The next item on my bucket list for the return to live performances was the official opening programme of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra's 100th season. This programme also marked the first appearance, in a live concert, of Gustavo Gimeno in his role as the orchestra's tenth Music Director.
Of all the performing arts organizations, I suspect that the orchestras of the world had the most to lose during the lengthy pandemic shutdowns. Actors, dancers, and individual musicians of all kinds could continue to put their work before the public through adroit use of electronic media, but for an orchestra there is no effective substitute to being together in a single venue, listening to each other and watching the conductor, welding themselves into a single musical organism. That's also true of choral singing, for all of the same reasons.
Right at the outset, then, I took my seat in Roy Thomson Hall, eager to hear how the orchestra sounded as a single body following on their year-and-a-half enforced hiatus.
For the first time I can recall, we faced a vacant stage. A few minutes after eight, the doors opened and the entire orchestra marched on, triggering the most enthusiastic applause of the evening, with many patrons standing and a great deal of cheering. Speaking for the audience, I think that said it all about our feelings.
The programme was intriguing, because it was developed to meet some special conditions:
- Total concert time no greater than eighty minutes, with no intermission.
- Works that could be played by a reduced orchestra of 50, allowing more spacing on stage.
- Works that could convey an atmosphere of celebration and endurance.
- Representation of composer of colour.
- One work each from the 1700s, 1800s, 1900s, and 2000s, the decades during which the independent concert orchestra as we know it (beyond simply being used as an accompaniment for singing) has grown and evolved.
The last two points weren't mentioned in any of the advance publicity I saw, but became clear as the concert progressed.
The evening opened with the Canadian premiere of Invictus by Anthony Barfield. Composed in response to the shocking murder of George Floyd, Barfield's work takes the form of a stunning, powerful, sometimes acerbic fanfare for the brass instruments. The title refers to the composer's own belief, speaking for himself and the whole black community, that "despite these troublesome times, we are in fact unconquerable." The TSO's brass section gave a stirring account of this gripping work.
For the second work, we went back to the earliest end of the programme's time line. Franz Josef Haydn, the man often celebrated as "the father of the symphony," was represented by an unusual aspect of his vast output -- the overture to his opera, L'isola disabitata ("The Deserted Island"). The music is undeniably dramatic, with some modulations that seem startling until you realize that it was written during the height of the middle period of his career when Haydn was often occupied with the ideals of the Sturm und Drang ("storm and stress") movement in composition. Indeed, the stormy opening of the overture suggests a possible shipwreck before the allegro main section launches. "Launches" is the appropriate word, as Maestro Gimeno lit the fuse of a rocket with a tightly-disciplined takeoff.
The third work, representing the 1900s, was Paul Hindemith's Concert Music for Strings and Brass. This work was composed on a commission for the Boston Symphony Orchestra's 50th season in 1931, and is designedly a work for public consumption -- but a strikingly thorny one. I can't resist the urge to quote from Volume 6 (1939) of the Essays in Musical Analysis by Donald Francis Tovey, who's one of my favourite writers on music (not that I always agree with him by any means):
Alas and alack-a-day, Hindemith, in his new Anweisungen zur Tonsatz, expressly repudiates atonality and polytonality, in terms which give no support to the idea that he ever used these privileges, even in early works. Still, facts are facts....
Tovey then goes on to describe a 1921 work for chamber ensemble in which a popular fox-trot dance tune is quoted in G major, while simultaneously accompanied by identical runs on the major scales of all the other eleven keys of the octave.
The Concert Music makes very free use of polytonality, with the strings and brasses occasionally (and rather painfully, for my money) playing very fully-harmonized melodies at the same time in two or more conflicting keys. I've had to sit through it twice in the last decade, and should be very happy never to be called on to repeat the experience.
As for the quality of the performance, that's hard to judge without closer familiarity and a copy of the score. The bigger, grander passages lacked for nothing in power and force. Gimeno's control of the quieter passages, where momentum could easily be lost, made it clear that the music was still moving forward in precise fashion. Apart from that comment, I can only observe that everybody arrived at the "right" chord together at the ending -- and then move on.
Schubert's Symphony No. 5 in B-Flat Major concluded the concert by fulfilling what is by no means an easy requirement: finding a symphony from the nineteenth century which would still keep the concert under that 80-minute total time frame. I have an easier time thinking of nineteenth-century symphonies which would blow out of that time frame all by themselves!
With the smallest orchestra of any of Schubert's symphonies, the Fifth also brings a beguiling Mozartean atmosphere. But it is not easily mistaken for Mozart, all the same. The profusion of ingratiating melody could come from few other hands than Schubert, and the same can be said for some of the intriguing modulations. Although neither dramatic nor grand, this little Fifth always strikes me as a songful delight.
The opening movement begins in full flow, allegro without a slow introduction, but is most unusual in opening pianissimo. Maestro Gimeno here led the only live performance I have ever heard in which that pianissimo was fully respected, yet that didn't preclude some sharp little sforzando accents which managed to get louder without getting louder, to intriguing effect.
The second movement, Andante con moto, definitely moved as directed, but at the same time conveyed an atmosphere of drowsy relaxation which felt somewhat like the slow movement in Beethoven's Pastorale, although there's no musical resemblance. Here, Gimeno notably managed to incorporate the slightest and gentlest of rubato so that the music breathed organically, with the entire orchestra coming right along with him.
The Menuetto third movement was played as a scherzo in all but name, an explosive, fire-eating reading such as I have never heard, and the first truly loud sound in the entire symphony. In Gimeno's performance, Schubert's role as a precursor of Bruckner's mammoth scherzos was clearly audible. The trio, by contrast, came at a tempo more relaxed than the menuetto, where many conductors maintain much the same basic pulse throughout the movement.
The light-hearted, joyful finale flew by quickly in a rush of happy, giddy celebration.
The concert as a whole was a splendid celebration of the return to live performance, and the well-filled hall attested to how badly the music lovers of Toronto had missed the privilege.
The best news was the realization that the orchestra was in as fine form as ever, playing with unanimity and musicality to burn under their new Music Director. The future of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra as we come out of the pandemic seems assured and bright indeed.
No comments:
Post a Comment