Calgary Herald from Calgary, Alberta, Canada • 101

CALGARY HERALD Saturday, June 22, 2002 ES5 Complete Czerny revealed Arts mm Mm taught mine rm-iv tit-- 'mm KENNETH DeLONG For the Calgary Herald For anyone who has struggled with the piano, Carl Czerny is a depressingly familiar name. The composer of legions of piano etudes, Czerny has the unenviable reputation of having inflicted more pain and boredom upon aspiring pianists than anyone born. That Czerny was more than a composer of dry technical exercises has been virtually hidden to the musical world. To reveal a different side of the man, pianist Anton Kuerti organized the Carl Czerny Music Festival and International Symposium, which took place in Edmonton last week. Many years ago, Kuerti stumbled upon a piano sonata composed by Czerny.

Finding a wealth of musical ideas and consummate craftsmanship, Kuerti was driven to explore further Czerny's largely unknown output. Extensive digging revealed that Czerny had composed more than 1,000 works, ranging from fashionable potpourris and variations on opera themes to symphonies, string quartets, masses and chamber works with piano. The Edmonton festival was the first of its kind and permitted music lovers to gain an overview of Czerny's wider musical accomplishments. In his own words, Czerny composed music in four basic categories: studies and exercises; easy pieces for students; brilliant pieces for concerts; and serious music. The festival concentrated upon music in the last two categories, and while it remains an open question whether any masterpieces were presented, the concerts showed Czerny to be a composer of considerable stature.

Much of the focus was on bravura music. At a time when piano virtuosity was an end in itself, Czerny's goal was to impress an audience through "absolute bravura combined with good taste." These qualities were heard in abundance; Czerny never wrote one note when three would do. The opening concert, for example, included two mammoth sonatas for four-hand piano played to perfection by the piano duo of Yaara Tal and Andreas Groethuysen. Sprawling works featuring a marvelous command of piano textures, they showed Czerny in an exuberant mood, the allegros bristling with ideas and often developed to achieve heart-stopping climaxes. Among the smaller forms were songs set to German, Italian and even English words.

Sung with panache by Benjamin Butterfield, they showed Czerny to be the ultimate chameleon. The German songs were full of romantic passion, the Italian songs a send-up of Rossini in his mama-mia vein, and the English songs as 'maudlin and sentimental as any drawing-room ballad. I Czerny, it seems, could reproduce nipon demand any style or idiom and understood what was needed to pro- duce any music effect But those effects were in the main re-creations of styles already in existence. Ultimately, Czerny was the Rich of the musical world. As a com-'poser, he lovingly re-created the works he loved by the composers he admired.

The two string quartets played at the festival were beautiful, Courtesy, Donald Lee, The Banff Centre left, and Jacqui Lynn Fidlar are learning to add new dimensions to their performances in the Banff Centre program. Phoebe MacRae, front, Vilma Vitols, Professional singers hone acting skills through Shakespeare the Banff Centre's Margaret Greenham Theatre. In the performances, Murrell and Leyshon wanted to avoid an academic, "excerpt-y" and ultimately confusing format, which might result from simply juxtaposing the spoken scenes with their sung adaptations. They opted instead for a kind of "flowing in and out" through the scenes from Shakespeare and the corresponding operatic treatment for each of the plays. The operatic excerpts are from Gounod's Romeo et Juliette, Verdi's Falstaff, Swiss composer Ernest Bloch's little-known Macbeth atmospheric, like the greatest movie music ever written for Macbeth," says Murrell) and Benjamin Britten's setting of A Midsummer Night's Dream "I thought at first this flowing in and out would make it (the performance) more like music theatre," Murrell recalls.

But the concept works because of the inspiration composers have habitually drawn from Shakespeare and because of the inherently musical and operatic scale of his plays. "It flows beautifully to have Romeo say (for example), 'But if thou wilt let me stay and and then have Juliet sing, 'Non, non, c'est pas le It feels like the same piece even though it's in two languages, Murrell says, because spoken and sung, it's in the same spirit The seasonal motif, with Romeo and Juliet representing summer, for example, and Falstaff and Macbeth representing fall and winter respectively, is the main unifying feature of the performance. "We wanted to give everybody a sense of an emotional through-line," Leyshon says. Since 1980, Leyshon, who is artistic director of the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre, has directed numerous opera productions for Vancouver Opera and Victoria's Pacific Opera. She says that although singers might lack theatrical training, ing in opera, is the brainchild of Leyshon and the Banff Centre's executive producer of Theatre Arts, John Murrell.

