2009 Pender Harbour Chamber Festival In Review

Friday August 22 Review
David Gordon Duke, Vancouver Sun

Sounds and Scenery: Pender Harbour Chamber Festival Day One
 
By David Gordon Duke, Vancouver SunAugust 22, 2009
  
For the last five years the Pender Harbour Chamber Music Festival has offered an intensive weekend of classical music to Sunshine Coast locals and visitors. This summer's event opened Friday with a free afternoon concert ("Chamber Music Doesn't Bite") and an evening program devoted to the music of Mendelssohn.
Pender Harbour, the collective name for a cluster of communities on the northern stretch of the Sunshine Coast, offers a remarkable venue. The festival setting, right out of a B.C. Binning or E.J. Hughes canvas, couldn't be more coastal: a small concert hall set on a outcropping just above an arbutus-fringed cove.
The idea of summer music in spectacular surroundings is always magical. The reality of offering a quality event away from city infrastructure can be more daunting: everything from finding corporate sponsorships, arranging effective publicity, and myriad other details too tedious to recount, can turn good ideas into logistical headaches. Fortunately for the loyal and enthusiastic PHCF audience, the project seems to be thriving, thanks to a committed cohort of stakeholders.
Though concentrated, there's nothing small about the scope of this year's fifth festival. Friday's Mendelssohn evening included offerings by a cadre of VSO principals with veteran bassoonist George Zukerman in a wind's only arrangement of the famous Scherzo from Midsummer Night's Dream; Zukerman and festival founder Alexander Tselyakov tossed in a Song Without Words, arranged for bassoon and piano as well.
The evening's core repertoire included the D major Quartet Op. 44, No. 1, tackled by what amounted to an all-star string quartet: violinists Livia Sohn, and Geoff Nuttall, violist Barry Shiffman and cellist Matt Haimovitz. Nuttall and Shiffman have long associations with the St. Lawrence String Quartet, and that ensembles's inimitable "take no prisoners" style flavoured this particular interpretation.
It's unrealistic to expect any ad hoc group to perform with the polish of a pre-formed ensemble; one-time-only ensembles offer freshness and vitality. And in this instance, intensity-all the more infectious given the intimately scaled hall.
Nuttall and Haimovitz were joined by Brandon-based Tselyakov to end the evening with the popular D minor Piano Trio. Here tempi were on the cautious side, which dulled some of the nervous brilliance that characterizes the florid and flashy piano part. Even so, the relatively laid back approach favoured cellist Haimovitz, who had the time and breathing space to demonstrate a particular affinity for the Mendelssohn style: lots of emotion, but a fine degree of sensitivity touched with just a hint of detachment.
The festival continues with three events Saturday and a grand wrap up concert Sunday afternoon.
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Saturday evening, August 23 Review
David Gordon Duke, Vancouver Sun

Stephen Chatman a highlight of Pender Harbour Chamber Music Festival
 
By David Gordon Duke, Special to The SunAugust 23, 2009
  
For five years now the Pender Harbour Chamber Music Festival has brought high-quality classical performances to locals and visitors to the Sunshine Coast. On Saturday evening this significant accomplishment was celebrated with the premiere of a newly commissioned work for piano trio by Vancouver composer Stephen Chatman, in tandem with Francis Poulenc's extraordinary Sextet for piano and winds.
To eke out the program we were given two minor works: Dvorak's affable, unremarkable Terzetto played by Livia Sohn and Geoff Nuttal, violins and Barry Shiffman, viola, and Villa Lobos' Assobio a Játo for flute and cello-thin stuff, but given a shining performance by VSO principal flute Christie Reside and cellist Matt Haimovitz.
Poulenc's Sextet, performed by a group of Vancouver winds and pianist and festival stalwart Alexander Tselyakov, is very much in the '30s style and taste, and masquerades as musical high comedy. Despite clever tunes and lively posturing, its bite is far worse than its bark: it has a heart of real darkness, made all the more intense by the slightly claustrophobic environment of a tiny and very full concert venue. Bravo to all involved for programming it.
And bravo, too, for the Chatman commission, titled, obviously enough, the Pender Harbour Suite. Chatman embraces our collective fascination with coastal imagery, giving the sequence of six short movements titles like "Mountains, rocks and red cedars" and "Mist, romance."
For some time Chatman has walked a fine line between "intellectual" and "popular" musical styles with agility. His new work continues this trend, juxtaposing loud/fast movements with driving rhythms and dissonant (though hardly experimental or advanced) sonorities with quieter sections that are more sensual, even sentimental.
The work is sure-footed and purposefully paced, a major addition to the trio repertoire. It says much about Chatman's artistic confidence, not to mention the festival's sense of adventure, to report that the work was received by Saturday's audience with rapturous enthusiasm.
Premiere performances inevitably have their rough edges, but violinist Nuttall, cellist Haimovitz and pianist Tselyakov did Chatman, and the festival, proud.
Special to The Sun
© Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun

Coast Reporter August 28, 2009
How suite it was
Jan DeGrass/Arts & Entertainment Writer
posted: August 28, 2009

Sechelt - The Pender Harbour Chamber Music Festival has always been a class act. In its five years of making music, founder and host Lise Aylmer has kept it on track. Aylmer bows out this year from the organizing committee that has taken over her life for the past half decade, leaving it in good hands. The momentum generated by co-founder and artistic director Alexander Tselyakov will continue to bring virtuoso musicians to this lively corner of the Coast.

