Reviews:
 

Toronto Star, May 19, 2007

William Littler

MIAMI BEACH–It was a typically cold February Friday in Toronto when Tom Hadley made his way from sunny Miami Beach to the auditorium of the Royal Conservatory of Music to listen to 20 or so aspiring orchestral musicians.

As he does every year, the director of admissions for the New World Symphony Orchestra was crossing the continent, auditioning recent grads of top music schools for coveted positions in an institution that proudly calls itself "America's Orchestral Academy."

It is an academy like no other, devoted to launching orchestral careers, its membership limited to one symphony orchestra full of musicians (about 90), with accommodations and a living stipend provided. Tenure is limited to three years.

Players have the option of leaving at any time during those three years, should they find a permanent job, which helps account for the arrival of 30-35 fresh faces each season.

While members of the New World Symphony, the aspiring orchestral players work with internationally known conductors, soloists and coaches – Toronto Symphony maestro Peter Oundjian and principal clarinetist Joaquin Valdepenas to name two – and present high-profile concerts in their own hall, Lincoln Road Theater in Miami Beach, as well as on tour.

What else attracts applicants, aside from the extra-curricular prospect of sun and surf?

"I want to be an orchestral musician and the New World Symphony is preparing me. I couldn't be in a better place at this moment," says 27-year-old Toronto violinist Ann Okagito.

Toronto clarinetist Robert Woolfry, 29, agrees, pointing out that "we are all here trying to get a job and having a great experience at the same time. I already hear my playing improving because of the high standards."

As their ages suggest, both Torontonians came to New World Symphony as mature, technically prepared musicians. All but two of the orchestra's current members are in their 20s and most have master's degrees.

"I knew there were great musicians being trained in Toronto," says Michael Linville, dean of musicians. "But we aren't just interested in people who play at a high technical level. We are looking for people who have a lot of personality in their playing and a good attitude."

Ah, yes, attitude. Symphony orchestras are notorious repositories of cynicism and discouragement. It was his discovery of this truth, Linville suggests, that helped motivate Michael Tilson Thomas to found the New World Symphony Orchestra all of 19 years ago.

One of the continent's foremost conductors, Tilson Thomas has stayed loyal to his Florida project despite demands of an international career and the music directorship of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra. He has done so with the not-so-hidden agenda of vanquishing negativity in the mindset of symphonic musicians.

"When I was a young musician," he recalls, "among veteran players in orchestras I noticed many were dissatisfied and blasé, yet there were others who, after 30 years, were still inspired. So I asked myself, how do you get to be like the people who still have joy in their work? And it turned out that they were the people who were in love with the process of music making.

"I see that attitude with my young colleagues here. Every member of our faculty feels the same way. And they realize that music making is not just about them as individuals. It is about communicating with a larger world."

Anyone who has seen Tilson Thomas's work with the San Francisco Symphony knows the transformative influence he can have on players and listeners. As an educator, he's led both to appreciate how much more is involved in musical communication than precise execution of notes in a score.

The same process was seen in a morning rehearsal of the New World Symphony the other day, as players arrived in shorts and sandals, greeted Shayna, the orchestra's principal poodle, and started practising furiously in anticipation of the maestro's arrival at the podium.

Having injured his back recently, he sat on a swivel chair and yielded part of the rehearsal and evening program to the orchestra's conducting fellow, Steven Jarvi, and its guest soloist, the distinguished German violinist Christian Tetzlaff. The players responded to all three with a mixture of eagerness, intensity and respect. The evening concert, opening with Jarvi conducting Liszt's seldom-played tone poem Tasso, followed by Tetzlaff playing and conducting Mozart's Concerto No. 3 in G Major and Tilson Thomas conducting Stravinsky's 1947 Petrouchka, showed some of the most committed orchestral playing I've heard in years.

