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The Very Thought of You: Trombone with String Orchestra by Ian McDougall

The Very Thought of You: Trombone with String Orchestra,
Ian McDougall SOCAN TMMPCD01,
2012, compact disc.

Reviewed by Jennifer Messelink

Juno Award winner Ian MacDougall is perhaps best known for his work in the Big Band idiom, with the Toronto Jazz ensemble Boss Brass. But his former students at the University of Victoria know the now-professor emeritus as a supportive and inspiring trombone instructor for fifteen years. With the release of his most recent recording, The Very Thought of You, Ian McDougall once again has the opportunity to make a difference in the lives of young musicians.

The Very Thought of You benefits the “Ten Mile Fine Arts Student Assistance Fund” with ten dollars of every $20 CD sold going to support struggling fine arts students. The fundraiser was conceived one night after McDougall witnessed a student buying his dinner at a local grocery store: a single potato. McDougall and fellow Boss Brass bandmate Rob Wilkinson have arranged fourteen jazz standards for trombone and string orchestra. Performed in a relaxed, intimate swing ballad style, McDougall brings that warmth and intimacy to this recording of well-known 1930s and 40s classics.

The Thirties fostered the development and popularity of the swing era, and Big Band orchestras led by Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Tommy Dorsey were well regarded. Tommy Dorsey was the first to play the trombone as a lyrical instrument. His featured soloist Frank Sinatra stated, “My greatest teacher was not a vocal coach, not the work of other singers, but the way Tommy Dorsey breathed and phrased on the trombone.” Ian McDougall continues in the tradition with “Everything Happens to Me,” a recognizable standard originally recorded by the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. McDougall effortlessly blends the lyrical qualities of the trombone with the rich harmonies of the orchestra. “I’m Through With Love” features solo oboe, as well as trombone, and a comfortable conversation develops, creating a multi-voiced orchestral experience. In the memorable title track “The Very Thought of You,” McDougall offers us familiarity with a unique view, reminding us that what is old can still be fresh and new.

The Very Thought of You is available at Lyle’s Place, Munro’s Books, Larsen Music, UVIC School of Music, Fine Arts café, and Ian McDougall’s website.

Jennifer Messelink is a fourth-year student in the School of Music at UVIC.

 

 

A Steinway Celebration: Robert Silverman & Lafayette String Quartet

September 23, 2012, Philip T. Young Recital Hall at UVic School of Music
Rhapsody in B minor, op. 79 no.1 –Johannes Brahms
Six Piano Pieces, op. 118 –Johannes Brahms
Rhapsody in E-flat major, op. 119 no.4 –Johannes Brahms
Piano Quintet in E-flat major, op. 44
Robert Silverman, piano , with the Lafayette String Quartet

Reviewed by Kelvin Chan

When you realize you should shove aside your daily routine to explore a composer further, you know the performance you’ve just heard has left “a lasting legacy.” Robert Silverman’s magnificent playing at his recent Sunday afternoon concert made me shelve my Mahler symphonies cycle and pull out the late piano works of Brahms for the night.

The program for the first half comprised a selection of works from Brahms’ late period—this is fantasy-like, probing, at times introspective music, and Silverman has an obvious affinity for this kind of expression. He paid meticulous attention to the treatment of both the sustain and una corda pedals, and a lush, burnished approach was apparent by the time of the second theme’s arrival in the Rhapsody in B minor, which he played with highly polished voicing in the treble register (which is notorious among piano majors at the School of Music for being recessed on the old Steinway, the instrument of Mr. Silverman’s choice).

