The stupendously successful inaugural Pender Harbour Chamber Music Festival that took place last weekend used a clever idea to attract listeners. They offered a Saturday afternoon virtuoso concert, called Chamber Music Does Not Bite, to the general public at free admission. How mellow is that? The one-hour presentation was designed to bring in the community and audience of all ages who could relax in their casual clothes, enjoy the music and maybe decide that chamber music is not stuffy or formal.
Every seat at the Performance Centre in Madeira Park was occupied to listen to festival artistic director and pianist Andrew Tselyakov, cellist Paul Marleyn and violinist Oleg Pokhanovski perform excerpts from well-known composers. The three musicians looked positively eager to share their work.
The concert opened with a Tchaikovsky nocturne and continued with Bazzini's Dance of the Goblins that showcased Pokhanovski's lively violin style and drew thunderous applause. Paul Marleyn played two exquisite pieces on the cello including a Rachmaninoff number. Marleyn has a tendency to finish a piece slowly, moving the bow gently to a soft conclusion, like the long, slow finish of a fine wine. In that instant of silence before the applause, someone aptly reflected the audience's sentiment by sighing audibly with pleasure.
The concert continued with an instantly recognizable piece, Flight of the Bumblebee by Rimsky-Korsakov, and a selection from Russian composer Shchedrin's opera Dead Souls, written for cello and three-handed piano. (Pokhanovski provided the third hand to Tselyakov's two.) It's a complicated piece that tells an amusing story of Cossacks arriving in a village of women.
The three musicians closed with a contemporary piece from a Moscow composer, Alexander Rosenblatt, in the style of a tango. It was flashy and exhilarating and drew a second curtain call. As one member of the audience who had also attended the Friday night concert noted, all three are excellent musicians in their own right, but they play together well as a trio. There were no diva antics or upstaging here.
"The festival went beyond our expectations," said organizer Lise Aylmer. "The musical quality was high and every night was a standing ovation, a spontaneous one."
Before the doors had opened on Friday, there was not one ticket left to sell in the four concert series with up to 100 people attending each evening.
"We couldn't have done it without you," Aylmer said at an opening reception to a room full of festival volunteers and musicians, while the personable artistic director, Tselyakov, was brimming with ideas for the following year. The Saturday night tickets had sold particularly quickly to weekend visitors from the city who heard an Evening in Vienna with selections from Beethoven, Brahms and Schubert and performances from Yariv Aloni on viola and Andrew Dawes on violin.
"The Sunday afternoon Dvorak Piano Quintet at the end was to die for," said Aylmer.
Unfortunately, plans to record the Sunday afternoon concert for later broadcast on CBC's West Coast Performance were stalled by the current labour disruptions.
