JLNotes

! ! ! ! !!!!!!!April-May

2014

Finally, the sun is out and slowly it starts getting warmer (with ice still on the sidewalks!). Everyone (well, at least myself) is feeling upbeat and very soon we will see all the trees dressed beautifully with leaves and surrounded by blooming flowers.

The spring has arrived!

This is also the time of the year to get ready for the Canadian Music Competition, the Peel Festival and for the North York Music Festival, where many of my students are participating. In addition, it is time to get serious about the RCM examination session in June. This month, I am busy traveling; first to Thunder Bay, where I am adjudicating the Lakehead Music Festival, and then off to Texas, USA, where I will be conducting the string examination for RCM. In between, of course, we have many rehearsals of Violin Ensemble with the Scarborough Philharmonic Orchestra for the concert on Saturday, May 3rd. I have tickets in my studio for this concert and hope that everyone will make an effort to attend this wonderful evening and support our violin ensemble for the hard work and dedication of its members. The Ensemble will perform works by Shostakovich and Prokofiev, most enjoyable!!! You can also order tickets on-line at: http://www.spo.ca/enjoy/buy-tickets Congratulations to all students participating at the Kiwanis Music Festival! Your effort was great and the results are exceptional! Please feel free and do not hesitate to share your thoughts and interesting news or articles for me to publish in the next edition of JLNotes.

News from JVL Summer School for Performing Arts

The preparation for the Cremona 2014 Festival is now in full swing. The first round of application has been completed on March 1st, and we have commenced the process of matching students for chamber music and orchestra programs. Just a reminder that the JVL SSPAs International Festival Music In The Summer 2014 will be held from Saturday July 12th until Saturday, July 26th. The competition will once again run from July 26th to July 28th. The registration for XIIIth season of the JVL Summer School for Performing Arts International Music In The Summer Festival is still open and I look forward to seeing everyone in July 2014! There are almost 1000 photos and countless videos, which are consistently being uploaded for you to see and like on Facebook, so check the site often! Should you have any questions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact me. Here is the link to our new website:

www.MusicInTheSummer.com
Please do feel free to contact me with any suggestions or concerns that you may have and please dont forget to check the website www.MusicInTheSummer.com often for updates of information. You could also find us on our Facebook page at: www.facebook.com/MusicInTheSummer

Anyone interested?
Rare 1719 Stradivarius viola to go on sale Tuesday, 25 March 2014 The 1719 Macdonald Stradivarius viola is to go on the market. One of only ten surviving violas made by the master luthier, the instrument will be offered for sale in a sealed bid process by auctioneers Sothebys and Ingles & Hayday. Made during Stradivariuss so-called golden period (170020), the viola was originally owned by the Marquis dalla Rosa of Parma. Over the next three centuries it was owned by several players, makers and dealers, including J.B. Vuillaume, John Betts, and W.E. Hill & Sons. In a letter of 2 November 1926 to the Rudolph Wurlitzer Co. in New York, Alfred Hill wrote, I have seen every existing specimen [of Stradivariuss violas], and, judged as a whole, I place this viola at the top; its proportions are untouched and, in fact, as left by the maker. The instruments name derives from its owner Godfrey Bosville, the third Baron Macdonald, who bought the viola in the 1820s. He is also known to have owned the 1711 Mara Stradivarius cello, now owned and played by Heinrich Schiff. In 1964 it was purchased for Peter Schidlof, violist of the Amadeus Quartet, who died in 1987. In one of his final interviews, printed in The Strad in January 1988, Schidlof called the viola utter perfection, adding: It is in a remarkable state of preservation, with a lot of varnish and not a single crack. Of the ten existing Stradivarius violas, only one other is currently in private hands: the 1690 Tuscan contralto viola, which is owned privately but held at the Library of Congress in Washington DC. The viola will be shown at Sothebys premises in New York on 27 March, and in Hong Kong on 4 April. It will also be shown to media in Paris, France, on 15 April. The auctioneers are inviting bids in excess of $45 million (27 million) for

the viola. If it were sold for such a price it would mark a world record for any musical instrument: the current auction record is held by the Lady Blunt Stradivarius violin of 1721, which was sold by the Nippon Music Foundation in June 2011 for 9.8m. In January 2013 the 1731 Vieuxtemps violin by Giuseppe Guarneri del Ges was sold by London dealers J.&.A. Beare to an anonymous buyer for an undisclosed sum, although Beares confirmed that the price exceeded 9.8 million.

