It's 80 degrees here, but today I saw -- so help me -- large patches of
*snow* in a park on the banks of the Ontario River, left over from a month
ago.

And, perhaps more to point during my current mission, Ottawa's Strings of
the *Future* Festival opened at the National Gallery yesterday with a late
Haydn and Beethoven, an early Webern and Schoenberg -- a program that could
have been performed a century or two ago.

And yet, in everything but for its name, it's a terrific festival, a week
of nonstop chamber music: 11 string quartets in 17 concerts featuring
55 works.  There are concerts every day at noon, 5 and 8, with related
activities around them -- lectures, workshops, institutes, etc.  It's all
taking place in Moshe Safdie's magnificent giant glass candelabrum, so
impressive, so unfunctional with its enormous Gothic hallways that can
never be used what the National Gallery was built for: to exhibit art; I
admire the building, but half of it is "wasted," no doubt about it.  The
concerts take place in a steeply-raked 400-seat auditorium (a small edition
of Berkeley's Hertz Hall), with pretty good sound, but depending on where
you sit.

While Claude Infante, formerly of the Paris Opera, is the director of
the festival, programming is under the control of the deceptively amiable
artistic advisor, Jean-Jacques Van Vlasselaer.  He picked the participants
and told them what to play.  Nicely.  But firmly.  And the results are
amazing.

Germany's Auryn Quartet opened the festival with the Haydn Op. 77, No. 2,
and the "Viennese sound" was picked up by the remarkable Lafayette Quartet
playing Webern's youthful (and virtually unknown) "Langsamer Satz" ("Slow
Movement"), a wonderfully romantic piece discovered not long ago...  in
Spokane!  (I reported about this from last fall's Seattle Symphony concert
opening Benaroya Hall.) J.J.'s programming logic continued as the Lafayette
played Schoenberg's "Transfigured Night," a work on the cusp of that
composer's radical change, just as Webern's work did.

The Auryn returned for a still-rare "full" performance of Beethoven's No.
13, Op. 130, complete with the Op. 133 "Grosse Fuge."

The following night, Britain's Arditti Quartet played the "standalone"
version of the "Grosse Fuge," in a muscular (or muscle-bound) fashion that
was completely different from what we heard the night before.  Not only are
the evening concert shared between quartets, but J.J.  also makes them
"compete" with the same piece -- splendid!

Canada's reclusive, rural-without-a-phone avant garde composer, R.  Murray
Schafer, 66, is getting a major representation at this year's festival.
A fine modern composer, but not one who believes in having his musicians
*sit*, Schafer's String Quartet No. 2 (played by the Lafayette this
afternoon) ends with the violinists and the violist strolling into the
audience, while still playing, the cellist looking around for them, then
playing a bit of a riff before the work ends.  At tonight's world premiere
of Schafer's String Quartet No. 7, the Quatuor Molinari was joined by
soprano Nathalie Paulin, singing text from the diary of a schizophrenic,
strolling onto and off stage, telling the audience at one point: "I want
some music!" The second violinist and violist take turns clapping for the
other to play brief standing jigs, and a good time is had by all.

With all this going on, Schafer is actually offering *some* music.  None
was in evidence from Germany's Trojahn (may not be his real name...:),
whose "Fragments of the music from Antigone by Hoelderlin" is a series
of *sounds* and silences, climaxing in the cellist hitting on string
repeatedly for an interval between four minutes and eternity.  Surely, this
is not the "future" part in the title, this stuff is a half a century
*old*.

The J.J.  interweaving continued unabated: the Lafayette's noon concert
included Berg's String Quartet, Op. 3, as a kind of bridge between the
Monday Webern and Schoenberg and tonight's Arditti concert-closer of the
Schoenberg Second Quartet (going beyond tonality and yet *today* rather
accessible), another quartet with a singer (patterns, patterns), in this
case, Sandra Stringer, doing fabulously with the difficult role.

A lot more happened, and this is only the second day.  Mid-week, we'll
progress to Schnittke, Gubaidulina, Nadarejshvili, even my unfavorite
Ades -- while still anchored in Berg, Webern, Schoenberg, with occasional
"throwbacks" to earlier Viennese, of Haydn, Beethoven, etc.  And I am still
waiting for the "future" part.  So do we all.

[log in to unmask]
in Ottawa to 5/8