“It’s just this beautiful little cocoon”: Conversations With Musicians

(Artwork by Incé Husain)

On Saturday, August 13th, classical chamber music emanated from UNB’s Memorial Hall Theatre. Audiences encircled candlelit tables; violins, violas, cellos, bass, piano, clarinet, and vocals surged in a celebration of Italian music. The event marked the final concert of the New Brunswick Summer Music Festival.

Musicians Peter Allen and Russell Iceberg discuss the festival, their musical process, and the importance of the concerts with rich, contrasting perspectives.

Concert pianist Peter Allen has been performing in the festival for 23 years. He compares it to “a vacation” filled with what he loves to do - playing music all day, rehearsing, and performing.

Featuring a loyal audience and different scores every concert that range from serious to lighthearted, the festival ambience is varied and familiar to Fredericton. Allen appreciates the musical variety, and describes the audience as “open to everything”. 

“The great thing about this festival is that we played four different concerts on four different nights, so the music constantly changes,” says Allen. “The audience knows the festival very, very well and they know what to expect. They’re open to everything we do.”

For the final concert, Allen played the “extroverted” paraphrase of Giuseppe Verdi’s Rigoletto opera by composer Franz Liszt. He explains that Liszt was famous for devising novel piano solo arrangements of well-known music to make it accessible to the general public.  

“(Liszt) does fast things and decorates them up a bit for piano,” he says. “(The Rigoletto) is light-hearted. It’s very extroverted, and it's showy, virtuosic.” 

As well as a concert pianist, Allen is a composer, conductor, and teacher; he describes a holistic learning process where these areas of knowledge interact to build his musical thinking. He believes that originality in performance arises from heartfelt thought and sincere spontaneity bounded by a meticulous adherence to the score. 

“Good interpretation comes from the player being sincere and truthful with the score, with themselves, and with the audience,” says Allen. “There’s nothing I do in performance that I don’t 100% believe in, not even in one single phrase. I also leave some room for spontaneity - to do something a little bit different just in the moment. That is what makes interpretation unique - doing things that you feel sincere and honest about and communicate to the audience, and at the same time maintain the integrity of the composer’s intentions… I’m very conscious of every single marking the composer writes.”

Allen believes that performances never attain perfection, and that this allows spontaneity and the “magic of live performances” to prosper. Nevertheless, he aims for the “highest possible goals” for performance, and considers a piece to be “performance level” when his personal satisfaction peaks - a summit where “no other pianist in the world can play it better”. 

“For me, performance level means that no other pianist in the world can play it better than me,” says Allen. “They can play it differently, but I would be just fine if anybody else in the world heard (me play), or another pianist heard (me play).”

On stage, Allen illustrates his state of mind as “a magical little cocoon to be in”, a realm separate from the external world where the scope of expression transcends words. Thoughts about the music underlie his performance, but not excessively - he follows his vision, trusting in what he’s done. He shares that the audience also enriches the performance with their tangible attentiveness. 

“It’s almost like a fantasy world. It’s a wonderful place to be,” says Allen. “You’re almost safe from the outside world - nothing can get to you. It’s just this beautiful little cocoon where you get to do what you love… The audience can pump you up, too. That’s a wonderful moment, when you know you’ve got them, especially in the quiet bits - you can just hear that they’re listening.”

For Allen, classical music surpasses every other genre in its evocative scope; he considers its preservation as “essential to the welfare of humankind’s soul and heart and mind”, recalling elderly folks braving blizzards and icy nights to meet its sound and feeling at concerts. He is wary of societal shifts that seem to build indifference towards classical music performances. 

“I actually fear there are moves now to not care about the performance of classical music. I hope it never gets devalued as something that’s passé,” says Allen. “I don’t think there’s any other kind of music that touches one as much. It’s about the soul… I think it’s something that you just don’t get from anything else.” 

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Montréal-based violinist Russell Iceberg performed in the festival for the first time. He describes the festival sound as “social”, “bubbly”, “sparkling”, and “self-consciously silly” across both serious and lighthearted performances, evoking a theme he calls “comedic resilience”.  

Delivered by a small group of musicians, chamber music features pieces with a very personal sound that exemplifies individual instruments. Iceberg characterizes chamber music as “very relatable and very human”, comparing the exchange of tunes between instruments to “people having a conversation.”  

He introduces his “virtuosic” solo pieces by Eugène Ysaÿe, a Belgian violinist who composed six violin sonatas depicting musicians from his personal life. Though solos are not traditional chamber music, Iceberg considers its intimacy to persist in these pieces. 

“(The solo pieces) have a chamber music element because they are all people (Ysaÿe) played with. He wrote (the sonata I played) for his friend, and it contains within it the characteristics he noticed in his friends’ playing. It resembles a piece they played together, too,” says Iceberg. “I love the piece; I play it a lot. It always reminds me of the friendship component of writing music for people that we know.”

Iceberg summarizes his ideal concert as one where “everybody is in a moment together”, and values the audience’s experience over his personal satisfaction or that of other musicians. While musicians might comment on technical aspects of the music or performance - like bowing or fingering - audiences might share how the music made them feel, where Iceberg finds more novelty. 

“The people I care the most about are the non-musicians. I hear about things (from them) that I never would have thought of, and it makes me think in a deeper way about what I’m doing,” says Iceberg. “Talking about (music) in a super technical way (as musicians can) kind of dehumanizes it, and it becomes more about accomplishing a task rather than being in a conversation.”

Iceberg devotes extensive thought to fleshing out the essence of his pieces, and “really wants people to get it”. But he does not believe in perfect performances, internalizing that the effort given to a piece cannot manifest fully within a single performance. Rather, he finds beauty in the ephemeral quality of concerts, each emerging from an irreproducible moment spun from the chemistry between musicians and the audience’s perceptions. With few rehearsals preceding concerts, Iceberg considers the pieces to be ready for performance when musicians are able to play in synchrony.  

“It’s really just a moment. We’re all coming at it with a fresh attitude of “we don’t know what this (piece) is, but let’s figure it out, let’s try to make it into something”,” says Iceberg. “(The music) is just the way it happened that day, it doesn’t have to be analyzed too much… In the case of something like that, I think (the piece) is ready as soon as we’re able to start the piece and end it at the same time. That, in a way, is where we rehearsed it to. And the hope is that everyone is going to show up to the concert and bring it to a level beyond that, which I think is a lot of what happened.”  

During his solos, Iceberg closed his eyes and swayed, reaching for a state of calm he calls “flow”. While closing his eyes sharpens his focus, swaying is multifaceted - soothing the muscular tension a violin demands, complementing the fluidity of the music, and simply a natural personal trait, like “the way we intonate in conversation”. Iceberg strives to communicate, chiselling at the poles of sound that might deepen his musical vision.

“It’s calmness, but not because the music is calm. It’s like a controlled chaos,” Iceberg explains. “Everything that (musicians) want to express has to be packaged in this way where we can do it in a state of calm. We have to be larger than life, things have to be exaggerated. The details have to be clear, the type of sound you produce for certain emotional states has to be even bolder - if it’s loud, play it louder; if it’s soft play it even softer. My hope is always that I am as non-verbal as possible, thinking just in terms of music and emotions.”  

For Iceberg, any music is worth playing if it brings people joy. He considers concerts to be inherently ambient settings, describing audience members who read or draw to the music. 

“If (music) causes people joy then I’m happy to do it. That can be music of any era, any style, any kind of instrument. The biggest goal is to have interesting and perhaps profound moments with people,” says Iceberg. “(Concerts are) just an ambient environment that, maybe if we’re lucky, we’ll beautify in some way.” ♦