joel quarrington

The past 15 months have seen a flurry of recordings featuring Canadian bass virtuoso Joel Quarrington; the release of his second Bottesini CD on Naxos, a duo disc with cellist Coenraad Bloemendal, a Trout with Yefim Bronfman, and Marjan Mozetich’s El Dorado with harpist Caroline Leonardell, and now this outstanding release on the Analekta label.  Matched up with his two previous solos CDs and other chamber music recordings like the Mendelssohn sextet this constitutes an impressive catalogue.

Those lucky enough to have been in the Kirkpatrick Theatre at the 2007 convention at Oklahoma City University to hear Joel’s ISB debut caught one of the highlights of that week, and for many one of the most impressive double bass recitals ever to grace a convention. This studio CD contains that whole program, including the encore, and the recording captures everything that made that evening so memorable.

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‘Garden Scene’ is a handy title but no more. It’s not descriptive of any fragrant contrabass programmatic machinations throughout the hour-long length of this CD. Still, miscellaneous affairs like this presumably need eye-catching handles.

In any case one is hardly likely to argue given the instrumental finesse displayed by master bassist Joel Quarrington. He and Andrew Burashko have constructed a convincing recital. It opens with the warmly quiescent charms of the Korngold of the disc’s title, moves on to a maestro of the bass repertoire, the great Bottesini, and then presents a centre-piece concerto in piano-reduced form. This is the notorious and amusing forgery perpetrated by Henri Casadesus whose ‘J.C. Bach’ work did the rounds as a Viola Concerto for many, many years. William Primrose recorded it in that form. It’s given suitably Old School treatment in this bass-and-piano version. Glière provides some lyric and dance relief, before we plunge into the formal strictures of the Weinberg Sonata that ends the disc.

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Written by Stephen Pederson in the Chronicle Herald

Whatever else he created in the way of musical mayhem, Canadian/American composer Raymond Luedeke composed a stunning showpiece for double-bass virtuoso Joel Quarrington. Symphony Nova Scotia, on its finest mettle, with Bernard Gueller on the podium, escorted Quarrington through Luedeke’s Bass Concerto on Thursday night in the Cohn before an ecstatic audience.

There is something ecstatic in the way Quarrington plays the bass. His musicianship, his phrasing, shading, tone colour and rubato (in which the musical line gets expressive without losing time), all serve his musical intent, imagination and the eloquence of his musical feelings.

The slow first part of the intensely romantic middle movement, sub-titled The Lover, showcased that side of his personality. Luedeke took for inspiration in writing the Bass Concerto the psychological theories of the male psyche according to the Jungian School. The concerto begins with a section called The King, followed in the middle movement by combining The Lover with The Trickster, and finishing with The Warrior.

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Written by:  Ken Winters

New Creations Festival
Toronto Symphony Orchestra
Hugh Wolff, conductor
At Roy Thomson Hall
In Toronto on Saturday

Contemporary serious music, both in the 20th century so recently past and in our new one, still so young, has had a long uphill struggle. The contemporary music scene in Canada exists in a kind of bubble. It has its own vigorous, sophisticated life but seldom intersects very naturally with, say, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra or the Canadian Opera Company.

This season, the TSO has made a cautious attempt to redress this situation by mounting a short, three-concert event it calls its New Creations Festival. The second concert Saturday night, was not, however, dazzlingly new. Two of the four pieces on the program, while premieres of a kind, had been created some time ago.

John Weinzweig, the only Canadian in the lineup, composed his Rhapsody for Orchestra 65 years ago, in 1941. It had its premiere by the CBC Symphony Orchestra in 1957, then languished unattended until Weinzweig, at the age of 91, made some revisions to it in 2003 and 2004. It was the revised version that had its premiere Saturday in a performance under the TSO’s guest conductor for the evening, the American Hugh Wolff.

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