The Six Piano Pieces, op. 118, one of a few cycles of piano works Brahms wrote toward the end of his career, is regarded as among the finest works in the Romantic literature. Being a pianophile, I have heard and studied multiple recordings of these pieces before, but never experienced them in a live setting, where the spontaneity truly adds to the quasi-fantasia nature of the music. Silverman presented the cycle with its strong thematic unity in mind, only briefly pausing between each of the six pieces, and in some cases, such as at the end of the Intermezzo in A minor, carefully linking the first notes of the following piece with the sustain pedal. Throughout the cycle, Silverman exhibited his mastery of tonal control, especially in soft playing: the last note of the serene Intermezzo in A major, for example, was produced with breathtaking softness—yet still with a remarkable degree of firmness, allowing it be projected over the lavish bass he frequently and beautifully conjured. He wrapped up the first half of the concert with a thrilling rendition of the Rhapsody in E-flat major, which allowed him to display his highly-refined tone at a wider dynamic contrast. The results were impressive.

After the interval, UVic’s Lafayette String Quartet joined Silverman on stage. The ensemble work throughout the Schumann Piano Quintet was first-rate. In the Development section of the Allegro brillante, for instance, the string players breathed and swayed freely yet were synchronized at the same time. Silverman provided a sensitive accompaniment throughout, frequently glancing at the violinists for visual cues. The brilliant chemistry in the ensemble was especially evident in the exhilarating Allegro, ma non troppo finale, where rhythmic excitement and structural buildups moved uniformly from first violin to piano to cello. The majestic culmination at the coda drew deservedly loud applause from the audience members, the majority of whom stood in ovation.

Kelvin Chan is a student in the School of Music at UVIC

Seeing Red at the Belfry

Red by John Logan
Directed by Michael Shamata
Until October 14/12

Seeing Red

Reviewed by Leah Callen

Red, The Belfry’s latest offering, highlights the relationship between Master and Initiate in the infernal chapel of artistic genius. Ken, a young artist, starts out as the assistant to the “high priest of Modern art,” Mark Rothko. We enter his inner sanctum where paint pots, ashtrays, and booze bathe in red light. It’s Luciferian, edgy and brooding. Like an alchemist, Rothko mixes paints and blows smoke as scarlet vapours rise around him, repeating his personal mantra: Rembrandt, Rothko, and Turner. Ken, his green assistant, pleads “pray for me.”

Rothko gazes out on the audience, appraising us as his masterpieces in progress. He urges Ken to be human, to have compassion for art. It lives and breathes, vulnerable to injury like a blind child in a room full of knives. He worries his murals will never forgive him if he hangs them in the Four Seasons Restaurant at the Seagram Building – his latest commission.

Red and black are the emotional colours of Rothko’s art — and playwright of John Logan’s words. Light and dark, intellect and heart, even Santa Claus and Satan have a tug of war. Ken and Rothko take turns embodying opposite energies. Ken tends to practical matters such as mopping, canvas construction and take-out food while Rothko guards the sacred tasks of selecting the perfect mood music, pigment, and cigarette. The scenes are dark as murder, but full of wry humour. I laughed out loud more than once, was touched by other moments. Red is very human.

At the heart of Red lies Rothko’s inability to connect. His compassion is towards his canvas. Even as Ken shares a traumatic memory, Rothko seems unable to offer real comfort. The two keep their physical distance throughout the play until the end.

At first, I resisted Rothko’s art. I’ve never been a huge fan of Abstract Expressionist anything. The set replicas invoked post-traumatic memories of Voices of Fire from my childhood. Curiously, the characters’ conversation about the canvases altered my point of view; I left appreciating the symbolism and movement in Rothko’s work. Music added a sweet touch to this production. When artist and apprentice share a canvas frantically, the overture from the Marriage of Figaro runs up and down in the background, foreshadowing that the servant is going to rise to the Master.

Actor Oliver Becker channeled Rothko with realism. I loved his feistiness and honesty. The character begs us to be fully human, to embrace our black as well as our red. There’s an inevitable narrative arc. The bond between master and servant builds; Ken, played energetically by Jameson Matthew Parker, grows a spine. Still, the actors pull off the transition without steering into cliché. I wanted to follow them as they worked on each other like canvases.

