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.

The Erich Korngold Garden Scene from which the CD takes its title is from a set of pieces for violin and piano that the composer himself arranged from his 1920 incidental music to Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing.  It is a very beautiful work, and the breadth of tone and color with which Quarrington imbues this recording is exceptional.  His vibrato is expressive nnd highly varied, and convincingly conjures the scene in Leonato’s garden fiom the beginning of Act Three. Quarrington utilizes a remarkably wide spectrum of colors in this five and a half minute work and is amply matched by the sensitive accompanying of Andrew Burashko.

The performance of Bottesini’s D major Elegy is gorgeous; a lesson in rubato, Quarrington skillfully threads each phrase with nuance and an ardent delivery worthy of Di Stefano.  The popular J.C. Bach/Henri Casadesus Concerto in C minor again demonstrates an exceptional sense of gradation and shading.  Technically flawless, the articulation as varied as it is clear; the slow movement is an exceptionally beautiful performance.  If one spends a moment to ponder the audacity of the Casadesus family in attributing works of their own composition to J.C. Bach, Mozart, and Handel among others, it is worth remembering that Edouard Nanny was also a member of their ‘la Societe de concerts des Instruments anciens’ for a number of years and may well have been the catalyst for his ‘discovery’ of one of our most popular Concerti.

Gliere’s Four Pieces are justifiably among the most popular concert works for the bass today and these recordings are among the finest of this repertoire on record.  Quarrington and Burashko both sparkle in the Scherzo and make the Tarantella sound effortless while ably recalling the frenzied Italian dance.  The ensemble is impeccable throughout and every detail is evident in the recording – kudos to producer Roberto Occhipinti.

Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s Sonata for Solo Contrabass, which concludes this CD, is a terrific recent addition to the concert repertoire for our instrument.  The influence of Shostakovich is hard to ignore; the third movement certainly recalls ‘A Soldier’s Tale’ to some degree and while the angular and rhythmic propulsion of much of the material has echoes in countless works, the long melodic lines, especially in the lower registers, sound unique and remarkably well written for the instrument.  It is an engaging and compelling work.

This is an exceptional disc in every way, and a very welcome release of some classic and some unknown material.  I am fervently hoping that Joel’s recital from the 2009 convention likewise makes it to disc in the very near future.

-  Review by Robert Nairn in Volume 33, Number 2 of Bass World

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.

The Garden Scene derives from Korngold’s Much Ado About Nothing. The burnished legato that Quarrington produces, his equalized scale and tonal subtlety – also the cellistic lightness he brings to it – begins the disc admirably. Bottesini only contributes the brief Elegy but it’s notable for what the performers do with it: variegated shading and nuance, precise articulation, and a bel canto imperative. The bassist displays prodigious feats of articulation, clarity and projection in the Casadesus-Bach where the lyricism in the slow movement is a focal point. Listen to the dynamics around the 4:25 mark in this movement to appreciate the full expressive potential of the big bull fiddle. There’s virtuosity galore in the finale, not least in the cadenza.

The quartet of Glière morceaux derives from Opp. 9 and 32, written in the first decade of the twentieth century. The Praeludium is serious and lyrical whilst its opus mate Scherzo is commensurately jolly, but with a wistful B section. The Op.32 Tarantella is a fizzer, with an especially lovely second theme cantilena, and must have been an especially fine showpiece for Koussevitzky, who was the dedicatee of both sets. The notes don’t say much about Weinberg’s sonata. It was ‘prepared from a manuscript facsimile that was edited by the great bass virtuoso Rodion Azarkhin.’ The work dates from 1971 but was clearly never published during the composer’s lifetime. It’s in six concise movements. The opening is restless and unsettled, the first Allegretto mordant, the second an embodiment of a question mark in music (very uneasy), the Lento tense, and the final decidedly Shostakovich-imbued.

Lovers of the bass will find Quarrington on top form in this well recorded and intriguingly laid-out recital, and Burashko’s perceptive qualities ensure solid ensemble virtues.

Read more at MusicWeb

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.

Luckily, Luedeke, who has played associate principal clarinet in the Toronto Symphony since 1981, is much more of a musician than a psychologist. Whatever triggered it, his music takes on a life and character of its own, only mildly influenced by the imagery most evident in The Lover and The Trickster movement.

