controversy that raged around Brahms’ head in his day between his "absolute" music and the "program" music of Berlioz and Liszt is long gone. Yet, in a curious way, the complexities of Brahms’ musical invention, and the pictures deliberately painted by the tone painting of some of his contemporaries, was unselfconsciously combined in Charke’s music of more than a century later.
Whatever energized that somewhat abstract debate in the musical politics of the 19th century has yielded, in the 21st, to the growing confidence of contemporary composers in the art of organic musical invention, where everything is made new, and impossibility is seen only as opportunity.
(spedersen@ns.sympatico.ca)
Stephen Pedersen is a freelance arts writer who lives in Halifax.
Concert Review
© Sat, Apr 9, 2011, Chronicle Herald, Halifax
Derek Charke and Bernhard Gueller Backstage after the premiere of Symphony No. 1
It was blockbuster night for Symphony Nova Scotia on Thursday at the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium.
Only two pieces filled the program, which will be repeated Sunday at 2 p.m., the world premiere of Derek Charke’s Symphony No. 1 Transient Energies and the great Brahms Violin Concerto.
Both challenged the limits of possibility, though by now the Brahms, written in 1878 and initially considered unplayable, is standard repertoire for college level violinists.
Certainly concertmaster Robert Uchida made it sound, well, not easy, but formidable still, though he transformed each of the profound technical challenges into artistic opportunities for ever-deeper musical expression.
Charke’s challenge was to integrate sounds associated with energy production from wind, water, oil and internal combustion, into a contemporary symphonic palette of instrumental colour, rhythmic invention and electronic manipulation.
And he had to guide his audience’s attention span, challenged even by the sweetly sonorous soundscape of the Brahms and much more so by contemporary music where the safety rope of intelligible melody has been heartlessly swept away.
Charke took care of this, partly, by means of unexpected changes of direction and tireless building and rebuilding musical momentum, all packaged into a tightly knit, four-movement score of unusual length.
His ear for instrumental tone as well as the shimmering timbres of natural sounds of automobiles, wind turbines, flowing water, gurgling oil, shovelled coal and the clatter of trains over buzzing steel rails is amazingly acute and all-inclusive.
Charke’s ability to extract rhythmic episodes from subtle sonic hints was paid for with hours of listening and the compilation of 450 sound files, some reproduced as recorded, others subjected to state-of-the-art digital manipulation, and all of it accumulated into a mind-boggling mass of musical material.
Consistently and forcefully, Charke marshalled them into order, while maintaining firm artistic control of imagery, shape and playability.
Moments of extraordinary tranquility, as in the mystical vision at the end of the hectic fourth movement, echoed through the Mahler-esque cello solo, played so expressively by principal cellist Norman Adams in the melancholy first movement.
The sound image of cars swooping by on a busy Highway 101 outside Kentville began the first movement and returned at the end of the fourth to diminish into the silence of vanishing momentum, a strangely sad sound.
The orchestra played the score like the musical Olympians they are when meeting such a challenge. Bernhard Gueller, the symphony’s music director, maintained control with an extremely light but unalterably sure touch.
Resident conductor Martin MacDonald sat at a small table back of the cellos, furnished with a notebook computer screen and a controller with eight pads on it that allowed him to play the prepared electronic score with the timing of a trained musician.
After intermission, the opening measures of the Brahms concerto, radiant with warmth and dark-tone colour, took us into the 19th century sound world as quickly as a click of the mouse on a computer.
Before long Uchida, Gueller and the orchestra revealed the details woven by Brahms into musical tapestries alive with subtle colour and melodic variation.
The controversy that raged around Brahms’ head in his day between his "absolute" music and the "program" music of Berlioz and Liszt is long gone. Yet, in a curious way, the complexities of Brahms’ musical invention, and the pictures deliberately painted by the tone painting of some of his contemporaries, was unselfconsciously combined in Charke’s music of more than a century later.
Whatever energized that somewhat abstract debate in the musical politics of the 19th century has yielded, in the 21st, to the growing confidence of contemporary composers in the art of organic musical invention, where everything is made new, and impossibility is seen only as opportunity.
(spedersen@ns.sympatico.ca)
Stephen Pedersen is a freelance arts writer who lives in Halifax.