In spite of Mozart, I walked home humming Black and Red from Les Miz. Red: the colour of desire, black: the colour of despair. The themes in Red and Rothko’s art are universal.

Leah Callen is an aspiring poet-playwright-screenwriter studying at the University of Victoria.

 

Witness to a Conga and Other Plays

Witness to a Conga and Other Plays
By Stewart Lemoine
Newest Press
206 pp; $19.95

Reviewed by Jenny Aitken

Stewart Lemoine’s most recent collection of plays demonstrates the comedic timing and wit that earned him the position of resident playwright at the Teatro la Quindicina housed in Edmonton’s Varscona Theatre. Over the past few decades he has written over 60 plays, yet his work remains poignant and fresh.

Published plays like these are crucial because they offer the reader and audience member a chance to appreciate the quality of writing as well as the quality of acting. Published plays also function as exemplars for students and aspiring playwrights to demonstrate that character, depth and humour can be revealed through dialogue.

The book begins with Happy Toes, a fast-paced comedy featuring five characters but focusing on two. Lemoine’s characters are cleverly constructed; there’s Edgar the middle-aged clarinet teacher with a crush on his bank teller, and his friend Alex, who fears he may be the “other man” in his relationship with Janine. The drama comes to a head during one of Edgar’s orchestra recitals, when a screaming match between Alex and Janine delivers the energy and pizzazz the orchestra lacked. “Happy Toes” is like your Uncle Alfred, quirky and even a little weird, but likable nonetheless.

As for the second play, The Oculist’s Holiday, I can see why it would be sandwiched in the middle. Set in Toronto in 1934, the story unfolds through Marian Ogilvy’s recollections of her vacation in Switzerland three years earlier. Although I appreciated the explanation of her position as storyteller – that she is a guest speaker at a graduation of a Women’s Business College – the monologues grew tiresome nonetheless. That being said, there was still humour throughout, as when Marian discloses information of her sexual encounters despite the “windmill gestures” being given to her by the college’s teachers.

The book closes with Witness to a Conga, truly saving the best for last. In preparation for their upcoming wedding, Martin’s fiancé Laura has asked him to prepare a list of people he wants to invite. Unfortunately, he can’t think of anyone. Told entirely from his perspective, this play chronicles Martin’s relationships with the people who have affected him most: There’s his now-deceased mother Eleanor, who left Martin’s father for another woman. We learn of his father Walter, whom he calls once every couple of years, and finally there’s Sheila, a former professor he probably shouldn’t still be thinking about. As Martin faces these “ghosts” from his past, he also must decide if he is the type of person who leads a conga, or someone who just sits and watches.

I found this book exemplified the quick and occasionally pointless manner in which we speak. Although the dialogue seemed random and unconnected at times, it worked because of the offbeat nature of Lemoine’s characters. Witness to a Conga and Other Plays is very much like a conga line – sure it may seem silly at times, but if you jump on board, chances are you will have a good time.

Jenny Aitken is a third-year creative writing and journalism student at the University of Victoria. She grew up in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, and has written for the University’s student paper, The Martlet, and for Boulevard Magazine.

Art gallery affirms artistry of kitty videos

By Lynne Van Luven
Dissing cat videos has suddenly become a vibrant pastime among the literati. Writers and film critics alike frequently bemoan the puerile focus and the cute factor. I don’t get it.

I’d understand if such critics were exercised by schlocky music videos or vile snuff films. Or if they took umbrage at screaming-chef videos or the blather of smarmy blonde actors who extol their new-found “lifestyle” wisdom.

But to bemoan kitty videos? Come on, folks, graft a bit of humour on to your humanity. Life is filled with awful realities: daily events in Syria; reporters being stifled and killed around the world; children starving, people using guns to express their political views . . . .

But kitty videos? How can you scoff at these witty, whimsical and loving expressions of man’s bond with felinity? When life is kicking you in the ribs, a quick viewing of the antics of Maru, the box-infatuated Japanese cat, will immediately alleviate your pain. And if you are on the outs with family or friends, there is nothing like a quick link to the furious cat video to remind you how
silly hissy fits really look.

