ANNIVERSARY

I married you and you have married me.

They promised that our house would fall apart.

This is the place where I was meant to be.

Incessant clangour, violent company

we planned to sidestep neatly from the start —

I married you and you have married me

through thick and thin. You wasted by degree

and pulled me with you down to deepest dark.

This is the place where I was meant to be.

Mineshaft fears infect the chemistry.

The cables snapped. We thought we were so smart —

I’d married you and you had married me.

It took sumless years to clamber free,

six children, indefatigable art

to reach the place where I was meant to be.

Our warring fathers’ sins have paid the fee;

defiance is elastic as the heart.

I married you and you have married me.

This is the place where we were meant to be.

APPLICATION, AS TO TYPE

I am a professional painist.

I have concretized the world over.

I play the complete Chaplin repertory and

love performing clamber music.

I am seazoned.

My rectals are slip-free.

My technique is second to neon.

I also do songs and intimations.

My frees are nominal.

Deferences on request.

WHY I LIKE BRAHMS

Because he admired married sopranos

and was too scarred to misbehave.

Because his adoration of the Kaiser

escaped the notice of Hermann Goering.

Because his first piano concerto broke

a certain sound barrier in Timmins, Ontario.

Because his genius moved forward

by reconstructing the past.

Because he fell asleep while Liszt performed

the might B minor sonata (he didn’t).

Because his childish genitals were knackered while playing

piano in a seaside brothel (they weren’t).

Because he was a smooth looker when young

and a dumpy, trotting silhouette when old.

Because he went to a lunatic Robert Schumann

when Clara couldn’t or wouldn’t.

Because his frugal bourgeois life remained

gregarious and lonely.

Because he buried his beloved Clara

and saved her husband’s symphony while she lived.

Because he loved intelligent contraltos

and never wrote an opera.

Because as any donkey can see he follows

the giant behind him.

Because his fourth symphony

is worthy of King Lear.

Because he wanted to be

better than his music.

Because he never ceases to defy, exalt, console

our helpless mortality.

HIS INTERMEZZI

Chiefly in order to make songs of them

we finger-touch these lieder without words

and hold the heartache in. No apothegm

can touch the hallowed grief this one records –

open the E flat minor’s Dies Irae

make it stand for lovers taking leave

of one another, aged arthritic Clara

from her faithful Brahms who must believe

she loves him by the way majestic hands

entreat the work’s mysterious heroics.

Each perceives their friendship never ends:

music comforts little these two stoics.

Stricken Johannes flicks a cold cigar

ponders why he loved no one but her.

HALF OBOE, HALF CLARINET

This is the voice to say yes to—

harsh, choked, dark,

smoked, veiled, black,

vaulting, slashing,

charred, metallic, raw,

hot-marbles-mouthed,

wrathful-heart-stopping,

deadened-before-dying,

little-girled, gaudy, bottled,

thick, opaque, rapt,

shrilling, cascading

E in alt to low F sharp,

chesting way up beyond A,

glottaled, noble, gloating—

Did you like my voice

  when you

first heard it?

  No.

I thought not.

VIENE, NORMA

Her art belongs to the ages

we all know that.

The camera recorded her last performance

a lone blur in a window.

She withdrew herself

and overcame her ruined voice.

Her heart

gave out.

Fifth Piano Sonata by Harry Somers

William Aide, piano

Concerto for Piano and Orchestra 1974 by Samuel Dolin

William Aide, piano

CBC Festival Orchestra

Victor Feldbrill, Conductor

John Beckwith: Stacey

Text by Margaret Laurence

Teri Dunn, soprano

William Aide, piano

John Beckwith: Six Songs to Poems by e e cummings

Mark Pedrotti, baritone

William Aide, piano

1. buy me an ounce and I’ll sell you a pound

2. ITEM this man is so

3. “o purple finch

4. Jimmie’s got a goil

5. that melancholy

6. let it go

Phil Nimmons: Images Entre Nous

James Campbell, clarinet
William Aide, piano

Chris Paul Harman: Poem

Lawrence Cherney, Bass Oboe
William Aide, piano

John Beckwith: Concerto Fantasy

CJRT Orchestra, Paul Robinson
William Aide, piano

Peter Paul Koprowski: Souvenirs de Pologne

William Aide, piano

CBC Vancouver Orchestra, Mario Bernardi, conductor

S.C. Eckhardt Gramatté: Sonata no. 3 (1924)

Landlicher Tanz (Rondo)

Kronung

Spanischer Tanz “Villa rosa”

William Aide, piano

Walter Buczynski: Lyric for Piano with Orchestra

William Aide, piano

CJRT Orchestra, Paul Robinson, conductor

Walter Buczynski: XI (1990)

 Fantaisie
 Berceuse
 Barcarolle

William Aide, piano

Brian McDonagh: A Sardonic Songbook

Poems by Stevie Smith

Monica Whicher, soprano – William Aide, piano

Talivaldis Kenins: Concertante (1966)

Presto furioso

Canzona: Lento

Vivace assai

Robert Aitken, flute; William Aide, piano

Talivaldis Kenins: Sonata for cello and piano (1950)

Allegro con moto ma non troppo

Scherzo presto assai

Andante molto sostenuto

Allegro molto e con brio

David Heatherington, cello –  William Aide, piano

Harry Somers: Birminal Trilogy

The  Owl and the Pussy Cat

Pelican Chorus (premiere 1994)

Abstemious Asses, Zealous Zebras (premiere 1994)

Barbara Hannigan, soprano; Marianne Bindig, mezzo soprano

Benoit Boutin, tenor; William Aide piano

Beckwith: Avowals (words by bp nichol)

Talivaldis Kenins: Piano Quartet no. 2 (1979)

Agitato assai, quasi feroce
Adagio dolce espressivo
Intrada: Moderato – Presto tempestoso

Paul Meyer, violin
Steven Dann, viola
David Hetherington, cello
William Aide, piano