Thursday night at the Jane Mallett Theatre Soundstreams and Music Toronto presented a concert featuring the Gryphon Trio (Annalee Patipatanakoon – violin, Roman Borys – cello, Jamie Parker – piano) and others.  Also two world premières.

First up was the première of  Vivian Fung’s Prayer; a short piece for violin (Lara St.John) and piano.  It’s a rather beautiful short piece with a melismatic beginning that gets more dramatic and then morphs to a kind of searching quality.  It was followed by Amy Beach’s Invocation for violin and piano, Op. 55 of 1904.  It’s a competent, melodic piece in the Romantic tradition.  Pleasant enough.

Aaron Copland’s Vitebsk: Study on a Jewish Theme, for piano trio is a much spikier, chewier piece,  Introduced as a very dissonant piece I really didn’t find it that dissonant.  It’s more playful really.  Sure there are quarter tones and chords Haydn wouldn’t recognize but Stockhausen it’s not.  Really nicely played.

The first half closed with one of the two highlights of the night for me; Avner Dorman’s Nigunim, for solo violin and piano quintet.  As the name suggests it’s a concertante piece with Lara St.John playing the virtuosic solo part and Noa Sarid – violin and Sheila Jaffé – viola completing the quintet.  The first and third movements, marked “adagio”, seemed really slow and reflective with obvious elements from a range of Jewish musical traditions.  Both the scherzo second movement and the presto final movement though were wild; quite a lot of dissonance and a driving pulse that supported a crazily virtuosic solo part.  Really quite exciting.

After the interval we got the première of James Rolfe’ Metzarim (Narrows).  Here the trio was joined by Aviva Chernick singing text from the Psalms in Hebrew and English.  It’s a really interesting piece.  The instrumental part is quite sparse but has a kind of driven quality that propels the vocals forward.  The vocal part has an emotional feel that goes beyond the text and might be difficult to achieve with a classical soprano but Chernick’s jazz inflected vocalism works perfectly.

The final piece was Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E-flat major, Op.44.  I was curious about this because usually piano quintets are played by a string quartet plus a pianist.  Here we had an augmented string trio.  I’m not sure I could tell what difference that made if any.  It was a perfectly enjoyable performance of a pretty standard piece of 19th century chamber music.  I enjoyed it, but not as much as the more experimental pieces that preceded it.