Cellist Adrian Fung would like to have lunch with Ludwig Von Beethoven and ask him what his intentions were in some of his compositions.
“Scholarly musicians in ivory towers have their ideas,” says Fung, founder of Afiara String Quartet, “I’d like to know much more.”
That’s a worry he doesn’t have with Christos Hatzis’ composition “String Quartet No. 3,” which Afiara is playing at the Royal Conservatory’s 21C Music Festival. Composer Hatzis is very much alive and able to answer any questions from the musicians who will premiere his piece on May 22.
“If I need to know something, I can just ask him,” says Fung, who describes the piece as “the crashing of worlds, two different ecosystems meeting.”
This festival, from May 21 to 25, is all about living composers in the modern world, writing exciting music on the cutting edge. It is the Royal Conservatory’s first new-music festival, but there are plans to make it an annual affair; the Toronto Symphony Orchestra has had a similar festival for a decade.
Esprit Orchestra has been playing music by current composers for 33 years. Its conductor and artistic director, Alex Pauk, closes the festival with “Mysterien.” Pauk’s wife, composer Alexina Louie, opens it with her “Imaginary Opera.”
Louie’s piece features Lan Weiwei on the pipa (an ancient four-stringed plucked lute) and was first performed in Montreal in 2004.
As Louie explains it, the commissioned work started off “as a blank slate.”
“This is when imagination comes into play,” she says, adding she wanted the piece to be colourful and dramatic. “Imaginary Opera” has four movements, starting with a mysterious prologue that ends “in a cloud of very dense wind chimes.”
The next section is “hyperdramatic,” followed by an atmospheric piece, Frozen Rain (inspired by a Canadian winter perhaps?), and ending with a Chinese-inspired dragon sequence.
Louie says she was partly inspired by Japanese Samurai movies she watched as a student at the University of British Columbia.
“These films had complex story lines, lots of emotion, masked armies protecting the emperor.”
Pauk will feature two emerging Canadian composers in the April 25 concert ending the festival. The works being showcased by Esprit include Under Dark Water by Christopher Mayo, now living in England, and Serafiniana by Zosha Di Castri, in New York.
Louis Andriessen, who is in his 70s, is “the granddaddy of Dutch composers,” Pauk says. Pauk’s orchestra is playing Andriessen’s “Mysterien,” written for the 125th anniversary of the Royal Concertgebouw Ochestra.
Afiara, made up of violinists Valerie Li and Timothy Kantor, cellist Fung and viola player Jessica Chang, has commissioned all three works that it is performing in the festival.
Fung was thrilled that the busy Hatzis, who had a long waiting list of commissions, agreed to produce an original work for them.
The quartet played the music for Hatzis, who lives outside of Toronto, where they were able to ensure they were on the right track, something Fung wishes he could do with Beethoven.
“He wrote incredibly difficult music that we can play now. I wonder if he would say, ‘I was only joking.’ ”
The 21C Music Festival is at the Telus Centre for Performance and Learning, Royal Conservatory, May 21 to 25. Tickets at www.rcmusic.ca