Point of View
Why cant players get vibrato right? Vibrating need not compromise purity of tone if its done tastefully, says Tully Potter, who takes to task those who overplay, misplay or completely disown it. We live in an age of too many certainties, and string playing has not escaped the attentions of the fundamentalists. If I had a pound for every word of nonsense that has been vented on the subject of vibrato, especially by Roger Norrington, I would be a rich man. I hesitate to add to the stream of vibrato-guff, but at a time when modern orchestras are prohibited from playing old music, while the period brigades move their entrenchments forward to encompass Elgar, Mahler and the like, perhaps a mere listener may have his say. I do not like hearing Mozart, whose style is founded on singing, without vibrato, although Haydns more bracing, contrapuntal style can take it. Nor do I enjoy Beethovens music without vibrato: some passages can be effective when played senza vibrato, and the greatest of all Beethoven players, Adolf Busch, employed that device. But he told his students: If you play without vibrato, you could be feeling things as deeply as anything, and no one would know it. If the period players were serious about their calling they would have a different armoury of vibrato effects for every national style, if not for each composer. Hungarian music would be played with the Hubay schools wide wah-wah vibrato, for instance, while French music would have quite a silvery finger vibrato, with now and then a spot of right-hand vibrato produced solely with the bow, as Capet used to do. But I am happy if each player comes before me on the concert platform with his or her own painstakingly developed range of vibrato styles. I am also at ease with constant vibrato. What I cannot stand, either musically or aesthetically, is the modern habit of beginning a note straight and then starting to wobble in the middle of the note. It seems to have started with the cellists Daniil Shafran being the most vulgar exponent but it has spread to violists and violinists. When a player does it, I hear the note twice, as a sort of uh-huh effect. It is jarring in a very tasteless way. If continuous vibrato is employed, it should be continuous. As Lionel Tertis put it, The finger must remain and vibrate on the string you are about to leave until you have actually begun to play the note on the next string and this second note must immediately take up the vibrato of the note you are just leaving. String playing goes hand in hand with singing, although one discipline will be ahead of the other at any given time. When modern orchestras began to play more and more loudly, partly through the use of string vibrato, singers found they could compete better if they too used vibrato. This use of vibrations to throw the sound evolved because musicians had to play or sing in bigger and bigger auditoria, especially in America. I dislike the later playing of Piatigorsky for this reason; and I can usually identify one of his pupils within seconds. Let us, by all means, encourage purity of tone in string playing. But that purity need not rule out a tasteful use of vibrato, where the player really listens to himself or herself when preparing and performing the music. The Strad

News
Violinist Hilary Hahn to receive !25,000 Dresden Music Festival Prize The US violinist Hilary Hahn has been awarded the Dresden Music Festival Prize for 2014. Worth !25,000, the award will be presented at a concert at the Dresden Semperoper on 4 June. In its citation, the festival award committee said, Through her authentic, contemporary musical language, Hilary Hahn reaches beyond the concert hall to young classical music fans. The violinists innovative use of social media was singled out, as well as her teaching work with string students: She inspires young musicians through her intense and uncompromising way of making music. This will be the eleventh time the prize, sponsored by German watch company Glashtte Original, has been awarded. The last string player to have been so honoured was violinist Gidon Kremer in 2007. Other previous winners include the Berlin Philharmonic and Simon Rattle.

Will orchestras be paperless in the future? Could a symphony orchestra ditch its entire sheet music library in favour of digital scores and tablet computers? The Brussels Philharmonic is setting out to do just that, as David Kettle reports The Brussels Philharmonic is on a mission: to become the worlds first paperless orchestra. On 7 November 2012 it gave its first concert playing, not from traditional sheet music, but from tablet computers. South Korean technology company Samsung had donated 100 of its Galaxy Note 10.1 tablets, and the orchestra worked with Samsung and Belgian company neoScores on new software to display the musical parts for the Prelude and Liebestod from Wagners Tristan und Isolde and Ravels Bolero. It was a big success, and everything worked really well, says concertmaster Otto Derolez. Each player, even in the string desks, had their own tablet, and they turned pages simply by sliding a finger over the screen. Its easy, says Derolez. The new page appears immediately it works very quickly. But the music that players see is far from just a scan of their original paper parts. Brussels Philharmonic production manager Bart Van der Roost, who has run= the tablet project since its launch in July 2012, explains: Theres just one large music file of the whole score, and the software interprets what needs to be shown locally on the individual devices. This way of working allows for enormous flexibility in what is displayed. Van der Roost continues: You can change the font and magnification of the score, and it adjusts automatically to the screen space available. You can change colours and even keys or clefs obviously we dont touch the composers work, but if something is written in the treble clef but youre more at ease seeing it in the bass clef, why not change it? The software also allows players to adjust page breaks to the most suitable points in the music a function, explains Van der Roost, that will allow string sections to stagger their turns so that the maximum number of musicians is playing at all times. And working from one central file means that changes and annotations from the conductor or concertmaster can be carried over into all the relevant parts although individual players are also free to annotate their own parts themselves with special pens. The orchestra predicts huge financial benefits if it moves to an entirely digital music system. If we can totally digitise our library, were going to save about !25,000 a year in printing costs,

