Mar 6th, 08
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Bottesini, Vol 2
Giovanni Bottesini enjoyed a globe-trotting career as “the Paganini of the double bass”. He was also a successful conductor and a composer, although only the music he wrote for his own instrument has outlived him. Many of the works on this recording emphasize the essential bel canto quality of Bottesini’s inspiration, most explicitly in the dazzling Bellini Fantasia, but also in the duets with clarinet and soprano which demand virtuosity of both feeling and technique. The Concerto No. 2 is a fully mature work, from the somewhat laconic first movement, through the simply singing second, to the third, driven by a rhythmic figure typical of the polonaise and the Cuban bolero.
You can buy the album here.
Feb 28th, 08
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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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Dec 27th, 06
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Dragonetti's 3-Stringed Bass
Written by: Matthew Hart
On a summer evening in July, I arrived for dinner at a grey house on a cliff in the Thirty Thousand Islands of Georgian Bay, and there, on a stand before the windows, in silhouette against the far horizon, stood a cello.
It made a bewitching sight, its voluptuous civility poised against a squall that passed just then across the long sheet of water. More bewitching still was the saga that unfolded that night, and captivated me, devouring my summer as I pursued it.
The cello and the island and the view belonged to Bob Williams, the descendant of a family of Toronto instrument makers who had risen to prominence at the turn of the century. They had made the cello.
Williams bought it from a dealer, was learning to play it, and was, in what spare time he had, trying to discover the fate of a collection of instruments given by his family to the Royal Ontario Museum. This is the story of one of those instruments, a double bass of such renown in its own enchanted world that that the mere mention of it excites a kind of longing.
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Apr 3rd, 06
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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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