News & Reviews

Rachmaninoff's Vigil simply beautiful

Creative programming and exquisite singing by the Halifax Camerata Singers and the Symphony Nova Scotia Chorus, directed by Jeff Joudrey, exceeded the highest expectations on Sunday night in St. Mary's Basilica.

Read the full review from The Chronicle-Herald March 27, 2007.

WHAT JOY!
Symphony, choirs, soloists carry crowd away with Beethoven’s Ninth

By STEPHEN PEDERSEN, Arts Reporter

What does a great pianist do after playing all five Beethoven piano concertos plus the Choral Fantasy? If he’s Anton Kuerti, and he is, you could spot him in the back row of baritones in the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium on Tuesday night singing in the chorus for the Ninth Symphony at Symphony Nova Scotia’s final concert of the season.

The concert, a blockbuster in every sense of the word, with a chorus of 90 voices, four soloists and 60 musicians, also marked the climax of conductor Bernhard Gueller’s brilliant four-concert Beethoven Festival.

Read the full review from The Chronicle-Herald May 11, 2006.

Tuesday, April 5, 2005
The Halifax Herald Limited

CAMERATA SHOW ASTONISHING CHORAL EXPERIENCE
By Stephen Pedersen / Arts Reporter

The Halifax Camerata Singers gave their weekend audiences, Saturday night in Halifax, Sunday in Wolfville, a taste of North - music composed by Scandinavian composers from Norway, Estonia, Finland, and Latvia (by way of Canada). It is a fascinating repertoire, a glory of pure sound and clear intervals even where harmonies tangle in dense voicings. Norwegian Knut Nystedt's Be Not Afraid and O Crux, both devotional motets, led off the program with a crystalline palette, in which blocks of ice in the stiller chords, contrasted with dissonances like crushed glass. The final soft chord of Be Not Afraid, exquisitely balanced, was tonally dark but with a barely discernible soprano on the top of the chord as soft as moonlight.

It takes a self-confident group of 25 singers to maintain pitch and line where the part-writing is often awkward, and the intervals clash and grind. Tones a half-step apart have to be sung boldly. There is no room for the faint of heart. But the Camerata Singers, after nearly 20 years of fine singing under the careful guidance of founding director Jeff Joudrey, are canny and unflappable. The result is an astonishing choral experience.

In the first of two Magnificats, a short work by Arvo Part, the transparency of the style - more like early Renaissance, with a hint of Gregorian chant than modern music, except for some strangeness in the melody - evoked devotional intensity. Imant Raminsh's Magnificat, a longer, more conventionally dramatic treatment, though there was nothing conventional about its modernism, features New Minas native Christianne Rushton, who has been studying in New York since graduating from Acadia University. Rushton's voice is big, round and full, beautiful in tone and technically rock-solid, with a gratifying evenness of colour and dynamic control in any register. Moreover, every word came across distinctly with all its interior expressive and musical nuances intact.

The choir's back-up and ensemble solos, under Joudrey's detailed, textually attentive direction, and pianist Cynthia Davies rhythmic articulation, offered ideal support for the remarkable presence and immediacy of Rushton's voice. Rushton and Davies performed a fine set of four songs set by Norway's Edvard Grieg after the intermission.

The choir came back to sing a set of Finnish folk songs by various hands, including one by Jan Sibelius, followed by Norwegian Ola Gjeilo's Unicornis Captivatur, and a bouncy arrangement of Hallelujah by Sweden's Robert Sund. The Finnish language proved surprisingly soft and melodic in the folk song set. On paper it looks like it could hurt you, with all those Pekka's, Jaakko's and Hyokki's in the composers names. But it sounded sweet and mellow, lingering in the ear like the taste of honey on the tongue.

Tuesday, March 15, 2005
The Halifax Herald Limited Entertainment

A CLASS ACT
By Stephen Pederson / Arts Reporter

Halifax music teacher Cynthia Kennedy Davies has shared her talents with her students for almost three decades. She also accompanies the Halifax Camerata and other choirs.

Playing in the Band CANADIAN TENOR Mark Dubois called her "one of Canada's best-kept secrets," after she accompanied him at a Parrsboro recital. Former Symphony Nova Scotia conductor Georg Tintner looked over to where she sat at the piano during a rehearsal of Haydn's Creation. She had just done something helpful but unexpected. He said, "You're a very clever girl."

