Music for the Winter Solstice at Heritage Hall

In what has quickly become a Music on Main tradition, Artistic Director David Pay once again programmed a year-end evening of music to celebrate the winter solstice at Heritage Hall. Back to lead the audience through the chorus of her haunting Winter Carol, the final piece on the program, was former MoM composer-in-residence Caroline Shaw. Joining Shaw on stage were local singer-songwriter Veda Hille, pianist Rachel Kiyo Iwaasa, and guitarist Adrian Verdejo.

The quartet, in different configurations, took the audience through an eclectic line-up of music, including two additional carols: Alfredo Santa Ana's spare and spine-tingly A Short Song for the Longest Night of the Year; and new MoM composer-in-residence Nicole Lizée's cheeky jingle Solstice Noir. Iwaasa rained down liquid sunshine in a stirring rendition of Denis Gougeon's Piano-soleil and later joined Shaw, on violin, for a beautiful rendition of Arvo Pärt's classic Spiegel im Spiegel (the Little Chamber Music Series That Could's Diane Park was in the room and I couldn't help thinking of our own danced performance to the same piece for the summer solstice of 2015). Verdejo performed two solos: John Mark Sherlock's Musiquita; and the world premiere of Rodney Sharman's for Guitar. And the incomparable Hille took her own turn at the piano, reprising two recent favourites: Let Me Die, from Onegin, her recent musical hit with Amiel Gladstone; and Eurydice, an adaptation of a Rilke sonnet that she wrote for Pay's Orpheus Project at the Cultch a couple of years back.

All of this flew by in a compact 90 minutes and was a great way to warm both the body and the soul on an unusually cold solstitial night in Vancouver. As Pay noted in his comments at the top of the evening, some rituals deserve to be repeated.

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Caroline Shaw at the Fox Cabaret

Last night Caroline Shaw concluded her year as composer-in-residence at Music on Main with a performance called "One Night Stand," part of MoM's "Month of Tuesdays" at the Fox Cabaret. The show featured a range of Shaw's compositions, including two pieces--"Valencia" and "Entr'acte"--performed by the immensely talented Emily Carr String Quartet; "Entr'acte," with a long plucked sequence and a beautiful coda for solo cello (played by Alasdair Money), was especially captivating.

Pianist David Kaplan also excelled in his performance of two of Shaw's "conversations" with nineteenth-century composers, in this case Robert Schumann and Frédéric Chopin. As is increasingly common at concerts these days, Kaplan read his sheet music from an iPad; in conversation with him at intermission we learned that he controls the turning of the pages with an extra foot pedal that is synched to the iPad through Bluetooth.

Throughout the evening, Shaw also improvised on violin, including in a wonderful duet with local dancer Vanessa Goodman. The duo will reprise their collaboration on Thursday as part of Dances for a Small Stage's Salon Series at the Emerald Room, and I was excited to hear in Shaw's stage patter last night that she and Goodman are planning to work together again in the future.

The final piece on the program was an excerpt of three songs from Shaw's By and By series, her setting of traditional bluegrass spirituals. Shaw was accompanied by Kaplan on piano and the Emily Carr String Quartet, but it was the purity of her own voice that resonated most with me. A triple threat as a composer, violinist and singer, Vancouver has been lucky to have this Pulitzer Prize-winner in our midst this past year. Here's hoping she visits again soon.

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PuSh 2016: An Evening with A Roomful of Teeth

Roomful of Teeth is a US a cappella band founded in 2009 by the composer and conductor Brad Wells. Last night they were at the Fox Cabaret beginning a two-night run in Vancouver as part of a special co-presentation by Music on Main and the PuSh Festival. The eight-member ensemble, though clearly classically trained, employ vocal techniques that span the globe, from barber shop to yodelling to throat singing. Their range--stylistically and melodically--is astonishing, and hearing their harmonizations last night over the course of what amounted to an extended motet that was as polyglot as it was polyphonic was to submit to the sheer transportive pleasure of the human voice raised in song.

The group includes among its members Music on Main composer-in-residence Caroline Shaw, and her Pulitzer Prize-winning Partita for 8 Voices was the first piece on the program. The 25-minute piece is divided into four sections that combine wordless melodies with spoken text (including traditional square dance calls) and various vocal effects, including rhythmic inhalations and exhalations of breath, whispers, and sighs. It is a work that makes one want to move, so infectious and novel is its orchestration of sounds. The performance by the group was absolutely thrilling.

After a short intermission, the group returned for a second program half that included works by a range of composers. All were stunning, but especially captivating to me were the last three pieces. On Judd Greenstein's Run Away alto Virginia Warnken sang the lead refrain in a way that sent chills down my body. Rinde Eckert's Cesca's View allowed soprano Estelí Gomez to cut loose with some powerhouse yodelling. And Wells's own Otherwise ends with a pure crystalline note held by the bass-baritone Dashon Burton for what seems like eternity. After rapturous applause, the group returned for an encore composed by the group's lone tenor, Eric Dudley. It was a quietly moving finale.

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Modular Music on Main

Last night, as part of Music on Main's Modulus Festival, Artistic Director David Pay programmed two song cycles for the 9 p.m. concert at Heritage Hall that couldn't have been more different. Yet the pairing absolutely worked.

First up was the world premiere of The Perruqueries, a set of five songs on the theme of "wigs gone awry," with text by Bill Richardson and music by Jocelyn Morlock, Modulus' composer-in-residence. The duo was commissioned by soprano Robyn Driedger-Klassen, baritone Tyler Duncan, and pianist Erika Switzer, and it proved an inspired collaboration. An adept of meter and a master of silly rhymes, Richardson's verse is suitably bathetic, adopting a mock heroic form reminiscent of Alexander Pope's Rape of the Lock as he describes several follicular fiascos both factual (the opera singer Galina Vishnevskaya, the hockey player Bobby Hull, the artist Andy Warhol, and a janitor at the CBC named Albert are all subjects) and fictional (a nursery rhyme about a pig and a thug and an elegy about real estate round out the offerings). Morlock's score matches Richardson's referentiality, a pastiche of musical quotations ranging from Puccini to the Canadian national anthem. All of this is handled by Dreidger-Klassen and Duncan with just the right mix of personality and dramatic flair, their voices rich and sonorous, their diction impeccable, and the personas they adopt never upstaging the music, which was played with spritely aplomb by Switzer.

After a brief set change, we were treated to four songs by the American composer Caroline Shaw, who recently won the Pulitzer Prize in music for a choral work that will receive its Canadian premiere this evening as part of the final program of the Festival. I gather that Shaw composes mostly for--and upon her own--voice. Last night she shared with us four traditional songs from her native North Carolina, all in their way meditations on death and passing in which, as she told us, she was trying to "liquify" the notes. She was aided in this endeavor by the Calder Quartet (Benjamin Jacobson and Andrew Bulbrook on violin, Jonathan Moerschel on viola, and Eric Byers on cello), who plucked and knocked their instruments as much as they drew their bows across strings. As for Shaw's voice, it's a beautiful instrument, not necessarily wide in range, but pure of timbre, with Shaw able to stretch notes horizontally in a way that is deeply resonant both acoustically and emotionally. Not so much the sound of lamentation as of consolation.

After a day that included a memorial service, it was an appropriate end to the evening.

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