explains Van der Roost. He admits, though, that such a digitisation project would itself carry a significant financial burden. The technology is still at an early stage of development, Derolez accepts: The tablets are magnificent apart from their size. Brussels Philharmonic librarian Emmanuel Sproelants agrees that screen size is a concern. Normally we use A4 parts, and thats bigger than the 10-inch screens were using. Ideally you would have two connected 17-inch tablets. But a bigger issue, according to Sproelants, is the availability of scores in a compatible digital format. For the November concert, the orchestra itself digitised the two scores it needed, but for tablet use to expand, music publishers will have to provide digital files themselves a costly process. And I dont know if publishing houses are interested in doing that, says Sproelants. Rights control is another issue that faces publishers considering letting loose digital versions of their scores, but Sproelants suggests a solution: The publishers could control the days that you can use the electronic score. You would enter a code each time you need to use a score, with the code running out after the last performance. Derolez accepts that moving entirely to tablets will be a gradual process. The total change is still a few seasons off. In 2013 well do another concert where the software will have developed further, and slowly well use paper less and tablets more. This is not the first time that tablets have been used in an orchestral setting: Kazakh violinist and conductor Marat Bisengaliev has experimented with them for several years with orchestras in Kazakhstan and India. Nick Lander, concerts and tours manager at the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, sees clear advantages in moving to tablets, but he points out one further concern: We do risk discarding the history. There is often a tradition of signing orchestral parts, so that they become a record stretching back decades of the performance history of the piece and of orchestral personnel. Maintaining our connection with the past is important. Whether such a soft-edged argument will be able to compete with the financial and practical advantages promised by the use of tablets remains to be seen. The Strad

Important Dates JVL SPPA and the Cremona International Music Academy
Final Applications Deadline: May 31, 2014 www.MusicInTheSummer.com

Scarborough Philharmonic Orchestra - Russian Showpieces

Ronald Royer, conductor Talisa Blackman, piano (Young Artist), Violin Ensemble of Young Artists Program: Sergey Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 3 Dmitri Shostakovich Symphony No. 9 Great works for Violin Ensemble and Orchestra including: D. Shostakovich Romance from The Gadfly S. Prokofiev Waltz from War and Peace S. Prokofiev March from The Love for Three Oranges Saturday, May 3, 2013 - 8:00 PM The Salvation Army Scarborough Citadel 2021 Lawrence Avenue East http://spo.ca/

Here are some dates and deadlines for RCM examinations and for festivals and competitions:
RCM Examinations Spring Session Practical Examinations: June 9-28, 2014 Theory Examinations: May 9 and 10, 2014 Registration Deadline: too late http://www.rcmexaminations.org/
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North York Music Festival April 4-28, 2014 Registration Deadline: too late http://www.northyorkmusicfestival.com/2014-festival/ Peel Music Festival March 24 - April 30, 2014 Registration Deadline: to late http://www.peelmusicfestival.ca/Main.aspx Canadian Music Competition Ontario First Round: April 30 May 3, 2014 Ontario Provincial Final: May 5 10, 2014 National Final, Quebec City: June 20 July 3, 2014 Registration Deadline: to late http://www.cmcnational.com/en/ Cremona International Music Competition Cremona, Italy: July 24 26, 2014 Registration Deadline: too late www.MusicInTheSummer.com

Concert Calendar
Here are the details of some Toronto concert organizations websites: Toronto Symphony Orchestra http://tso.ca/Home.aspx!
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Canadian Opera Company http://www.coc.ca/performancesandtickets.aspx National Ballet of Canada http://national.ballet.ca/performances/season1213/ Roy Thomson Hall http://www.roythomson.com/

Royal Conservatory Concerts http://brochure.rc.mu/ Tafel Music Baroque Orchestra http://www.tafelmusik.org/ Scarborough Philharmonic Orchestra http://www.spo.ca/

Recommended listening:
Hilary Hahn - Paganini Caprice 24 & Paganiniana https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OKPUausH64

Finale
You can download this edition of JLNotes with direct links to various sites referred above from:
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https://www.facebook.com/MusicInSummer

JVL SUMMER SCHOOL FOR PERFORMING ARTS CREMONA, ITALY

Should you have any comments or suggestions please send me e-mail at: jvl@lakirovich.com or jacoblakrovich@hotmail.com or call on: 905-882-7499, 416-735-7499
www.lakirovich.com www.MusicInTheSummer.com

79 Chagall Drive, Thornhill, Ontario L4J 9B8 Canada

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