TORONTO — Traditionally in the classical music world, concert life essentially peters out some time in May or June, and musicians and music lovers continue their activities in out-of-town festival locations like Tanglewood, Saratoga, Marlboro, Ojai, or Aspen. Not so in Toronto.
The Toronto Symphony and the Canadian Opera Company may be on hiatus, but Toronto Summer Music has been filling the gap for 19 years with chamber music and recitals of a very high order. This year’s programs run from July 11 to Aug. 3 and features concerts of real substance nearly every night of the week. In addition, Toronto Summer Music offers an academy for young musicians to study with and be mentored by the artists appearing in the public concerts.
This year’s festival opened with a fully staged performance of Purcell’s The Fairy Queen under the direction of the celebrated early-music specialist William Christie. Performers appearing later include mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly, the New Orford String Quartet, the Pacifica Quartet, and the Canadian Brass. The artistic director is violinist Jonathan Crow, concertmaster of the Toronto Symphony. In addition to being a superb performer, Crow has proven to be an excellent musical curator.
On July 18, I attended a recital at Koerner Hall by the 37-year-old Ukrainian Vadym Kholodenko, a pianist who first came to international attention in 2013, when he won the Van Cliburn Piano Competition. In Toronto, Kholodenko put together an interesting program. He started with a Handel Chaconne, essentially a theme and 21 variations, and then went on to Beethoven’s last sonata, whose second movement is one of the most remarkable sets of variations ever composed. This made for a very effective contrast. Handel’s keyboard music gets little exposure on recital programs these days, and his Chaconne is well worth a hearing. Handel was a keyboard virtuoso, and the Chaconne gives the performer plenty of opportunity for display. Kholodenko played the Chaconne with appropriate brilliance.
Beethoven’s Op. 111 does not offer audiences the memorable tunes and visceral excitement of the Moonlight, Pathétique, or Appassionata sonatas. It is a more cerebral and inward-looking piece. It is also among the most forward-looking of Beethoven’s works for the piano, with an altogether new way of using extended trills. And anyone looking at the score for the first time will be astonished to see unusual time signatures like 9/16, 6/16, and 12/32. Beethoven never stopped growing and digging deeper as a composer. Kholodenko proved more than equal to the formidable technical demands of the sonata, and he managed to sustain the very slow tempo of the second movement Arietta with total command. A very satisfying performance.
Kholodenko has already established his credentials as a Prokofiev interpreter on several fine recordings for Harmonia Mundi. He has recorded an album of solo piano works as well as all five piano concertos with the Fort Worth Symphony. The second half of the concert was all Prokofiev. Here, again, Kholodenko’s programming sense was in evidence. He started with a lighter work and then went on to some really heavy-duty stuff.
Prokofiev had a remarkable range as a composer, moving easily from complicated sonatas and symphonies to easily accessible shorter pieces like the Classical Symphony, the character dances in Romeo and Juliet, the Lt. Kije Suite, and the March from the opera The Love for Three Oranges. The Four Pieces for Piano, Op. 32, date from 1918, and they are all short dance movements: Danza, Minuet, Gavotte, and Waltz. The first three are playful and perky, but the Waltz is so slow as to be unrecognizable as a waltz at all. Clever pieces played with a pleasingly light touch by Kholodenko.
Over the years, I have come to appreciate more and more the stature of Prokofiev’s nine piano sonatas. As a group, they constitute a landmark in 20th-century piano literature for their originality and substance. Just last summer, I visited the Bravo! Vail Music Festival, where Anne-Marie McDermott and two other pianists played all of the sonatas in two concerts. I attended a fascinating illustrated lecture on this important oeuvre by McDermott and came away more than ever convinced that this was important music.
Prokofiev’s Piano Sonata No. 8 was written during the war in 1944. It was a terrible time for Russia, and there are pages of melancholy, angst, and anger in the score reflecting what the composer must have been feeling. But it is not programmatic music in any way. It is pure music and, as such, a considerable achievement. The first movement is complicated and demands a great deal of the listener. The second movement is much lighter and has a catchy tune. The last movement is often percussive, exceedingly difficult to play, and tremendously exciting. Kholodenko demonstrated a technique as fine as any I have heard in recent years. Emil Gilels gave the first performance of this sonata, but I wonder if he could have done more for the music than Kholodenko.
The audience demanded an encore and got not one but two. The first was a charming piece by Poulenc called L’embarquement pour Cythėre, and the second was a brief and extremely quiet work by Ukrainian composer Valentyn Silvestrov, Bagatelle, Op. 1, No. 1. Neither of these pieces is well known, and it would have been helpful for Kholodenko to offer a few words of introduction before he played them.
All in all, a challenging and rewarding recital by an artist who would be welcome back in Toronto anytime. A near-capacity audience indicated they thought so, too. Toronto Summer Music has shown once again that July in Canada’s largest city can be a special time for concerts of quality.