That’s why I was thrilled to learn that The Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis, Minnesota, just sponsored an Internet Cat Video Film Festival, with 70 entries, as a social experiment — as well as a modern-art event.

And I was even happier to see some of my favourite feline performers entered: Keyboard Cat was represented (26.3 views since first posted in 2007) as was the obsessive Maru. Best of all, the winner of the People’s Choice award turned out to be my all-time favourite cat video: the inimitable Henri 2, Paw de Deux, by Will Braden.

So take that snobs! The rest of us already knew the truth: no matter how many times we listened to Henri’s lugubrious self-indulgent mewlings, we couldn’t help chortling.

Lynne Van Luven would be owned by 15 cats if left to her own devices.

Nothing Small About Gay Dwarves Stories

Gay Dwarves of America
By Anne Fleming
Pedlar Press
205 pp; $21

Reviewed by Arleen Paré

In the world of literary genres, the short story could be entering endangered-species status. Not because fewer people write short stories; quite the contrary, many writers enjoy the short story form, and literary journals still publish them. But because few collections of short stories appear on bookstore shelves — Alice Munro notwithstanding. This means that when a short story collection appears, it must be outstanding. Anne Fleming’s Gay Dwarves of America, with its audacious title, is such a book.

Anne Fleming is a B.C. writer with one earlier collection of short stories, Pool Hopping, and a novel called Anomaly. She is a humourist who, pleasingly, can’t help but highlight life’s ironies. She also displays a flair for the poignant. Her writing is smart, smart-assed, funny, and cool. You feel cool reading these nine stories. That doesn’t mean you won’t also feel deep sadness. Fleming’s writing is self-reflexive too. But mainly, Fleming creates unforgettable characters. She writes character the way some poets write extended metaphor. In Gay Dwarves of America, each story is a character, each crazily different. In an unthemed and unlinked collection, this is key: keeping each story distinct keeps the collection as a whole alive, compelling.
Gay Dwarves, unlike most contemporary collections, takes risks from the start. It begins with one of the least risky, “Unicycle Boys.” Curtis is the unicycle boy; Jenny is the narrator. Jenny is the story. She’s the perfect snooty high school girl. She’s cool, ironic and smart-mouthed. The dialogue, “I ran into (Curtis) at Caravan. He’s kind of a neat guy. In a loserish sort of way,” is perfect high school superior. Curtis of the unicylcle is how Jenny learns what the story conveys. It’s a good lesson.

The second story, the eponymous “Gay Dwarves of America” is considerably more quirky. As a short, gay woman, I read it with trepidation, alert to stereotypes and slurs. The story is about John and his college roommate, Pen. Neither is gay nor a dwarf. They exploit the idea to set up a website. But it’s an idea to keep out the sadness. In the end, both are sad.

The stories continue in this quirky manner. If the character isn’t quirky, and most are, then the situation is strange, or the point of view is unusual, or the subject matter is peculiar. Or the format is challenging. Take, for instance, “Puke Diaries,” about throwing up from six different points of view, including that of a cat. It begins with the cat. Each character has unique vocabulary for it, his or her own reasons for puking. The story grows into wholeness, comes together.
By the time we arrive at the final story, “Thirty-One One Word Stories,” which actually is one word centred on each of the final thirty-one pages, we are able to create our own story from each of the words. This is the tacit instruction. The words are inspiring: Thief, Martyr . . . Martha . . . . I began thinking about Martha. As the last story, it works, as each story does in its own exquisite way.

_______
Arleen Paré is a Victoria writer and poet. Her first book, Paper Trail (NeWest Press, 2007), won the Victoria Butler Book Prize and was short-listed for the Dorothy Livesay Prize for Poetry. Her most recent book, Leaving Now (Caitlin Press, 2012) was released this spring. She completed her MFA at UVic in June.