Cynthia Kennedy Davies has never lacked for admirers of her musical energy whenever she has performed in public. But an even better-kept secret about her is that her biggest fans today are the Primaryto Grade 6 children she teaches music to at Ecole Rockingham School, including her 111-voice Grades 4 to 6 Choir. Some of them are kids of the kids she taught early on in her 28 years in Halifax schools.

"At the age of 10, I decided I wanted to be a music teacher," Davies said as the wind whirled the snow around a Quinpool Road coffee shop on Saturday morning. Only once did she have a flicker of doubt about whether she liked the concert stage or the music classroom best. "I worked as rehearsal pianist at the Charlottetown Festival in 1976 and again in 1979 - Anne of Green Gables, Come By The Hills, By George, The Rowdy Man with Gordon Pinsent," Davies said. "It was a summertime gig. But they decided to tour to Toronto in the fall. I had to be released from teaching."

During the school year Davies taught in the Halifax Schools Music Department headed at the time by Chalmers Doane. "I said, 'Chalmers, you have to let me do this, because I have to find out if this is what I want do.' "He allowed me to go. It was fun, but I really like the honesty of a group of kids - there is no more honest audience than a group of kids sitting in front of you. You can't snow them. With a regular audience it goes back and forth. But kids are on to your every move. There's connection, energy, heart."

On one level, Davies discovered there wasn't much difference between performing and teaching. On another, the level of what Davies calls "heart," it's no contest. "I taught at Rockingstone Heights School in Spryfield for six years," she said. "They were beautiful kids and they came from hard backgrounds. But music crosses it all out - you're safe here - just make music.

"In 1987 we made that Sobey's Christmas commercial for TV for Bob Quinn with all the kids singing on it. To see those kids filmed on camera - the special ed kids held it together." Davies was only four years old when she first played piano in public. "They tell me I played Bumble Boogie," she said. "But I don't remember."

She can't remember ever not playing the piano either. At three, her earliest memories are of putting 45 rpm records on the record-player and playing along by ear. "I thought my mother exaggerated about that," Davies said. "But it was confirmed (later) by family members who hadn't seen me since I was little. "My parents loved music. My father sold cars and played the guitar. My mother was from Cape Breton. She bought a piano for my sister Judy when she was 12. Judy and her boyfriend arranged a concert for me to play."

At six, Davies' mother thought Cynthia should take lessons. Her father objected, thinking that learning to read music would spoil her ability to play by ear. She studied with Sister Margaret Young, then with Constance Hubley. "At first I was faking, letting on that I was reading," Davies said. "I would struggle through the piece once, then play it back by ear with only maybe one or two notes different. But you get caught after a while. It was a struggle to learn to play (read). But I decided to bite the bullet and I'm really glad I did, though it took me a few months to get the hang of it." As a result, she can either put a piece of music up in front of her or hear it once and play it right off. It doesn't matter whether it's a lead sheet (melody only) or whether the chord symbols are written in or not.

When Kennedy started going to school she began accompanying music classes. In junior high at Oxford School, where she transferred to take an accelerated program, she was taken from class to class to play for the them. "They had these tiny little pump organs you could wheel from room to room. They were fun. I'd love to find out what happened to them," she said.

As a performer, Davies played her first gig on Tiny Talent Time at CJCH in a segment called Firehouse Frolics. At 12 she was a guest on CBC's evening news show Gazette. She also participated in a CBC program called Who's New? and played on the CBC-TV series 22 Hazelwood with Joan Gregson and Atlantic Symphony Orchestra cellist/saxophonist Erno Reti. She even wrote music for CBC's Educational TV program Thurbird's World.

In high school at St. Pat's, Davies accompanied the All-City High School Choir. After graduating, she went to Dalhousie University for a year then transferred to Acadia where she studied with Felicita Kalejs. Following university she went straight into teaching in the Halifax schools system, travelling from school to school during recesses, teaching at noon hours and accompanying all-city groups like the Youth Honour Choir and Soundtrax (which she still does). "On Monday I would teach till noon, then come back to play for the Honour Choir from 4 to 6. On Tuesday I taught all day at different schools - if you count everybody, I worked with 400 to 500 students."

