BANFF, Alberta — The triennial Banff International String Quartet Competition began in the Canadian Rockies in 1983. Until its 12th iteration in 2016, the contest at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity offered no programming in the intervening two years.
After the 2016 competition, the centre’s then-president, Janice Price, asked competition director Barry Shiffman whether a festival-like program would be a viable addition to event’s concept. Since the Labor Day weekend in 2017, the Banff Centre has presented what has become the Banff International String Quartet Festival. Aside from drawing chamber-music fans back to the mountain town, one motive for the festival’s creation was to reward the competition winners with one more opportunity to perform in Banff, beyond the dozens of concerts the competition facilitates for the laureates. This year, the 2022 winner, the Isidore String Quartet, and the 2019 co-winner, the Viano Quartet, were the invitees.
The festival’s 2024 offerings were, as usual, sold out. The audience that comes to Banff for the competitions, some of them since the beginning, from throughout North America has become dedicated supporters of the festival.
This year’s festival, which ran Aug. 29-Sept. 1, had the additional lure of presenting the multiple Grammy-winning Canadian violinist James Ehnes and his own string quartet. The Ehnes Quartet played a concert of Beethoven and Debussy on Sept. 1 and joined the 28 players in the makeshift Banff Festival Orchestra for Elgar’s Introduction and Allegro for Strings on opening night.
That evening, Ehnes, with Shiffman on viola, also performed Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante in E-flat with the orchestra. (Besides being an administrator and programmer in Banff, at the Rockport Festival, and at Toronto’s Glenn Gould School, Shiffman was one of the founding members of the St. Lawrence String Quartet, which won the Banff Competiton in 1992.)
The opening-night concert, the only one to take place in the newly renovated and renamed 638-seat Jenny Belzberg Theatre, also featured Bach’s Brandenburg Concert No. 3 in G major. My sense of the new space (300 seats were removed) was that it was very lower-register friendly. The sound of the three violins, played by seasoned performers, felt muted, dimming the impact. However, Joel Quarrington’s bass in the back was ever-present. Not unusually, the harpsichord, played by Banff Centre music director Megumi Masaki, was inaudible beyond the stage during the ensemble playing.
The Aug. 31 morning concert was all contemporary music by female composers. Kronos Quartet founder David Harrington introduced the groups, which played works commissioned for Kronos’ 50 for the Future project, which enlists composers to write works that quartets, developing or otherwise, can work with and ultimately perform. The project has commissioned far more than 50 new works. Its website archives all of the new scores, which are made available to any ensemble for free.
Two of the five works were folk-flavored pieces: Rhiannon Giddens’ At the Purchaser’s Option, arranged for string quartet by Jacob Garchik, and Glimpses of Muqam Chebiyat, a Chinese folk arrangement composed by Wu Man and played by the Viano Quartet. The sometimes-intimidating notion of “contemporary music” was no issue. A couple of the other pieces, though, were adventurous.
Quebec composer Nicole Lizée’s Another Living Soul calls for string playing and short moments of ethereal vocalese, accompanying whistling tubes, modified to create specific pitches, taped-together gravity tubes used as bows, some punctuating foot stomping, and tiny tings in the last section for a variety of desk bell pitches, which the musicians lightly tapped with their feet while playing. The effect was unequivocally enjoyable music. Lizée is one of a kind, and her creativity sounds completely unaffected. [Lizée’s opera A Torrent of Light was the recipient of the 2023 Best New Opera Award from the Music Critics Association of North America.]
The other striking piece in the morning program was “written” by Canadian Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq and arranged by Garchik. When Harrington asked Tagaq if she’d consider creating a piece for quartet, he said the subject arose of how to notate a facsimile of throat singing, which comes from an oral tradition. Tagag playfully asked him what a note was.
In the end, because the stringed instruments are so versatile, the musicians, who included the Rolston String Quartet‘s Luri Lee and Edmonton Symphony concertmaster Robert Uchida, delivered perhaps a too-long but fascinating musical representation of the heaving, panting, guttural expression of the indigenous art. (In the first concert on the afternoon of Aug. 30, with the young brother-sister Cheng² Duo, cellist Brian Cheng produced a convincing equine whinny.)
The Isidore played on the night of Aug. 31, opening with Five Pieces for String Quartet by Erwin Schulhoff. The collection of short pieces surveys a range of idioms, all of whose titles begin with alla — in the style of. The work showcased the ensemble’s range in music that didn’t scream “really big quartet!,” a digestible introduction to their diverse program.
