Chamber Music Festival

You may have noticed that I haven't updated my blog in the last few days. Well, I'll more than make up for it in the next two weeks with post on average twice every three days. The catch is that we're taking a break from politics and going into music.

For the next 14 days, I'll be posting on this blog reviews of concerts at the Ottawa Chamber Music Festival. For those of you who live in Ottawa, I strongly encourage you to attend a few concerts yourself as the music is really wonderful. And for those of you who don't, well, I'm sure some of those Chamber groups will be coming to your city in the next year!

Brass Bounty, Saturday July 26^th

Tonight’s programme was all about having fun: easy, tuneful music performed by a hearty brass band with the simple goal of giving the audience a pleasurable evening.

Things kicked off appropriately with Spirit of Brass, a fun and thoroughly unmemorable piece written by Uruguayan composer Enrique Crespo. I say unmemorable not in a pejorative way, but rather as a compliment: much of the charm of tonight’s pieces came from the fact that they were light, easy to take in, and yes, each one more unmemorable than the others!
Next on the list was a 7 movement extravaganza inspired by the works of John Aubrey. Each movement depicted a short story written by the English author, and if outlandish isn’t a strong enough adjective to describe them, let’s just say that we went from a sick patient thrown from his doctor’s office into the Thames, to a rude son slapping his father’s best friend, to a young man joining the Turkish army, and back again to the doctor’s office. Composer Simon Willis clearly had a lot of fun with this piece and teased the audience by sprinkling his tuneful melodies with unexpected wrong notes. He also created voice and tempo contrasts so exaggerated that they passed the point of grotesque and became simply funny!
We ended the first half of the concert with Brass Memorial to Brahms, a modern Dutch piece inspired by the oboe solo of the Brahms violin concerto. I think I probably still prefer the original, but it was nevertheless very nice.

The second half of the concert took place in the Latin world. After a quick stop-over in Algeria for Saint-Saens’ Marche militaire française from the Suite algérienne, the ensemble arrived in the Americas where it settled for the rest of the evening. They performed an Argentian Tango (written by a Dane), a Brasilian modinha, a Mexican andaluza and… a Canadian Tango. This one was written by 26 year old Rob Teehan, a promising composer en herbe on the staff of the National Youth Orchestra of Canada. He was by pure chance present for the performance with part of the National Youth Orchesta and gave the audience a nice introduction to his work. It was actually, in my mind, one of the nicest pieces of the evening, certainly better than the Villa-Lobos!