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