CLASSICAL
Egoyan take on new works is stunning

ELISSA POOLE
Special to The Globe and Mail

Victoria Symphony
Eve Egoyan, piano
Tania Miller, conductor
At the McPherson Playhouse

Print Edition – Section Front

In Victoria on Thursday

The physical manifestation of a six-edged, seven-sided perfect cube may be
spurious, but its musical manifestation, Rudolf Komorous’s piece for piano and
small mixed chamber ensemble (entitled The Seven Sides of Maxine’s Silver
Die) is not. Just as Maxine’s marvellous die was, according to the composer’s
program note, the "most precious object in her capricious repository," so
Komorous’s piece was the jewel among the works presented in the opening concert
of the Victoria Symphony’s New Currents Festival.
Pianist Eve Egoyan was the featured soloist in three of these works, and her
clear, uncompromising taste was much in evidence in the choice of repertoire,
a capricious repository inasmuch as only Egoyan would have thought to bring
these particular three compositions together on the same program. That
program included, in addition to the Komorous, Ann Southam’s Figures for piano and
strings and Spanish composer Maria de Alvear’s Clear Energy for piano and
orchestra.
What very different pieces they were. Maxine’s Silver Die was immediately r
ecognizable as a work of Komorous’s by its enigmatic stylistic juxtapositions
and unique voicings, doublings and orchestrations — as unique to Komorous as
Mozart’s are to himself. His melodies have a Mozartean fluency, too,
distinct, unusual entities that lie somewhere between banality and an almost
supernatural loveliness, and that Komorous irradiates from time to time with a triad
as delicate as perfume.
Egoyan’s remarkable playing balanced that delicacy with intense focus,
holding all in a net. Komorous gives the piano rapid, rippling scales that slow
down at the end of long trajectories. Egoyan timed these decelerations so
perfectly that the spaces in between the notes were still charged with presence.
Similarly when scales made way for chords, it was possible to imagine them as
the same object perceived within different time frames.
Southam’s Figures rolled along with energy to spare, its livewire piano part
accented and asymmetrical, aspiring to perpetual motion. Southam calls
herself a minimalist, but the label underprepares one for the joy she conveys in
her various riffs and repetitions, even though it’s perfectly in keeping with
the disrespect she shows for standard procedure with a 12-tone row: Southam
orders hers to provide a maximum of friendly intervals and is gleefully
unbothered by the odd tonal centre.
Maria de Alvear’s Clear Energy, a world premiere, seemed less a piece than
an installation, a way of ushering the listener into a particular
psychological space through sound. Certainly it had its own strange beauty, the piano
tuned a quarter tone distant from the other instruments, sending notes out one
at a time into the ether against a wash of sustained (albeit punctuated) sound
from the orchestra. The difference in temperament opened the soundscape in
the same way that a yoga posture might open the space between the shoulders,
creating space we didn’t know was there and shivers of piquant sensation as
well — sensation that we read as exquisite, somehow, because novel. I even
found myself confusing sound with touch, so thoroughly had de Alvear transformed
the listening parameters, and so convincingly had Egoyan restitched our
reference points.
The concert’s opening string piece, Bits of Beauty by Victoria Symphony’s
composer-in-residence Tobin Stokes, lacked piano (and mettle). Comprising eight
little beginnings or fragments, Stokes’s Bits were sweet (in the way Samuel
Barber’s Adagio is sweet), but despite some angel-hair textures and laudable
melodies, they were bland, too. The piquant, the novel and the dangerous were
studiously absent — providing us with a list of beautiful things rather
than beautiful things themselves.