I think I just sat too close to the stage for my own good.
I've since found a recording of the Turangalila with Riccardo Chailly and the Concertgebouw Orchestra, so I'm looking forward to listening to the piece again, where
I control the volume.
Tonight's concert (Day 3 of the festival) was much less deafening for my ears, but musically just as interesting - maybe more so. Michelle Mourre was guest conductor for the evening, and "Inferno" was the theme of the concert. The most exciting piece, and my favorite, was the first one -- Denis Gougeon's
Un train pour l'enfer ("Train to Hell"). The drums took center stage in that work, thundering throughout and ending the music with a final emphatic BOOM. The next piece, Linda Bouchard's The Open Life, was a bit more complex and subtle, not as "showy" as Train to Hell. I did find The Open Life harder to enjoy, but then it would be remarkable if every piece in a concert of contemporary classical music became an instant hit with the audience (or with me, at any rate). I mean, the nature of this Festival is that the music performed is often
very new - sometimes the ink is literally still wet on the score, having been completed by the composer mere hours before.
That is, of course, one of the special things about a festival like this: that the focus is exclusively on living composers. (The WSO does make exceptions for recently deceased composers, such as Messiaen, who died in 1992.) Anyway, after the two opening pieces by Gougeon and Bouchard, WSO music director Alexander Mickelthwate held an informal "half-time" chat onstage with the two composers. Yes, they even brought out a couch!
Also present were the WSO's composer-in-residence, a music journalist for the Winnipeg Free Press and a local novelist.
It was a very engaging, funny and quite candid chat. Mickelthwate is quite the extrovert onstage - a very personable guy. He threw out some surprisingly tough questions to the guests and to the audience: why can't we attract people in mass numbers to new music like we can attract them to Beethoven? (He informed us that the WSO's Beethoven Ninth concert in April is close to being sold out.) What are we doing wrong? What more can we do to promote new music? Is there some basic limitation to the appeal of new classical?
Mickelthwate also asked both the audience and the two composers if music written by men and music written by women were discernably different from each other. Pretty bold question, and a good one! In short, Bouchard and Gougeon said there was no difference - though Bouchard mentioned that she has, from time to time, gotten comments that "it's not right" for a woman to write really aggressive music, which she has done. That made me wonder if Michelle Mourre and other female conductors also received those kinds of comments during their careers, like it's "not right" for a woman to be an orchestra conductor.
The second half of the concert was taken up by one work, Henri Dutilleux's cello concerto
Tout un monde lointain, featuring the WSO's principal cellist, Yuri Hooker, as soloist. He did some amazing virtuoso playing, alternately bowing and plucking the cello. This composition seemed a bit overly long to me - I kinda lost the plot midway through - but the cello part was undeniably exciting.
All in all, a worthwhile concert, punctuated by that wonderful onstage chat.