The Pender Harbour Chamber Music Festival has always been a class act. In its five years of making music, founder and host Lise Aylmer has kept it on track. Aylmer bows out this year from the organizing committee that has taken over her life for the past half decade, leaving it in good hands. The momentum generated by co-founder and artistic director Alexander Tselyakov will continue to bring virtuoso musicians to this lively corner of the Coast.
For this fifth annual event, a new Yamaha concert grand piano sat on a new stage in a refurbished performance centre. That would have been excitement enough, but in addition, an especially commissioned piece of music, Pender Harbour Suite, by composer Stephen Chatman received its world premiere last Saturday, Aug. 22 to a full house. The dynamic work performed by Tselyakov on piano, Geoff Nuttall on violin and Matt Haimovitz on cello pulled the audience to their feet in rapt admiration.
In a prior interview, open to the public, with Vancouver Sun music reviewer David Duke, Chatman spoke about the work.
"This is a very inspiring place," he said of Pender Harbour prompting him to evoke nature in his 17-minute suite. "I'd never written for this medium before (a small piano trio) and found it very challenging. My solution was to use double stops to make it sound more like a chamber orchestra."
He noted it was a difficult piece written for first rate performers, and the trio bore out his claim. Chatman spoke of the creative process in what he calls "a lonely profession."
He spends about half his time teaching at the University of British Columbia where he is professor and head of composition. But Duke called him a composer who is in the community rather than the ivory tower and therefore the perfect choice for this commissioned work.
There was much anticipation at the evening concert that also featured an opening Terzetto for two violins and viola by Antonin Dvorak with Livia Sohn, Barry Shiffman and Geoff Nuttall performing superbly.
"This is what chamber music is all about. I can reach out and touch you at the back of the room," Nuttall told the audience.
The concert also included a delightful and hummable sextet for piano and wind instruments by the French composer Francis Poulenc in which the listener could clearly hear its relationship to jazz.
Chatman's piece, by contrast, is dynamic and marked by vivid juxtapositions. The first movement entitled Mountains, Rocks and Red Cedars increases in intensity with rising musical lines that gives a sense of climbing, possibly a hike on nearby Mount Daniel. The second movement, Phosphorescent Bay at Midnight uses pizzicato (plucking of strings) to catch the flickers of light upon the ocean.
But instead of the water moving from the peaceful bay into the raging tidal rapids of the fourth movement, as one would expect it to flow, the pace changes to slower and lyrical. This movement could well become a choral selection, Chatman noted. As the strings saw busily, the music switches back to the dark side. The sixth movement, Silver wings, is a metaphor for many images within the local landscape and the piece concludes loudly and decisively.
Festival performer George Zukerman called the Chatman piece "very strong." This was praise, indeed, from a musician whose own career is an iconic one. His ongoing efforts as an impresario have helped to tour musicians throughout Canada and the world, but mostly he is acknowledged as the man who put the bassoon on the musical map as a solo instrument. At this year's festival Zukerman presided with his bassoon in several concerts including Saturday afternoon's program that included two Inuit chants learned while touring up north.
Next year's festival, Aug. 20 to 22, shows signs of being equally adventurous ready to push the boundaries of chamber music once more.