Plans call for New World Symphony to move from its converted movie theatre premises to a new 700-seat concert hall designed by Frank Gehry. It would be hard to imagine an orchestra more deserving.

Vancouver Sun, Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Arc Ensemble  - RCA Red Seal  - Rating 5

The title of this release, "right through the bone," is how Edvard Grieg described the music of Julius Röntgen, who was a relative of Conrad Röentgen, the inventor of the X-ray. I'd only heard the name before but until now, none of the music. Not expecting much, I was astonished. He wrote beautiful music.

This Dutchman's obscurity seems totally undeserved and would seem due to two factors: the fact that he was incredibly productive (24 symphonies, three operas, 20 string quartets, etc.) has perhaps deluded people into thinking him facile, and academic dogma naturally would look down on anyone like Röentgen, who died in 1932, still writing in an unabashedly romantic style nearly a century past the date.

His music evokes, in particular, Brahms, his language being full of sixths and having a very similar harmonic idiom.

But you'd have to be a pedant to care, at least to go by the four lovely pieces on this collection (the Quintet for Piano and Strings, the Trio for Clarinet, Viola and Piano, the Viola Sonata in C Minor and the String Sextet in G). They may make you wonder how someone so derivative in one way could be so original and expressive in the one that counts, and he evidently loved the viola.

He was an important figure in music, being the first person to mount Dutch productions of Handel and Bach and also the pianist who premiered Brahms's Second Piano Concerto (Brahms adored him). You may too, especially from the assured playing and obviously firm belief shown by Toronto's Arc Ensemble.

La Scena Musicale, January 10, 2007

Norman Lebrecht

CD of the week Weinberg: On the threshold of hope

Mieczyslaw (Moishe) Weinberg (1919-1996) was the composer closest to Shostakovich, each playing the other his new works before committing them to print. When Weinberg was arrested in the last weeks of Stalin’s terror, Shostakovich wrote to the NKVD chief Beria protesting his innocence. Weinberg, a prolific symphonist, is at his most expressive in chamber works that he imbued with echoes of contemporary Jewish suffering. His 1945 clarinet sonata played here by Joaquin Valdepenas and Dianne Werner, is a miniature masterpiece, combining a klezmer-like improvisatory spirit within a strict formal structure. The 1944 piano quintet bears kinship to a prior work in the same form by Shostakovich. Both are melodic, ironic and disrupted by passages of panicky agitation; Weinberg, however, finds a soft ending. These revealing performances, by members of the Royal Conservatory of Music, are testimony to a Soviet composer’s courage, ingenuity and, in the clarinet sonata, near-genius.

New York Times - January 14th, 2007

MIECZYSLAW WEINBERG:

‘On the Threshold

of Hope’: Chamber Music

Richard Margison, tenor; ARC Ensemble. RCA Red Seal 82876-87769-2; CD.

MANY European Jewish composers fled west to avoid Nazi persecution, but the Polish composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg, who died in 1996, went east. Moves to Minsk, Belarus, in 1939 and Tashkent, Uzbekistan, in 1941 both saved his life (his family in Warsaw was killed in the Holocaust) and resulted in a lifelong friendship with Shostakovich. 

Mr. Weinberg’s music, like the chamber works on this new recording, reveals both his Jewish roots and the influence of Shostakovich. This disc, featuring admirable performances by the members of the ARC Ensemble (Artists of the Royal Conservatory, Toronto), takes its title from the brief period of relative freedom enjoyed by Jews in the Soviet Union during World War II. Then Stalin's anti-Semitic postwar purges squashed hope on the threshold; Mr. Weinberg was arrested in 1953, but Shostakovich intervened on his behalf.

The highlight of this disc is a fiery reading of Mr. Weinberg’s intense five-movement Piano Quintet (Op. 18), written in 1944. It opens with a warmly lyrical melody soon tempered by dissonance and angst. But Mr. Weinberg is playfully satirical where Shostakovich might have been bitterly sardonic. The intense Allegretto offers by turns dense, wild climaxes; spare, staccato textures; and gentle lyricism. The ensuing Presto sounds like cafe music spun through a carnival funhouse. An introspective Largo leads to the spiky, driven Allegro agitato, with a jagged folk dance and earlier thematic material winding through it.

