Freelance Published:"Saturday, September 22 EDMONTON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA WITH BILL EDDINS ON PIANO What: ESO season-opener with the Classic Landmarks Masters and Sunday Showcase When: Tonight at 8 and Sunday at 2 p.m. Email to a friend Printer friendly Font: * * * * Where: Winspear Centre Tickets: $28-$65; Winspear box office, 428-1414, or toll-free at 1-800-563-5081 - - - EDMONTON - "It's all Daniel Barenboim's fault," ESO music director Bill Eddins exclaims in possibly the worst attempt at a hybrid accent ever.
Just settling back into his residency here in Edmonton after a summer in Minneapolis with family, Eddins is attempting -- in this ridiculously funny voice -- to explain the genesis behind this weekend's program of Parisian themed music. "Did you ever meet Daniel? He's an Argentine Jew and he talks just like this -- and eight or nine years ago, he had a wonderful idea.
" The wonderful idea -- to have Eddins play Faure's Ballade in F-sharp major and Franck's Variations symphoniques on piano with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as a guest of CSO maestro Barenboim -- was a bemusing prospect, but Eddins has learned over the years to rely on his colleague and friend. "My blood pressure went up, but I said, 'Yes, Daniel.' I mean, he's a freak of nature; the man can do anything, and I'm just a kid from Buffalo -- I trust his instincts.
Late 19th-century French music is not my bread and butter; I'm a Germanic man, but I listened." Eddins' capitulation will pay off for Edmontonians with the concert this weekend, one that deftly shows the currents of artistic change then running through the French capital at the turn of the century. The program for tonight's and Sunday afternoon's ESO opener will feature both the Faure and the Franck, with Debussy's PrГ©lude Г l'aprГЁs-midi faune and Stravinsky's L'Oiseau de feu (The Firebird) to round it off.
The sequencing will be a chance for Eddins to show the shocking break in musical tradition that occurred at the time. "The first two pieces are by the book, the Faure and the Franck, and the second two are very much against the book." Eddins mirrors composer/author Pierre Boulez in tracing a momentous break in western musical tradition to the Debussy piece -- a five-years-in-the- making composition that owes much of its existence to the composer hearing a Javanese gamelan orchestra at the 1889 Parisian Exposition Universelle, which also boasted the official opening of the Eiffel Tower.
"Between 1880 and 1930-35, I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall in Paris -- not just because of the musicians, but also all of the other crap; the artists and filmmakers, politicians and writers. The changes were incredible." The demarcation point can't be overstated -- from Debussy's musical eureka!
an entire splinter of sound winds its way through western music, threading aspects of jazz, classical, rock, new age and experimental music together. Rigid ideas of theme, accompaniment and harmony were suddenly under scrutiny, 400 years of musical tradition about to be assailed by rebel musicians. "Musicians were confronted with an orchestra of mostly struck instruments, without the strict harmonic rules that went from Brahms all the way back.
It was like nothing that anyone had ever seen or heard.
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