Alain Trudel
Conductor & trombonist
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Alain Trudel's Gamble Pays Off
June 15, 2007, 9:00 pm
Conductor Trudel’s gamble pays off
Scotia Festival wraps up with big orchestral blow-out
By STEPHEN PEDERSEN Arts Reporter
Scotia Festival of Music ended a highly successful 2007 season with a massive blow-out in the Sir James Dunn Theatre on Sunday night. The two-week festival has been playing chamber music to packed houses since May 28 — 13 concerts over 14 days.
Chamber music is intimate and small, but there was nothing tiny about the 85 musicians who jammed the stage Sunday night for the live CBC Radio Two broadcast of two world premieres by festival conductor-in-residence Christos Hatzis and Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra.
Conductor Alain Trudel explained to host Heidi Petracek that since Hatzis’s Tongues of Fire with solo percussionist Beverley Johnston and his Rebirth with solo violist Steven Dann were both concertos, he thought he should program a concerto for the orchestra alone. Thus the fiercely difficult Bartok, which features all the instrumental sections of the orchestra in both individual and ensemble solos.
It was a daring choice. The Scotia Festival Orchestra is made up of master players and students and is, essentially, a pick-up orchestra whose rehearsal time is limited. But the gamble paid off. While a little scuffed around the edges, the Bartok scored a tour-de-force for the orchestra, featuring some truly outstanding solo work from the many experienced players, including a large contingent of Symphony Nova Scotia’s brightest and best and bringing the audience to its feet for multiple curtain calls.
Tongues of Fire is an eloquent and moving work, representing the conflict of ego in the form of the soloist, and society (the orchestra). It rises to terrifying levels of sound during the heat of the struggle and is musically, utterly convincing in its complexity and noble in its ambition.
Beverley Johnston is Canada’s gift to the world of solo percussion, and Hatzis taxed her musicianship and extraordinary technical mastery to the limit as she travelled from the front, where her marimba, vibraphone and tuned gongs were positioned, to the back of the orchestra where she could lay to with a will on gangs of toms and a big bass drum. Behind her, percussion instruments were spread from wall to wall, requiring six percussionists to handle all the assignments.
Two harps and 12 French horns gave considerable substance to the heroic sound of the outer two movements.
The concerto pitches the soloist against the orchestra in what becomes a fevered duel for supremacy. The concert master, violinist Mark Fewer, steps forward to champion the orchestra and he and the soloist start competing. When she realizes he has more notes and tonal resources than she, she overwhelms him with power. He concedes. But she too collapses briefly over her bass drum. A Pyrrhic victory.
The second movement is full of sweetness and repose, prefaced by a pop song, Eternity’s Heartbeat, sung and recorded by Patricia Rozario and played on Sunday’s concert as a prelude to the second movement. That movement, sounding at times like the sound score to an epic movie, relieves, but only temporarily, the opening shots of the battle between soloist and orchestra in the brief but ferocious first movement.
The final movement resolves the conflict of a work characterized at times by multiphonics in the winds, harmonics in the strings, and shouts and screams by the orchestra members contributing to the urgency of this electrifyingly expressive work.
Rebirth is a reworking of a previous version for tape and viola, with the orchestra taking the place of the tape. Steven Dann played it with extraordinary confidence and power and rich sound. It is an extremely difficult work for the conductor, let alone the players, but Trudel showed real confidence in resolving its complexities.
( spedersen@herald.ca)
Halifax Chronicle Herald
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