Gramophone, January 2007

Classical Net  January 8, 2007

 Mieczysaw Weinberg: Sonata for Clarinet and Piano

Jewish Songs After Shmuel Halkin Piano Quintet

ARC Ensemble Richard Margison, tenor

RCA Red Seal 82876-87769-2 DDD 76:56

Here’s a composer who might be on the verge of receiving the recognition he deserves. Chandos is in the middle of a (slowly progressing!) Weinberg symphony cycle, and now here’s a release of three major chamber works composed in 1944 or 1945. The composer’s Jewish faith, and the dates of the music’s composition, have suggested this CD’s title, which is “On the Threshold of Hope.” Holocaust-related imagery and allusions to anti-Semitism pervade the booklet, probably in hopes of piquing the potential listener’s interest, but Weinberg never spent time in a Nazi concentration camp. In fact, he left Warsaw in 1939 and, instead of escaping to the West, he went east to Minsk, and then continued on to Tashkentafter the Germans invaded the Soviet Union. After the war, Weinberg remained in the Soviet Union and encountered its own brand of anti-Semitism. This, then, is really not “Holocaust music,” as some might be led to believe, even though Weinberg’s family was killed by the Nazis. Weinberg’s work is of a very high stature and really should not need extra-musical associations to attract new listeners. Goodness knows there’s already been enough confusion concerning alternative (and incorrect) spellings of his name as, for example, “Moysey Vainberg.”

 Weinberg (1919-1996) met Shostakovich during the war years. Shostakovich apparently liked Weinberg’s music, and a warm relationship between the two composers persisted until Shostakovich’s death. Anyone who likes Shostakovich’s music probably will like Weinberg’s as well. (It also should be noted that Shostakovich, while not a Jew himself, was sympathetic, and daringly included Jewish themes in several of his major works.)

 All three works on this CD are both approachable and artistically important; this is not a “niche” release by any means. The three-movement Clarinet Sonata certainly should be a staple of that instrument’s repertoire, not just for the suggestions of klezmer music in the second movement, but also for the entire sonata’s ambitious construction and for the worthwhile challenge it poses to the soloist. The song-cycle is a setting of six Yiddish poems by Shmuel Halkin. Although the texts celebrate the Soviet war effort - the soldiers and those remaining at home - this is hardly a glorification of war, or mere jingoism. Weinberg achieved something here that Shostakovich never was able to achieve, in my opinion: nationalistic music of a high quality without a trace of irony. The third work on this CD is a Piano Quintet from 1944. This is a work in five movements, in which the second and third are fast and increasingly grotesque, and the fourth a frozen Largo that is almost twice as long as the next longest movement. (Similarities to Shostakovich again!) The Quintet begins with a memorable theme, and Weinberg cannily brings it back at the end of the work. The driving final movement also contains episodes strongly reminiscent of a Highland fling, but that surely must be a coincidence!

 The ARC Ensemble is comprised of faculty members from the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto. On this CD, we hear clarinetist Joaquín Valdepeñas, violinists Erika Raum and Marie Bérard, violist Steven Dann, cellist Bryan Epperson, and pianists Dianne Werner and David Louie. All the performances are first-class in the sense that I don’t see how they could be improved upon. Canadian tenor Richard Margison lends his handsome voice and interpretive commitment to the Halkin songs. The performances are complemented by excellent engineering.

The major classical labels are playing it very safe these days, and I would not have expected a CD such as this one to appear on RCA Red Seal. Please show Sony BMG Masterworks that this is the kind of CD you want them to release more of by buying “On the Threshold of Hope.”

Raymond Tuttle