Chronological Deviations

Dan Albertson

[December 2025.]

[With love and gratitude to Jeffrey Kwok Ka Yong 郭嘉勇.]

Maurice RAVEL: Trois poèmes de Mallarmé (1913)¹. Igor STRAVINSKY: Trois poésies de la lyrique japonaise (1912–13)². Christopher BUTTERFIELD: Jappements à la lune (1990)³. Jocelyn MORLOCK: …et je danse (2004)⁴. Richard RIJNVOS: No. 46, ‘Riflesso sull’aria’ (2025)⁵. Robyn Driedger-Klassen (sop)^1,2,4,5, Fides Krucker (m-sop)^3,4, Turning Point Ensemble, Owen Underhill (cond.). December 5 and 6, 2025, Vancouver, BC, Canada (www.turningpointensemble.ca).

Concerts can, when programmed with imagination instead of autopilot, reveal and relish paradoxes and parallels of time and place. The Turning Point Ensemble brought one such occurrence to Vancouver.

The connecting thread of the concert was three works for female voice and the identical ensemble of two flutes, two clarinets, piano, and string quartet, two written coevally and one written earlier this year. Likely owing to the expensive instrumentation, too irregular for ensemble and orchestra alike, the classics by Maurice Ravel and Igor Stravinsky rank as rarities in performance.

The Trois poèmes de Mallarmé delight in a dream world that could, with the string harmonics that circulate through the first poem, seem to be a foreshadowing of spectralism. Here is Ravel full of sensuality and sensuousness, transforming the enigmas of Stéphane Mallarmé with fancy as much as restraint.

The Trois poésies de la lyrique japonaise, written alongside the latter stages of Le sacre du printemps, have none of the savagery of the ballet but display wafts of folklore in the chordal wind writing and the Russian word-setting, here rendered instead in the softness of French.

Christopher Butterfield’s Jappements à la lune, its texts taken from the last poems of Claude Gauvreau, as much as the word poem may apply to what these texts are, emphasizes the nonsensical nature of the source (a world beyond words) while, through inexplicable means, building an imaginary narrative of cohesion and logic. By turns lyrical and tender, whimsical and deadpan, minimalist and maximalist, the eight settings are crammed with surprises and invention.

Back to French for Arthur Rimbaud in …et je danse by Jocelyn Morlock. Scored for soprano, mezzo-soprano and reduced ensemble of violin, cello and piano, it is less immediate in its charms and variety than her earlier breakthrough work Lacrimosa for similar forces, and its latent air of Terpsichore is never quite brought to the fore.

The companion piece to Ravel and Stravinsky completed the trajectory of the concert: Richard Rijnvos’ No. 46, ‘Riflesso sull’aria’. Built on structuralist principles – four parts, one for each season, with three songs apiece, each season prefaced by an instrumental movement – the composer, a former modernist who has long since incorporated a broad aesthetic palette, shows neither timidity nor reverence in crafting his own song-cycle that avoids the pitfalls of homage and instead creates a world all its own, to such an extent that the passing quotes from the 20th century appear nothing other than organic. How reassuring that a composer can, in 2025, reject the dogmas of style and cliché that ensnare too many creative minds, for going onward is the only way, right?

While an evening with five vocal works could be taxing for listeners, and all even more so for the performers themselves, soprano Robyn Driedger-Klassen and mezzo-soprano (but much more than that, in reality) Fides Krucker ensured with their engagement and precision that the five works were able to stand as distinct entities. The Turning Point Ensemble, at times hesitant, was carefully balanced and attentive to the vocal lines. More programming by theme, with juxtapositions of era and geography, is always to be welcomed.