Minimalist music brings a thaw
Red Deer Symphony Orchestra conductor Claude Lapalme is prepared to forgive anyone who falls asleep during Saturday’s concert.
He even condones it, saying the second half of Arvo Pärt’s Tabula Rasa, is so tranquil and hypnotic, “if people fall asleep, it’s perfectly fine.”
The chamber work for strings will be performed at the Spring Thaw concert at the Red Deer College Arts Centre — along with a tuneful Joseph Haydn symphony and a descriptive Canadian piece by Harry Somers.
Pärt is an Estonian composer who completely broke with his previous style of conventional modernist music (“the kind you hear in horror movies,” quipped Lapalme) to emerge, in 1976, with a completely new “cleansed” style based on repetition.
It’s been called “holy minimalism” because of its ability to put listeners into a higher, trance-like state.
The work’s title, Tabula Rasa, (raized or cleared table) is appropriate since Pärt makes it apparent from the first two notes — which are the highest possible A and the lowest possible A — that he’s going to give listeners something absolutely new, said Lapalme.
“This is the hatchet. You definitely get the feeling he is saying ‘I am not looking back . . . I am starting over with a clean slate,’” added Lapalme, who believes the simplicity of Pärt’s music is deceiving.
When chamber musicians first saw the repeat quarter-notes and slow scales for Tabula Rasa, they scratched their heads, wondering “where is the music?” said Lapalme. “But once they put all the parts together, they fell in love with the piece, because it’s just gorgeous.”
Tabula Rasa requires an altered piano, with screws placed between strings to give it a bell-like sound. It will also feature performances from guest solo violinists Brinna Brinkerhoff and Kerry DuWors.
Brinkerhoff plays with the New Works Calgary Ensemble Resonance, the University of Calgary’s String Quartet, and is the assistant concert master of the River Oaks Chamber Orchestra in Houston. The Mount Royal College music instructor has also played with many orchestras, including the Winnipeg Symphony and the Calgary Philharmonic.
DuWors is on the music faculty at Brandon University and often performs as a solo and chamber musician. She has most recently played at the National Arts Centre, the Northern Lights Music Festival in Mexico, the Stratford Summer Music Festival, and Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall in New York.
Listeners should take a good look at DuWors’s violin —it’s a Palmason Gagliano instrument from 1747 that’s on loan from the Canada Council for the Arts.
The other chamber work for strings on the program is Somers’s North Country from 1948. It’s made up of four short movements that are like postcards from the woods of Northern Ontario, said Lapalme, who studied the piece as a student, and liked it enough to perform it again.
Haydn’s joyful “Drumroll” Symphony No. 103 will make up the second half of the concert, and is a pure audience pleaser.
Lapalme said anyone who doesn’t understand the Pärt composition will surely love the melodious Haydn, which will be performed with a full complement of about 40 musicians.
WHAT: The Red Deer Symphony Orchestra’s Spring Thaw concert
WHEN: 8 p.m., Saturday, March 20.
WHERE: RDC Arts Centre, Mainstage
TICKETS: $47.50 ($34 students/seniors) from TicketMaster
lmichelin@reddeeradvocate.com
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