Trumpets toot their own horn in WSO concert

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This article was published 28/04/2021 (1668 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Listeners will get to hear the city’s top brass in action this weekend when the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra presents Telemann, Schubert and Fung as its final (B)eyond Classics offering of this unprecedented season.

The 60-minute program sees the WSO trumpet section taking the limelight as soloists — principal Chris Fensom, associate principal Paul Jeffrey and Isaac Pulford — in Telemann’s Concerto for Three Trumpets in D Major. It’s also the first time this year that all three players have performed onstage together, owing to the need for a reduced orchestra size, including COVID-19-friendly, compact “cohorts.”

“It’s lively, it’s musical, it’s fun to play,” Fensom says of the good-natured baroque piece during a group Zoom interview last week. “Almost all of Telemann’s music has a certain spirit to it, and there’s a reason why it’s lasted 300–plus years.”

The lesser-known work being performed solely on higher-pitched “Piccolo” trumpets calls for a carefully blended alchemy of the three individual parts, in which each instrumentalist plays off the others in perfect harmony, with tightly knit entries and brilliant passagework.

Easier said than done these days. All musicians are now separated by more than two metres, with brass players blowing through sound-muffling bell covers stretched over the ends of their horns to prevent virus-carrying “aerosols” from travelling through the air.

“That makes it 20 to 30 per cent harder,” Fensom says. “The sound changes, the response changes and the pitch changes. It’s like playing a different instrument and we’re working extra hard to give the product that we’re used to.”

They’re also performing behind large Plexiglas shields, though the trumpets are not flanked on all sides by the clear protective cocoon, as the notoriously “dangerous” flutes are during this season of COVID-19.

“We’re not in the penalty box,” Jeffrey quips.

With precious few recordings available for reference — it’s the debut performance of the piece for each musician — and in a vacuum of in-person rehearsals, the three have been diligently practising their individual parts with a handy YouTube video forwarded by Fensom to hone their ensemble playing and gain a sense of the greater whole. Jeffrey has also closely studied a seminal recording by one of his heroes, Swedish trumpet dynamo Ulf Håkan Hardenberger, released when he was in his 20s.

“I remember hearing it for the first time and thinking how amazing that piece is,” he says. “I’m just thrilled to finally get a chance to play it.”

But beyond the intensive hours of practice, and the countless dialogues and debates that began last July over myriad details — from the voicing of chords to precise tempo choices to ensure their performance pops this weekend — there’s another, less obvious ingredient never more critical than now.

“One of the very real challenges of the pandemic is not being around each other as often,” Pulford says, adding that WSO members typically rehearsed together at the Concert Hall four to five times a week in the “Before Times.” “We just don’t have that daily sort of repetition, and so have been falling back on and trusting our history and experience of how we’ve played together in the past.

“We have to rely on that kind of muscle memory of ‘This is where my colleague likes to play,’ or ‘This is how they like to play a certain section,’ as we continue to navigate the pandemic,” he continues. “And then even when we are onstage, we’re distanced by three metres or more, and need to tap into that sense even more.”

It also helps that many musicians describe the close-knit WSO as a “family,” able to provide continuity, solidarity and support, as evidenced by the players’ collegial, foot-stomping applause that has taken place all season long in the absence of a live audience.

“One of the silver linings this year has been getting to hear all our soloists who are members of the orchestra, and boy, do we have great players,” Jeffrey says.

“We’ve all played in many different orchestras, and there’s something really special about the WSO. Whether we’ve known each other previously, or you’re meeting someone for the first time, it’s always been like, ‘Holy cow, this feels like I’ve known you for 20 years already.’ You get that feeling with the players in this orchestra.”

Another concert highlight will be Vivian Fung’s Baroque Melting, which the Juno-award winning Canadian composer compares to Salvador Dali’s melting clock in his painting Persistence of Memory.

“This is the heart of Baroque Melting, in which I take familiar baroque musical ideas and motives, recognizable elements accentuated by the harpsichord, contort them, bending pitches and phrases out of shape, and then twist them back into focus again,” Fung writes in her program note. “The apotheosis comes at the end, when a quotation of a Bach chorale, Wär Gott Nicht mit uns diese Zeit from Cantata BWV 14, is warped, fading the work out to end on a quiet and contemplative note.”

The program rounds out with Schubert’s Symphony No. 5 in B-flat Major, scored for the smallest orchestra of all his symphonies and perfect for these lockdown times. The work was inspired by his hero: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

The concert takes place Saturday, May 1, at 7:30 p.m. For livestream tickets or further information, visit wso.org.

holly.harris@shaw.ca