One of the questions that a child directed at two versatile musicians, Mark Fewer and John Novacek, was: “How did you get to be so fast?” Performing on violin and piano, the two musicians took an extra day after their Sunday Coast Recital Society concert to entertain students from Gibsons Elementary and Elphinstone Secondary on Monday with an abridged version of the same concert they gave the grown-ups. Their performance was brilliant. Pianist Novacek answered the student’s question by saying that it can take up to a year to learn a piece and at first it is played very slowly, gradually working up speed. Practice is key.
The kids were attentive – many of them put up their hands to say that they were learning an instrument and the questions came eagerly.
“What’s your favourite music?” asked one little girl. Fewer admitted that he had grown up on a diet of Schubert, Mendelssohn and Led Zeppelin. They are eclectic, no doubt, or what a critic has termed “genre-bending.” Both men are interested in American repertoire and like to play jazz when not in classical mode. In the past, Novacek has performed with a Californian composer, John Adams, and the piano was the lead instrument on one of Adams’ compositions, titled Road Movies.
Their speed and variety of repertoire was exciting. Perhaps one of the more interesting pieces was that written by American George Antheil. Fewer related a story about this eccentric musician who performed with a gun at the ready in case the audience didn’t like his music. Antheil’s sonata is a piece that requires the violin to give off unearthly sounds and asks the pianist to play frantically then suddenly switch to a minimal drum set to finish. It’s a wild ride, and not surprisingly, the students liked it.
Fewer and Novacek, who have been playing together for 12 years, also performed a mixture of classical and ragtime that included a piece by Stravinsky, a Brahms violin sonata nicknamed Rain, and they closed with a jazzed-up version of Dvorak’s Humoresque.
Coast Recital Society’s artistic director Frances Heinsheimer Wainwright said that these events are made possible thanks to a special grant received from the BC Touring Council’s Community Youth Engagement program.