The Q but with Longer Hair

Every day I drive to work from my nice Elk Lake acreage (rented not owned – I am still a student); I listen to Jian Ghomeshi and his show The Q. I love listening to him on the CBC. He has great charm: consequently, the artists and public figures he invites on his show feel comfortable and open up in ways they do not with other interviewers.

It is two weeks until my thirtieth birthday. This morning I sat up in bed and sang the words “Soon I’ll be Thirty, I don’t want to be Thirty.” My wife has grown accustomed to how weird I am, so she just asked the sensible obvious question: “What are you singing?” “Moxy Fruvous – Stuck in the Nineties,” I replied. She had never heard these words. I was astonished that she had no idea what I was talking about.

Moxy Fruvous is a Canadian vocal folk group that sang politically satirical songs during the late eighties to late nineties. They released a great album in 1993 called Bargainville. The lyric I sang this morning was from one of the singles off the album. Of course, Jian was a member of this awesome band.

So let us occasionally remember a different phase of the career of the Canadian radio host Mr. Ghomeshi. Below is a link to one the band’s best tunes “King of Spain.” Note the great nineties fashion and Jian’s awesome long locks.

 

_______

Matthew (Gus) Gusul is the Online Editor for The Coastal Spectator.

First Novel Levels Critical Eye on 1950s

Stony River

By Tricia Dower
Penguin Group, 350 pages paperback, $24
Reviewed by Joy Fisher

In an Author’s Note appended to her first novel, Stony River, set in the 1950s, Tricia Dower writes: “Nothing was as it seemed back then.” It was, she asserts, “an age when secrets crouched behind closed doors.”

The three protagonists in this coming of age novel, Linda, Tereza and Miranda, all struggle to come to terms with the unspoken and, sometimes, unspeakable, secrets which affect their lives.
Close in age—Linda is 11, Tereza 12, and Miranda 15 when the narrative commences in 1955—they are nevertheless contrasting both in appearance and in their life circumstances. Linda is middle class, plump and silently resentful of her over-protective parents. Tereza, beaten by her working-class step-father, is swarthy, functionally illiterate but street-wise. Miranda is a red-haired Irish lass whose deranged but brilliant father, James, known to the neighbours as “Crazy” Haggerty, keeps her locked up in a decaying, book-filled house.

Despite their differences, the lives of these three adolescents intersect repeatedly for the rest of the decade until the novel reaches its conclusion, and the stories of each protagonist a resolution.

Although Dower has lived in Canada since 1981, the novel is set in a small town in New Jersey not unlike the one in which Dower grew up. Stony River, nearly surrounded by a river of the same name, emerges as a character in its own right: a map of the town showing the locations of crucial settings in the narrative assumes pride of place as a kind of frontispiece.

The town and the book are peopled with a supporting cast of characters as colourful as the protagonists. “Dearie” is a pink-haired grandmother so vividly drawn the author has a hard time keeping her from stealing scenes. Buddy, who eventually becomes Tereza’s husband and the father of her child, is ultimately revealed as a homicidal maniac. And James, although dead at the beginning of the book, continues to haunt the narrative as Miranda gradually comes to realize that her son Cian was not the product of a mystical union of the goddess Danu and god Dagda, deities in the Pagan Celtic religion into which her father had indoctrinated her.

These characters are not caricatured as villains nor offered up as sacrificial lambs on the altar of conventional values, however. They are drawn in depth, with love. Even one of the detectives investigating Buddy confesses he sympathizes with him. And Miranda believes that “[s]eeing differently might be the truest gift James left them.”

Seeing differently is also the truest gift Dower has given to her readers. She says her goal was to write a “ripping good yarn,” but that the urge to challenge religious dogma as well as assumptions about right and wrong, sanity and madness, love and abuse crept in. She’s right, but her writing is so imbued with compassion that it never seems strident. By the time you finish this novel, you, too, will see differently, and you will be a better person for it.

