Last night I was at the Toronto Symphony at Roy Thomson Hall for a programme of three works, with the orchestra guest-conducted by Giancarlo Guerrero.
The first piece was one of my earliest musical loves, the Russian Easter Festival Overture by Rimsky-Korsakov. This is one of the three principal orchestral works (alongside the Capriccio Espagnol and Scheherazade) that amply prove R-K's claim to be one of the greatest masters of orchestral colour of all time. In any of these pieces, the dazzling variety of sound combinations and their aptness to each moment of the music might lead you to believe that a gigantic Mahler-sized orchestra was involved, whereas he actually composed for a normal-sized mid-Romantic orchestra.
The Russian Easter Festival is a concert piece based largely on traditional Russian Orthodox hymns, but in this composer's hands the hymn tunes are not used solely to portray the religious rites surrounding the Easter festival. Indeed, the noisy, jubilant secular celebrations of the cities are just as effectively depicted with reference to the ancient hymns as well. Most effective of all are the moments when the orchestral strings land on a quiet sustained chord, allowing a soloist to play a gentle cadenza in the manner of a vocal recitative. The central pivot point of the work, indeed, is a long cadenza intoned by the solo trombone which evokes the chanting of the priest during the Easter morning service.
The overture makes liberal use of syncopated rhythms, the main beat sometimes departing from the first place in the bar for many bars in succession. The extreme vigour of the fast passages also tries the hold-it-together skills of the conductor to an intense degree.
Guerrero more than met the challenge. The quiet moments were most evocative, the strings seeming to listen with rapt, awed attention to the cadenzas, especially the trombone intonation. The vigorous passages were tight, incisive, well-balanced. The rousing conclusion, with massive trombone chords forcefully blasted at just the right moments, put the seal on a performance as powerful as any I could want to hear. Wow!
Unfortunately....
(you knew there was an "unfortunately" from the title heading, right?)
The succeeding performance of the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto # 1 was a bit of a dud, for me at any rate. It was surely dynamic in the first and last movements, and the orchestral playing was suitably subtle in the quiet second movement. Pianist Kirill Gerstein played cleanly enough, without over-pedalling (unlike the last time I heard this one done live). So what was the hitch?
Simply this: the pianist did not, would not, make eye contact with the conductor. All the really good concerto pianists stay in touch with their conductors by use of their eyes. Not Gerstein! Several of the faster syncopated passages threatened to come apart as a result. The fast, quiet scherzando in the middle of the slow movement did come apart, with the soloist speeding up and arriving appreciably and audibly ahead of the orchestra at the concluding fortissimo chord and arpeggio. The last pianist I saw in this concerto held continual eye contact with the conductor throughout this particular passage, and no wonder! Last night, I heard and saw just why that is so necessary.
Of course the audience cheered at the end, but the applause was not terribly sustained -- I suspect that any musicians in the audience probably arrived at the same conclusion I reached.
After the intermission, we had Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra. It's a totally unfamiliar work to me. One listen through certainly is not enough to grasp everything that happens in this complex and multi-layered score. However, I picked up enough to want to invest more time in it -- and that's more than I can say for much of Bartok's music. Sorry if you really like his work, but this is one composer that just doesn't do much for me -- except for his stunning one-act opera Bluebeard's Castle.
Despite my unfamiliarity, I could tell that the orchestra were tightly together on this one, and that Guerrero was thoroughly in command of the score.
So, apart from the Tchaikovsky (and even that had its moments), this was a very good concert -- but the best was assuredly in the first 15 minutes!