For this fifth annual event, a new Yamaha concert grand piano sat on a new stage in a refurbished performance centre. That would have been excitement enough, but in addition, an especially commissioned piece of music, Pender Harbour Suite, by composer Stephen Chatman received its world premiere last Saturday, Aug. 22 to a full house. The dynamic work performed by Tselyakov on piano, Geoff Nuttall on violin and Matt Haimovitz on cello pulled the audience to their feet in rapt admiration.  

In a prior interview, open to the public, with Vancouver Sun music reviewer David Duke, Chatman spoke about the work.

“This is a very inspiring place,” he said of Pender Harbour prompting him to evoke nature in his 17-minute suite. “I'd never written for this medium before (a small piano trio) and found it very challenging. My solution was to use double stops to make it sound more like a chamber orchestra.”

He noted it was a difficult piece written for first rate performers, and the trio bore out his claim. Chatman spoke of the creative process in what he calls “a lonely profession.”

He spends about half his time teaching at the University of British Columbia where he is professor and head of composition. But Duke called him a composer who is in the community rather than the ivory tower and therefore the perfect choice for this commissioned work.

There was much anticipation at the evening concert that also featured an opening Terzetto for two violins and viola by Antonin Dvorak with Livia Sohn, Barry Shiffman and Geoff Nuttall performing superbly.

“This is what chamber music is all about. I can reach out and touch you at the back of the room,” Nuttall told the audience.

The concert also included a delightful and hummable sextet for piano and wind instruments by the French composer Francis Poulenc in which the listener could clearly hear its relationship to jazz.  

Chatman's piece, by contrast, is dynamic and marked by vivid juxtapositions. The first movement entitled Mountains, Rocks and Red Cedars increases in intensity with rising musical lines that gives a sense of climbing, possibly a hike on nearby Mount Daniel. The second movement, Phosphorescent Bay at Midnight uses pizzicato (plucking of strings) to catch the flickers of light upon the ocean.

But instead of the water moving from the peaceful bay into the raging tidal rapids of the fourth movement, as one would expect it to flow, the pace changes to slower and lyrical. This movement could well become a choral selection, Chatman noted. As the strings saw busily, the music switches back to the dark side. The sixth movement, Silver wings, is a metaphor for many images within the local landscape and the piece concludes loudly and decisively.  

Festival performer George Zukerman called the Chatman piece “very strong.” This was praise, indeed, from a musician whose own career is an iconic one. His ongoing efforts as an impresario have helped to tour musicians throughout Canada and the world, but mostly he is acknowledged as the man who put the bassoon on the musical map as a solo instrument. At this year's festival Zukerman presided with his bassoon in several concerts including Saturday afternoon's program that included two Inuit chants learned while touring up north.

Next year's festival, Aug. 20 to 22, shows signs of being equally adventurous - ready to push the boundaries of chamber music once more.

The Local
Thursday August 27
"A pristine landscape of ocean, inlets, snow-capped mountains, majestic trees and abundant wildlife” - such were the words used by world-renowed Canadian composer Stephen Chatman to describe the source of his inspiration for his latest work. The piece was commissioned by the Chamber Music Festival for its fifth anniversary and received its world premiere to rapturous and prolonged applause.

This was not the only treat for the music lovers in attendance; ten outstanding musicians from as far away as Montreal and Palo Alto, California enthralled them. Beginning on August 21 with a free concert called “Chamber Music Doesn't Bite!” donated by the musicians, and ending with a superb concert on Sunday afternoon, the weekend provided a number of surprises and some well-loved favourites.

Friday evening's concert was a celebration of the 200th birthday of Felix Mendelssohn and offered a variety of works by this well-known composer. The selections resonated with the audience who rewarded the musicians with warm and enthusiastic applause. Saturday afternoon's focus was on Joseph Haydn in recognition of the 200th anniversary of his death. Mixed in were some unusual selections that entranced the listeners: Inuit chants, a modern look at an ancient Japanese melody and a Chinese folk song.

Saturday evening featured the performance of “Pender Harbour Suite” that followed Intermezzo,an interview by David Duke, a regular contributor to the Vancouver Sun, with composer Stephen Chatman. Other selections to round out the evening included pieces by Dvorak, Poulenc
and Villa-Lobos. These offered the diversity that was the signature of the entire event.

The final concert on Sunday featured works by Telemann, Mozart and Brahms, composers from three different musical eras. The performances presented a pastiche of styles and forms, representative of their times. Throughout the weekend, the musicians, with Alexander Tselyakov as Artistic Director, outdid themselves with their lyrical and emotive interpretations of the music.

Submitted

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