This year’s 21C Festival opened last night at Koerner Hall with Turkish pianist and composer Fazil Say performing some of his works with the help of a few friends.  It was a pretty varied evening considering all the works were by one person.  The opening pieces Gezi Park 2 and Gezi Park 3 are reflections on the Gezi Park protests of 2013.  The first is for solo piano and is by turns dramatic and meditative.  It uses a fair amount of extended piano technique and is highly virtuosic with great rhythmic complexity.  In the second piece the composer was joined by a string quartet (Scott and Lara St. John – violins, Barry Scxhiffman – viola and Winona Zelenka – cello) and mezzo-soprano Beste Kalender.  This work was both expressive and dramatic building on the musical language of the first piece with the additional textures of the strings (more extended technique) and a lot of rather beautiful vocalise from Beste.  It’s an impressive piece.

The first half concluded with The Moving Mansion.  This was described as a homage to Atatürk and his love of nature.  It’s scored for piano quintet and really stretches the palette of the strings with lots of extended technique.  Sometimes it’s very percussive and at others it seems to be invoking bird song.  Once again there are sharp contrasts between dramatic, quite abrasive passages and more reflective, melodic material.  This was a very demanding piece and got great virtuosity from all concerned.

There was a real change of pace after the interval.  First up were Seven Songs for piano and mezzo-soprano.  These were all to Turkish texts and the gist of each was described in the programme but there were no texts or translations.  Since it seemed to be an overwhelmingly Turkish speaking audience maybe that wasn’t such a big deal.  The sound world here was very different.  The general lie of the music was somewhere between folk music and very high class French cabaret/chanson with just occasional forays into darker territory.  So the dominant mood was wistful and playful which gave Beste the opportunity to display her richness of tone and her ability to get inside a text and play with it.  It was all really rather lovely.

Finally there were three Jazz Fantasies for solo piano.  These are insanely virtuosic and quite cheeky.  Gershwin’s Summertime, the “Alla Turca” from Mozart’s Sonata in A Major and Paganini’s famous 24th Capriccio all get the treatment.  Multiple styles of jazz are layered onto the familiar themes to create a crazy kaleidoscopic parade of inventiveness and virtuosity.

The reception of course was rapturous.  The Turkish community, like the Czechs, come out in force for “their music”!  It’s so pleasing to see a truly packed hall in Toronto these days.