East Coast Connection

ECC Artist Profile: Peter-Anthony Togni

November 30, 2009 - 2:13pm

A feature review and interview, by Heather Ladd

In a season when Handel’s Messiah is hauled out, dusted off, and performed to countless audiences around the country, a new and intriguing choral piece has been launched. Peter-Anthony Togni’s Lamentatio Jeremiah Prophetae, a concerto for bass clarinet and choir, was performed on November 14 to a full and rapt audience gathered at Toronto’s St. Anne’s Anglican Church.

Togni, a composer, musician, and CBC Radio host, is a long-time Halifax resident who grew up in Ontario. Saturday’s concert, which celebrated the CD release of this original work on ECM, is a coup for Togni, now the first Canadian composer to be signed to the prestigious record label. With the CD launch, Lamentations takes its place in an ECM catalogue that features the likes of jazz giants Keith Jarrett and Jan Garbarek, and the Estonian classical composer Arvo Pärt. Fine company for the Haligonian.

St. Anne’s could not have been a better setting for Togni’s event. Like the Group of Seven paintings adorning this place of worship, Lamentations is a Canadian reflection on higher things. Its five movements give an account of a prophet who is ignored and persecuted in troubled times. In light of the global financial crisis, lines in the fourth movement ("How is the gold become dim") seem very profound indeed: "Those accustomed to dainty food perish in the streets; those brought up in purple now cling to the ash heaps."

Togni’s work is surprisingly modern and accessible. Lamentations is contemporary in its musical aesthetic as well as its themes. According to the composer, roughly 30% of the piece is improvised, and stands as a vehicle for the amazingly talented Atlantic Canadian bass clarinetist, Jeff Reilly. Despite this, Lamentations still maintains the emotional and spiritual force of an older tradition of choral music, from Monteverdi to Bach to Britten. Here, the old and new are brought to life: Togni’s work reminds us that there is room for invention within tradition, room for renewal amidst struggle.

Reilly made use of the full range of his instrument, setting the drama through his initial flights and plunges of virtuosity. The clarinet’s soliloquy was met by the harmonized voices of Toronto’s Elmer Iseler Singers. The choir conveyed the urgency of the prophet’s message while sometimes trying to suppress it. In the climax of the piece, the choir ominously increased its volume and pitch, warring with, rather than supporting, the bass clarinet, which is drowned out. A soprano part, sung beautifully by Rebecca Whelan, punctuated the Lamentations as a singular voice of hope and of despair. At various points in the performance, the audience was "surprised by joy", lifted out of the moody, mournful, and tumultuous soundscape.

The singers display all that’s best about a very old choral musical tradition, but it’s the bass clarinet - an instrument often overlooked - that made this fare so different. Like Jeremiah himself, the soloist - in dialogue with the choir - represents the human in dialogue with God and his times who rages, suffers, fears - but at the end of it, still believes. Speaking to Peter Togni immediately before the concert, I asked him what I should listen for. Instead of pointing me towards a specific musical thread, he encouraged me to pay attention to how the music makes me feel, the vagaries of its affective power. He did not steer me wrong; from the first strains to the last, Lamentatio Jeremiae Prophetae is a deeply moving work which captures the restlessness of belief in modern times.

Retrieved from: http://www.eastcoastconnected.ca/news/ecc-artist-profile-peter-anthony-togni on November 30, 2009