New Music Festival's Blood and Ice packs an emotional punch

    1 of 1 2 of 1

      A Vancouver Symphony Orchestra presentation, as part of the VSO’s New Music Festival. At the Orpheum on Saturday, January 17. No remaining performances

      Revel as you will in the excellence of the instrumentalists, the kinetic energy of the conductor, and the ingenuity of the composers, but save some room for wonder at the conceptual brilliance of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s programming. Over the past few seasons we have seen concert after concert in which the featured works speak to and illuminate each other, with only a bare handful of inappropriate matches. And now the VSO’s events are beginning to supply their own metacommentary, should one care to tease out the threads.

      Why, for instance, would music director Bramwell Tovey be so devoted to Ottawa composer Kelly-Marie Murphy’s work? Could it be that he has a marked taste for melodrama, as indicated by his recent programming of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Violin Concerto in D Major? Stay tuned: we’ll ask him next time we chat.

      In any case, Murphy’s Blood Upon the Body, Ice Upon the Soul offered all the angst and drama anyone could ask for. Opening with a pitch-black thunderclap from the brass and a fusillade of percussion, the 20-minute work quickly became a bravura showcase for VSO assistant concertmaster Nicholas Wright, who purred beguilingly on his violin one minute before pitching a potent hissy fit the next. That Wright accomplished this flawlessly indicated that his recent hiring is another good move on the part of the VSO.
      More puzzling is that Murphy introduced the piece by saying that she didn’t set out to rewrite Bernard Herrmann’s score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. Maybe so, but Blood Upon the Body, Ice Upon the Soul follows a similarly dark tack and is even more cinematic. Curiously, too, the work borders on making a hero of its protagonist. Murphy was inspired by the terror she felt when living next door to a drug-dealing, rifle-wielding future murderer, but the deviant Wright portrayed here through music seemed more a Paul Bernardo–like charmer than an emotionally disturbed teen.

      It was hard not to root for him, and that’s disturbing in itself.

      Following Murphy’s emotional roller coaster with the debut of VSO resident composer Jocelyn Morlock’s That Tingling Sensation was a shrewd move. Do you sometimes make an involuntary sigh when confronted with music of heartbreaking beauty? Well, the first section of Morlock’s piece was that exhalation extended to five minutes or more, a swooning ripple in time during which all the world’s worries fell away. And it was intentionally that: grilled by Tovey on-stage before the show, Morlock explained that the work was inspired by her investigations into autonomous sensory meridian response, the neural function that produces goosebumps or raised hair when triggered by beauty.
      Did the piece meander midway through? Perhaps, but that could be explained by the breaking of its initial spell. We’ll have to hear it again to make sure—sooner rather than later, we hope.

      The program was bookended by Harrison Birtwhistle’s Night’s Black Bird and Claude Vivier’s Orion, both brilliantly made mediations on life’s journey—and, in the case of the latter, an intriguing sidebar to Blood Upon the Body, Ice Upon the Soul. Vivier, often hailed as the greatest Canadian composer of his generation, was stabbed to death in 1983, but from this performance it was clear that his voice has not been stilled.

      Comments