New Music treat after VSO’s rocky visions

by David Gordon Duke

SYMPHONY AT THE ROUNDHOUSE
Conducted by Alain Trudel, with Camille Churchfield, flute
Roundhouse Community Centre, Jan. 21

EONTA
New music
Vancouver Playhouse, Jan 22

Though doubtless unplanned, two very different programs gave Vancouver audiences an ad hoc festival of new music this weekend. On Friday the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s second Roundhouse series got off to a rocky start with Musical Visions of the Planet Earth, a program ineffectually curated and, for the greater part, indifferently performed by a variety of largish ensembles made up of VSO players.

The evening of “desert, rain, sun, sky, space and snow” began with an example of Hildegard Westercamp’s eco-electronics, Cricket Voice, a sentimental holdover from the soundscape fad of the '60s and '70s. Toru Takemitsu’s Rain Coming is a take-it-or-leave-it- work: fans find a wealth of timberal epiphanies, detractors hear it as phonetically learned (but misunderstood) Debussy. Brandon composer T. Patrick Carrabré’s Chase the Sun is B-grade TV music, lumpily orchestrated, crudely conceived. Novice Jordan Nobles’s Aurora, a sprawling collection of pretty gestures, has moments of character, but quickly outwears its welcome.

VSO composer-in-residence Jeffrey Ryan’s own flute concerto Cruithne achieved instant masterpiece stature in comparison to the rest of the program. Elegantly premiered by soloist Camille Churchfield, it’s a work of professional polish with moments of orchestrational spark.

Ultimately, however, the solo parts amount to little more than a compendium of 20th-century flute clichés, and the work as a whole seems cold and contrived. The evening ended with a whimper in the form of Michael Torke’s drab, derivative essay for string orchestra, December. Messy, dispirited playing in the unforgivingly dry acoustics of the Roundhouse made it sound as though the parts had been handed out that afternoon.

Saturday’s Vancouver New Music program at the Playhouse demonstrated an entirely different level of taste. Director Giorgio Magnanensi commissioned locals John Korsrud and Rodney Sharman to complement recent works by Mauricio Kagel and Heiner Goebbels around the keystone of the program, Iannis Xenakis’s 1964 “new music classic” Eonta.

Korsrud’s The Shadow of Your Smile proved a particularly electrifying starter, full of the brash, edgy exuberance that is his trademark. Kagel’s Die Stücke der Windrose: Westen was filled with witty juxtapositions and snatches of incongruous but deftly combined musics, vibrant and inordinately entertaining. Sharman’s Dry Leaves, the most lyrical piece on the first half, displayed a formal adroitness and a keen ear for delicately combining and layering ephemeral colours and textures.

The second half began with Goebbels’s 1989 politico/ philosophical rant Befreiung — a example of the engaged, high-volume European music that so often transplants poorly to North American contexts. But the gem of the second half was yet to come: after 40 years, it might have seemed unnecessary to bring Xenakis’s Eonta to the VNMS audience. Surely the small, specialist audience that cares about this work is well familiar with it?

As it turned out, Eonta is brilliant and effective live.

Pianist Marc Couroux and five local brass players navigated the work’s unbelievable complexities with aplomb, guided by Magnanensi’s committed, effective conducting.

It proved the wisdom of Magnanensi’s vision: quality and innovation can happily coexist.

Vancouver Sun
25 Jan. 2005

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