I have heard it said that a good book has a soul, and all the characters in it have souls. Stony River is a good book.

Joy Fisher is a survivor of the 1950s and a fourth year student in UVic’s Writing Program.

 

Afterthought on a Fringe Gem

Afterthought on a Fringe gem

Bookworm
By Corin Raymond

Who would think that a one-hour dramatic monologue about books by a guy who looks like a truck driver could bring tears to your eyes—but that’s what happened for me at the last performance of Bookworm, the final show of the Victoria Fringe Festival of 2012.
Corin Raymond likes to say he’s a singer-songwriter who lives with his books in Toronto. He admits to having three or four thousand of them, all of which he’s read, some many times. His love for books—their feel, look and the sound of their words in his mouth—was instilled in Raymond by his father, a bibliophile, teacher and “secret actor.”
Raymond’s unabashed passion for books and affection for his father brought the entire audience to its feet, roaring approval. It’s no surprise that Bookworm was named a “Pick of the Fringe.” Catch it in Vancouver if you can.

Reviewed by Joy Fisher, a fourth-year student in UVic’s Writing Program

 

 

Turn Up the Volume, Crank Down the Windows

Cadillac Couches

By Sophie B. Watson
Brindle & Glass. 217 pp. $19.95

Reviewed by Julia Kochuk

In her witty debut novel Cadillac Couches, Sophie B. Watson sets scenes of Canada’s cross-country landscape to a playlist of nineties favourites. Watson tells the journey of two “foul mouthed, Albertan, wannabe Edwardians” in their early twenties, chasing music and purpose .
It’s summertime in the late nineties under the prairie skies of Edmonton. The air is laced with Dan Bern and the scent of fresh onion cakes. Anxiety-ridden Annie is stuck in inertia: watching, not living; a fan, not a player. She nurses her broken heart with red wine, music, and cigarettes smoked on her “Cadillac couch,” a vintage couch she bought “for twenty-five bucks at the Salvation Army on the north side of the river one lucky Saturday.”
The inertia and heatbreak make Annie antsy. She must get her mind off her ex, and her butt off the couch. She must make real-life rock star Hawksley Workman fall in love with her. She decides a road trip to the Montreal Folk Festival, with her très chic friend Isobel, is in order. Hawksley will be performing.
Will Annie gain control of her anxieties? Will she get over Sullivan? Will she get the chance to meet and/or marry Hawksley? What is Annie’s purpose, her holy grail? Will she ever find it?
Sophie B. Watson is an award-winning freelance writer, published in several magazines including Canadian Dimension, Briarpatch Magazine, and Legacy Magazine. This is her first novel.
Cadillac Couches reveals Watson’s ability to create truthful character and voice: Annie is old enough to pay her own bills, but youthfully naïve enough to hope “sexy-ass troubadour” Hawksley Workman could pick her from a swarm and fall madly in love with her. Cadillac Couches effectively represents the stage between teen and adult: that in-between stage where responsibilities are low and expectations for life are high.
The novel unfolds chronologically, starting with the escape from Edmonton in a beat-up 1972 pink Volkswagen Bug named Rosimund. The action is staccatoed with flashbacks and daydreams, mirroring the road trip mind. Each chapter opens with a sketch and lyrics, as if you were doodling in your notebook and fiddling with the radio from the passenger seat of the car.
While life looks rosy through Rosimund’s windows, the story sometimes moves faster than the poor Bug can travel: the novel is packed full of road kill, fuzzy navel drunken nights, high school memories, a pregnancy scare, and many minor characters. However, this still rings true to the true road trip nature, where scenes flash by windows and people are forgotten as you pull away from gas stations.
Cadillac Couches is a marvelously quirky and enjoyable novel. It is as much a ballad to Canada, as it is to music. It captures all you feel about the scenery passing by, the songs you know the words to. It reminds you that you can escape, but also that seasons change; you can come home more you than you were when you left.

Julia Kochuk is a fourth-year writing student at the University of Victoria.