The Trickster, like much of the first movement, is full of texture, spiky orchestration with the brilliance of a Shostakovitch symphony, lots of percussion in the instrumentation and single winds including bass clarinet and contra-bassoon in the basement with piccolo an independent voice rather than just the icing on the orchestral cake.

This is a very showy work for all. On the technical side you’d be impressed if Quarrington was a violinist.

But where the violinist’s fingers must work to a precision standard measured in millimetres, the bassist, with something close to four inches between whole notes on the fingerboard, and strings that are several miliimetres thick, has to combine the strength of a plow horse with the fleetness of a thoroughbred.

The program began simply with Mozart’s appealing, divertimento-like Symphony No. 21 and ended after intermission with a super-hot interpretation of Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony, No. 4. Quarrington (who is principal bass of the National Arts Centre Orchestra) took up a stand at the back of the bass section to support colleagues Max Kasper and Lena Turofsky.

This was another case of extreme orchestral aerobics.

The outer two of four movements sear the ears with razor-edge rhythm and red-hot tempos. The Pilgrim’s March (second movement) is hypnotic with its steady shuffle of invisible feet, and the third movement a mild scherzo.

The finale is a blistering saltarello, in which the music, true to its form, leaps around like a convention of agitated fleas.

Yet, as in all Mendelssohn, fairy music is not far behind, and this one comes closest of all his symphonies to the sparkle of his Midsummer Night’s Dream. A real challenge to both players and conductor, the orchestra nailed it.

The audience were then the ones to leap around in delight, though all they could do was clap their hands raw.

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.

I’m not sure Wolff quite got it. It was clear and neat and not just noisy, but it seemed not to speak or grip the attention. Weinzweig is one of the great men of our music, and the performance seemed not to convey this, seemed too little almost too late — even though seeing him there, now 93, wheeled on in his chair to accept his applause, was indescribably touching.

The concert’s other not-exactly-new creation was Paul Hindemith’s Keyboard Music with Orchestra, which Hindemith composed in 1929 for the noted one-armed pianist Paul Wittgenstein. The terms of the commission gave Wittgenstein complete power over the performing rights. He never played the piece himself, but refused to let anyone else play it or to let it be published. In the Wittgenstein estate, which became accessible only in 2002, a single copy came to light, and had its first performance in Frankfurt by the American pianist and teaching icon Leon Fleisher.

It was Fleisher who gave its Canadian premiere Saturday. The work is a fairly soft bomb, the outer movements replete with Hindemith’s characteristic busyness and only the middle movement yielding more. This movement has a lovely long solo for English horn, delicately embroidered by the piano. The outer movements might have come into clearer focus if Fleisher had played them with a harder edge, or Wolff had quietened the brass; as it was, the audience caught fleeting glimpses of the solo part through a heavy underbrush of orchestra.

We did have the very first public performance of a new Concerto for Double Bass by the American composer John Harbison. This is a pleasant work, if not exactly a toe-tapper. The first movement, Lamento, has its feet in medieval viol music. The second, and most immediately attractive, is a cavatina, which makes the most of the double bass’s singing qualities. The third is a rondo, and comes closest of the three to vigour. What I missed in the piece as a whole was any exploitation of the solo instrument’s sonorous depths. Joel Quarrington played it immaculately, with remarkable musicality and refinement of tone, but the range of the work itself seemed narrow.

The fun of the evening was thus pretty well concentrated in the final work, in its Canadian premiere, a flashy and colourful Percussion Concerto written for the brilliant Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie by Chinese composer Chen Yi.

Chen has designed a striking visual as well as aural piece for a large battery of tuned and untuned percussion, all inspired by the arts of the Beijing Opera, in which she formerly played violin. In addition to the highly choreographed physicality of Glennie’s performance, the middle movement requires that she speak, while still playing, a long dramatic poem in Chinese, in the exaggerated inflections of the opera. We had no idea what the words meant (no translation was supplied) but even so, the sonic effects were riveting. The diminutive composer, who came on stage for the ovation, was obviously thrilled with the performance.