What the Critics Say

Toronto Summer Chamber Music Festival
July 5 - 8, 2005
Glenn Gould Studio

Summer fest wets our musical desert
July 6, 2005
Toronto Star

WILLIAM LITTLER

The musical desert known as Toronto in the summer gave birth to a welcome oasis last night, when the Toronto Summer Chamber Music Festival presented its debut concert on the stage of the CBC's Glenn Gould Studio.

As festivals go, it is a small one in the European manner, with only four concerts in as many days, and nothing like the multi-concert Ottawa Chamber Music Festival that has put Toronto to shame for the past few years, but it is a new beginning and a promising one at that.

Contrary to one of its press releases, it is not "the city's first and only summer festival of chamber music," as anyone can testify who attended the hyperbolically named Toronto International Chamber Music Festival last summer and the year before.

It appears, however, to be the real thing, thematically programmed rather than a miscellaneous collection of pieces and performed at an appropriate level, if concert number one can be considered its standard setter.

Concert number one was devoted to seldom-heard music by three composers of unusual promise who died young and only partially fulfilled, as well as to the Canadian debut of Belgium's Arriaga String Quartet, whose founding first violinist, Michael Guttman, doubles as the festival's artistic director.

Dubbed the Spanish Mozart, Juan Arriaga published three string quartets two years before his death at the premature age of 20 and the first of them, the Quartet in D minor, provides a reason for calling him the Spanish early Beethoven as well, with its wide ranging harmonies.

The Belgian foursome played the music in a way that acknowledged its classical roots as well as it harmonic adventures, before going on to Guillaume Lekeu's single movement Meditation, whose inspiration was obviously not early but late Beethoven.

Lekeu lived only four years longer than Arriaga and his debt was to his teacher César Franck rather than Beethoven in his Violin Sonata in G Major, a passionately rhetorical late romantic work in which the Canadian pianist Richard Raymond supported Michael Guttman's vibrato-laden, convincingly extroverted solo violin.

Raymond himself proved the star of the concluding work, the posthumously published Sextet for piano, string quartet and double bass (Toronto violist Douglas Perry and bassist Joel Quarrington joined the ensemble), written by Felix Mendelssohn at the precocious age of 15 and a floridly decorated piano concerto in all but name.

I can't remember the last time I heard it, which is exactly why it belongs in a festival.

All-Brahms evening plays all to the good
July 7, 2005
Toronto Star

WILLIAM LITTLER

Composers tend not to be the most generous critics of their contemporaries, which helps explain how, in a vintage 1886 Viennese newspaper, Hugo Wolf could call Johannes Brahms "the greatest bluffer of this century and of all future millennia."

By 2005, Gary Kulesha could take a markedly different view. In introducing a Gryphon Trio performance of Brahms's Piano Trio in C, Op. 87 at the Jane Mallett Theatre last month, the Toronto composer described the bearded notesmith as one of the most important composers in the history of western music.

It was easier to agree with Kulesha than with Wolf last night, when the inaugural Toronto Summer Chamber Music Festival presented as its second concert in the CBC's Glenn Gould Studio an all-Brahms program consisting of two of the now acknowledged masterworks of the 19th century chamber music literature, the Sextet No. 2 in G Major, Op. 36 and the Quintet No. 2 in G Major, Op. 111.

If neither work is heard all that often, it is largely because string
sextets are harder to assemble than trios or quartets and so are quintets involving two violas.

Both performances last night involved as core ensemble a foursome new to our shores, the Arriaga String Quartet from Belgium. Founded by first violinist Michael Guttman in 1980 in honour of the Spanish composer Juan Cristomo de Arriaga, and including as well violinist Ivo Lintermans, violist Marc Tooten and cellist Luc Tooten, the quartet recently recorded all three of Arriaga's quartets on the ASV label.

All those years of playing together have given the Belgian musicians a collective sound that was particularly evident in the Quintet, a work Brahms intended as his valedictory composition and wrote in the mellowness of his advancing years.

If the playing in the Sextet sounded less homogenized, with some wiriness of tone evident in some of the furious passage work of the fast movements, the character of the music provided at least part of the explanation.

The extra players in this case included Canada's most distinguished solo violist, now living in London, Rivka Golani, as well as one of our finest young cellists, Yegor Dyachkov, who dug into the Hungarian rhythms of the scherzo movement with at least as much vigour as their Belgian colleagues.

The Belgians will return tonight and Friday as participants in the
festival's final two concerts, the first devoted to composers inspired by folk music, the second to French music. Using them as the basic ensemble for the festival is proving to be an interesting idea, validated by the quality of their playing.

As for the quality of Brahms's music, it seems to be better recognized now that it is no longer heard in opposition to the music of Richard Wagner. Listeners don't feel obligated to take sides these days. After all, even Arnold Schoenberg was able to call Brahms a progressive.

Dvorák ‹ that's all folks
July 8, 2005
Toronto Star

JOHN TERAUDS

One always hopes that an entire concert program is memorable. But sometimes it is one piece that justifies the price of admission and the time spent.

Such was the case last night for the third of four concerts in the first Toronto Summer Chamber Music Festival at Glenn Gould Studio. Each evening's program was themed by artistic director Michael Guttman, a professional violinist and member of the Belgium-based Arriaga Quartet.

It is this quartet that provides the interpretive backbone for the festival, presenting last night a series of pieces assembled under the umbrella of "Composers Inspired by Folk Music."

There wasn't much room in the world of Western classical music for folk idioms before the middle of the 19th century. But with the rise of nationalism throughout Europe, there was increasing demand for the sounds of the people in symphony halls and salons.

Czech composer Antonin Dvorák is probably one of the most accessible and highly developed purveyors of 19th-century folk sensibility. His Piano Quintet No. 2 in A Major, Op. 81, is also a gorgeous piece of late-romantic composition (from 1887).

This piece can be played delicately and with reserve. Or it can be a hearty, full-blooded ode to the Czech spirit. The Arriagans ‹Guttman, violinist Ivo Lintermans, violist Marc Tooten and Luc Tooten on cello ‹ joined by pianist Richard Raymond constructed a musical monument to Dvorák's compositional inventiveness as the concert closer. And it was good.

The quartet played two pieces by Argentinean Astor Piazzolla, but they were short and too varied to sustain a thought or a mood. The same held for two pieces by Ernest Bloch to open the evening.

There were four Dvorák Miniatures for two violins and viola, too, but they are slight works.

The festival concludes tonight with a varied program of late-19th-century French music.