Fiddlers alone worth price of admissionRichard Todd, The Ottawa CitizenPublished: Sunday, May 28, 2006 A perfect spring day like yesterday could hardly have had a better culmination than the Cantata Singers of Ottawa's evening concert at Christ Church Cathedral. It was a shame that only a little over 150, only a fraction of the CSO's normal audience, turned out to hear it. It's hard to imagine anyone not enjoying the eclectic program, dubbed A Canadian Soundscape and featuring not only the Singers, but two fiddlers whose combined age is only 20, and the Siginiup (Sun's Drum) Inuit Drum Dancers. The first half of the program was a collage of choral and Ottawa Valley fiddle music and drum dancing. It began with the 11-year-old fiddler Tessa Bangs playing Niel Gow's Lament for the Death of his Second Wife. Bangs is a terrific player with a wonderful fiddle sound, which isn't quite the same as a classical violin sound. Gow was an 18th-century settler whose plaintive and lovely lament is all the more eloquent for the absence of bathos, and Bangs performed it without a hint of the maudlin. The first of the choral offerings, Malcolm Forsyth's The Sea for treble voices, was evocative and nicely rendered. It was followed by several movements from R. Murray Schafer's Magic Songs and Harry Freeman's Keewaydin interspersed with the drum dancing. Whatever subtleties of the latter may have been lost on this spectator, there's no doubt that the combination of the traditional Inuit items with the Schafer and Freeman was most effective. The Schafer, in particular, demonstrates the breadth of the composer's imagination and something of his genius. One of the songs, to make a bear dance, was so intriguing that it's too bad a bear wasn't brought along for the show. Conductor Michael Zaugg led the singers in persuasive renditions of this difficult music. Four songs from Steven Chatman's Due West / Due North opened the second half of the program. One was titled Mosquitoes and left the listener itching to hear more. (Sorry, couldn't help it.) Tessa Bangs and her nine-year old sister, Ella, were joined by their guitar-playing father, Robert, for a terrific medley of fiddle duets and step dancing. This set was worth the price of admission all by itself. The Four Alberta Cowboy Songs that concluded the program were another reminder that the Cantata Singers are sounding better these days than they have for quite a long time. © The Ottawa Citizen 2006 |