Their second piece was the world premiere of a Banff Quartet Festival commission by Canadian jazz pianist Andy Milne called Chimeric Reveries. One meaning of “chimeric” is “hoped for but illusory or impossible to achieve.” I believe this is Milne’s first crack at string-quartet writing, which he may have found chimerical. He has a solid reputation in his genre. He has won a couple of Juno awards (Canada’s Grammys) and has recorded extensively. His association with the Banff Centre goes back at least 30 years, making it a comfortable place to try something new.
His piece felt like groping, reaching for some original but tentative contribution to the genre, maybe even forced a little. The Isidore foursome weren’t technically challenged. They often sounded like musicians just poking around for some illusive musical idea. Periodically, Milne tossed in a conventional jazz piano line. There may have been an allusion to John Coltrane’s Giant Steps in the opening bars. I think it could have used more of his own familiar idioms, notwithstanding the string instrumentation. A wonderful aspect of the festival is that it gives musicians opportunities to venture out of their usual associations. This excursion into the string-quartet world felt like a stretch. The Isidore also played Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence with Ehnes on viola and Edward Arron on cello.
Four musicians of the 12-member Israeli Chamber Project performed the afternoon of Aug. 31. It was an eclectic program of new and older music, including Mozart’s Kegelstatt Trio for clarinet, viola, and piano in E-flat and Rebecca Clarke’s Dumka for violin, viola, and piano. Sebastian Currier’s series of nine miniatures called Verge, for clarinet, violin, and piano, was a revelation. It begins with the skittish 52-second “Almost too fast” and ends with “Almost too calm,” exploring a variety of tempi and dynamic shades episodically.
The group began its encore with one member acknowledging the horrors occurring in the Middle East. They have faced anti-Israeli protests at some venues, but not in Banff. The encore was an arrangement for clarinet, viola, and piano of a Shlomo Yidov tune called White Days. The original is a song with lyrics by Leah Goldberg. It conjures a time of stress-free days, and carries the hopeful line, “The bridges are straight and tall between yesterday and tomorrow.”
Starting last year, Shiffman invited an author to the festival whose work reflects some aspect of classical-music culture. This year, the guest was Jeremy Eichler, whose book Time’s Echo: Music, Memory and the Second World War examines the music and biography of four great composers who explicitly or implicitly expressed their feelings about war more broadly and particularly, in the case of Schoenberg and Shostakovich, on the Holocaust.
Eichler gave a talk about his book the afternoon of Aug. 31, which was followed the next afternoon by a concert titled In Memoriam: Richard Strauss at the End of German Music, during which the author introduced Strauss’ darkly elegiac Metamorphosen as a poignant, somewhat cryptic reflection on living through a history that included genocide and other catastrophes.
The performance of the Strauss that followed Eichler’s contextualizing could be described as a kind of religious phenomenon. The musicians, whose role Strauss identified as “23 solo strings,” stood dressed in black on the Rolston Recital Hall platform and evoked the image of a congregation of believers on fire with the spirit of the music. Each player looked like a part of the ensembles project, but individually, they looked unencumbered with any prescribed role they might be conditioned to project in another classical-music context. Everyone was the lead player in the larger whole. It was a testament to the fact that a vividly live performance cannot be replicated through any other medium.
The last concert on Sept. 1 featured the Viano Quartet in a program that opened with Beethoven’s String Quartet in C minor, Op. 18, No. 4. The second piece was Barber’s String Quartet in B minor, Op. 11, which includes the famously diaphanous second movement Adagio, often performed on its own as the Adagio for Strings. The original quartet version’s small forces are capable of making their instruments both surge and whisper, and the Viano demonstrated their prowess, hypnotically conjuring the most rarefied emotions. The group conveyed the soothing iterations of the melancholic melody with such control and comforting suspense that I didn’t want it to end.
The festival concluded with the Viano and guest cellist Adrian Fong, a juror the year the ensemble won the competition, playing Schubert’s String Quintet in C major, D. 956. Shiffman explained that when Gian Carlo Menotti started the Spoleto Festival in Italy, he designated Schubert’s quintet the finale of the event, and so why not follow in a great tradition?
The Banff International String Quartet Festival, like its namesake competition, is still young, but its place in the summer program of the Banff Centre seems totally secure.