"It was crazy at Christmas concert time with as many as three concerts to prepare. When I went out of the house I had to check: do I have this, do I have that - I felt like a Fuller Brush man. This year is the first time in 28 years I have been at one school, in one building."

During those 28 years, Davies taught at St. Agnes, Dalhousie School in Purcell's Cove, St. Catherine's, Holly Drive, J. L. Ilsley, Bloomfield, Springvale, Burton Ettinger and Oxford. At the same time she sang for seven years in the Halifax Camerata Singers, then took over her current job as the choir's accompanist.

Equally well-known as Cynthia Kennedy before her marriage to painter Bruce Davies, she shares a home in Halifax with him and their dog, Sneaker Davies. Having taught through the glory days of the Halifax schools system, much diminished by amalgamation in 1996 and now a receding shadow of itself, Davies allows herself a degree of cynicism. Halifax, Dartmouth and County school programs set the bar too high. Outside schools complained, and a levelling process began several years ago. "It's hard to be part of a sinking ship," she said. "Music is not being taught by specialists now and the standards are dropping. The whole world is busier now than when I started. The kids are busier too. They don't have time to be kids. But choir gives them a chance to calm down and focus. And if you raise the bar - they come right with you."

It's not hard to teach little kids, she said, though it's harder than it used to be because they don't have self-discipline or manners. "The politics of education make you tired - never the kids. There's something about kids singing that's pretty nifty. Sometimes I can get the same rush from Camerata as I get from the kids. The heart is there."

Thursday, March 11, 2004
The Chronicle-Herald Entertainment

SNS, CHOIRS DIP FORCEFULLY INTO MOZART'S MASS
By Stephen Pedersen / Arts Reporter

Any performance of Mozart's great C Minor Mass is a significant event. Tuesday night's performance in the Rebecca Cohn by Symphony Nova Scotia and the SNS Chorus with soprano Henriette Schellenberg, mezzo-soprano Laura Pudwell, tenor Emmanuel Serra and bass Daniel Hambly, went beyond mere significance, all the way to heaven-storming glory.

Under the direction of Bernhard Gueller, with the SNS Chorus and the Halifax Camerata Singers trained by Jeff Joudrey, the extraordinary detail and sheer musical forcefulness of the performance gave the sold-out audience a gripping adventure into the unpredictable, mercurial mind of Mozart.

Writing under the influence of Bach especially, but also Handel and other Baroque masters, Mozart did not complete the work. He borrowed movements from it to insert in other commissions, and patched much of it together with music he had written for other occasions.

It is marvellous how little, in the gripping wonder of this unique score, its patchwork of styles matters, especially in the concert hall.

To hear Mozart writing a double-fugue in the artistically luminous shadow of Bach (as in the Osanna and Cum Spiritu Sanctu), with trombones and horns to deepen its weight, and lively Mozartian figures dancing out its episodes, ranks as one of the great musical experiences when it is done as well as Gueller's forces did Tuesday night.

There is little for the tenor and even less for the bass (who sings only in the final Benedictus), but the glory of the world is in the brilliant music written for the two women. You need powerful voices under the command of superior musicians. In Schellenberg and Pudwell SNS gave us two of Canada's, and the world's, best.

Pudwell's astonishing vocal power and the firm brilliance of her tone and the agility at her command in the Laudamus Te, were balanced by Schellenberg's beautifully clear, sweet and effortless excursions at the top of her range after giving the mischievous Mozart's absurdly low notes their cool due, in the opening Kyrie. Their duet (Domine) was especially impressive in its balance with the florid soprano ravishing away at the top.

The chorus achieved apotheosis in the Cum sancto, while in one of the most purely Mozartian movements, the Et incarnatus, Schellenberg's voice blazed out with a golden shimmer, leading to a mouth-watering cadenza with flute, oboe and bassoon.

The first half of the program was less ambitious, but hardly less remarkable. After spelling out the philosophical idea behind Charles Ives' The Unanswered Question Gueller, trumpeter Richard Simoneau and the orchestra gave a detailed, dynamically shaded performance, which was followed by Barber's Adagio for strings.

Gueller's tempo, sensitively played and somewhat quicker than customary, explored the shape of the famous Adagio and gave it a coherence missing from more self-indulgent tempi. But the version for a capella chorus, a free-standing Agnus Dei, sung with care and devotion by the Camerata Singers, was even more meaningful. It was new to me, but I think I prefer it now.