According to Murrell, the increased emphasis on musical training, beginning in the late 1800s, meant that opera became almost exclusively a musical art form at the expense of its theatrical aspect. He recalls seeing a television interview with Freder-ica von Stade in which the great soprano showed a late-i9th-cen-tury book of acting skills for opera singers that had been given to her by a friend. "Essentially, it was a series of photographs of some rather thin, pathetic, old man making faces and doing stock gestures," Murrell says. The six-week Banff program, which began June io, is about as far as you can get from the clenched-teeth, fist-raised-in-anger form of operatic acting conventions. The 16 professional singers who are taking part hone their acting skills through a study of scenes from four Shakespearean plays and the corresponding operatic excerpts.

"The idea of using Shakespeare, spoken and sung, to instil in singers basic theatre skills was something that I always wanted to do," says Murrell, who is one of Canada's best-known playwrights and by his own admission an inveterate lover of opera. He points out that such training familiar territory for any theatre student constitutes only about 20 per cent of the curriculum taken by voice majors in most university opera programs. "In a way," he says, "we're making it 8o per cent of this program." Four Shakespearean plays with the unifying concept of season Romeo and Juliet, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Macbeth and A Midsummer Night's Dream make up the acting portion of Opera as Theatre. The program will culminate in Shakespeare at the Opera, three evenings of performance on July 17, 18 and 20 at they nevertheless have an advantage over actors when it comes to tackling an unfamiliar text. "They understand texture and rhythm, and (accordingly) are used to inhabiting a scale of language that a lot of contemporary actors are very nervous about, or back away from" The Opera as Theatre program devotes mornings to 90-minute body awareness exercises based on Feldenkreis and Alexander techniques, followed by a two-hour session devoted to acting technique.

The afternoons are taken up with musical preparation under the program's music director, Leslie Dala. Evenings are set aside for the singers to work with vocal coaches and develop their own repertoires. "It's very inspiring here," says Calgary mezzo-soprano Jacqui Lynn Fidlar, who is participating in the program. "I've never felt this degree of togetherness anywhere else." For Fidlar, the program provides an invaluable lesson in acting because it brings home the importance of "really understanding the motivation for each line. "We're not sure how to use our voices for speech without sounding overblown, over-dramatic, and being untrue to what is happening in a given scene," she says.

"It's a big challenge." And this is part of an even bigger challenge, she says, which is acquiring the sophistication necessary to compete in a market dominated by the special effects of contemporary entertainment icons such as Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. "How can we possibly do that onstage? Thaf why we have to work even more to have the magic in ourselves. "And thaf one of the reasons for the Banff program to discover the power within us for the verve and energy to really draw the audience in and make them feel they're experiencing something very special" poetic ana wonaenuuy written tne styie 01 Mozart, i ne aympnony in Ki ii lliiiiu noa luii ui paasiuii cuiu ciicigy 1.. ill uic aiyic ui ccuiy uccuiuvca wmle listening, you found yourself asking: Will the real Carl Czerny please stana upr Kuerti asserted that the best of Czerny was composed when he was very young, before his legendary composition craft was developed and he still spoke rrom tne heart he best works were pieces Czerny composed in his teens, compositions such as the first piano sonata and the first violin sonata. The Violin Sonata was a highlight of the festival, played with complete understanding by Kuerti and violinist Erica Raum.

(Kuerti has recorded the piano sonata, and a new CD of the Violin Sonata with Kuerti and Raum was released during the festival). While the festival did not unearth a composer to rank with the gods, it did present a weu-rounaea account of a man who was far more than a composer of etudes. The best of Czerny is certainly worth playing if you can not only because of his fine command of compositional craft, attractive melodies, and general sense of energy, but because it forces us to re-examine the hair-line difference between talent and genius, between inspiration and re-creation. An "interesting historical figure" fTovev) in the best sense, Czerny was a man of his time, in tune with all the latest trends, able to deliver quickly any kind of piece needed or wanted. CBC Radio Two recorded many of the concerts and will present a three-evening series of concerts from of the festival in mid-July.

Spotlight The Banff Centre's Opera as Theatre program presents Shakespeare at the Opera, part of the Banff Arts Festival, at 8 p.m. on July 17, 18 and 20 at the Margaret Greenham Theatre. Tickets: $15 (general), $12 (students and seniors), $8 children, available through the banff centre box office 1-800-413-8368. BOB CLARK Calgary Herald Sing hallelujah! The days when opera singers simply stand and deliver or in today's parlance, "park and bark" are almost over. Thanks to the advent of surtitles, the influence of filmed and televised operas, and popular stadium spectacles like those of the Three Tenors, opera is no longer seen as the static big-ticket item in which the tenor is clumsy and the fat lady simply sings.

"Beautiful voices are always going to live at the centre of opera, but our patrons want a theatrical, narrative and visual experience as well," says Glynis Leyshon, director of the new Opera as Theatre program at the Banff Centre. Delivering the full-blown experience is one of the reasons the genre is enjoying "incredible resurgence," Leyshon says. The summer program, which aims at redressing some of the imbalance between singing and act- i.