Last week's Toronto Symphony Orchestra programme was interesting from first to last, giving much for the music lover to chew upon and nothing that was overly familiar or beaten to death.
The programme opened with the world premiere of in moments, into bloom by Julia Mermelstein. It's one of a group of Celebration Preludes commissioned by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra to commemorate its centenary season. Each piece was to have a playing time of 3 minutes, thereby acting as a kind of hors d'oeuvre or appetizer, not only for the concert to follow, but also for the other works of the composer.
Mermelstein provided a rather fulsome programme note, as seems to be now customary. I didn't read it until after I had heard the music, and when I did it cast scant illumination upon the work. All the same, this piece was pleasing to the ear -- a continuous progression of shifting harmonic and tonal textures, with distinct diatonic chords looming out of the sound from time to time, and then fading back into the kaleidoscopic backdrop. It would be worth hearing again, but more significant to me was that it whetted my appetite to hear more of and from Mermelstein.
The next piece up was Igor Stravinsky's Scherzo Fantastique, Op. 3. It was completely unknown to me, but I didn't need to read the programme to recognize instantly that this was music which, like the slightly later and much better known Firebird, came to life very much under the spell of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who was Stravinsky's composition teacher when he wrote this showpiece.
A showpiece it is, pushing the older composer's signature exotic orchestration almost to the limit, while maintaining rapid, pulsating ostinato figures which were inspired by the endless motion of bees and the humming life which permeates a beehive. The orchestra made the most of the lively rhythmic backdrop, and sound was carefully balanced throughout so that even the most densely-written passages still remained both musical and transparent.
At a single hearing, it was difficult either to classify or to assess Zosha di Castri's In the Half Light, another commissioned world premiere. According to the programme note, the composer stated that the work was actually a collaborative achievement among herself, text writer Tash Aw, and soprano Barbara Hannigan, who sang the premiere.
The text, both elliptical and epigraphic, isn't much more helpful, other than the fact that it is divided into seven discrete sections. The musical form follows that division, with the last section containing musical recollections of the opening.
The sung role for the soprano is dramatic in an extreme yet non-stagey way. The drama is inherent in the music itself, with its rapid succession of high-altitude cries, low ominous murmurs, and quiet hints of private conversations overheard. The nearest musical comparison I can think of is found in the similar enormous leaps of Schoenberg's Pierrot lunaire, minus that earlier work's cabaret overtones. In any case, di Castri and her collaborators have here created a piece which deliberately eschews the old ethics of setting text to music, particularly the classic demand that the text be heard. What we hear, musically, is much more a question of the subtext which is not sung, a reality which emerges when you study the printed text as you listen.
Hannigan's performance was powerful in a lyrical way, as she brought ringing beauty of tone to all the extreme demands of the score. The orchestra matched her with enormous variations in texture, yet always holding the sound in control so that the singer was never drowned out. di Castri's score was notable in avoiding this trap, which too often befalls contemporary composers unused to writing for voices.
While Maestro Gustavo Gimeno did sterling work in all these diverse compositions, his showpiece moment came after the intermission when he led the orchestra in an unusual complete performance of the original 1910 score of The Firebird by Igor Stravinsky, the composer's first and greatest hit. In today's concert world, the work is far more often represented by the shortened orchestral suites prepared by the composer himself, either the original 1911 suite in five movements, or the somewhat longer 1945 suite in which Stravinsky added back in a few of the pantomime sequences from the original ballet and re-scored them, all so that the work could be newly copyrighted in the United States.
I've heard both the 1911 and 1945 suites in concert, but the complete score I've heard live only when the National Ballet of Canada staged, and then remounted, James Kudelka's version of the complete ballet.
In fact, the last time I heard The Firebird in a live performance was in June of 2019 when Gimeno, then newly named as Music Director Designate, led the orchestra in a quickly-arranged performance of the 1945 suite which gave audiences (and self-appointed critics, ahem!) a first chance to assess his style and abilities as a conductor. A link to my review of that concert follows:
Having now heard the complete ballet in concert, I would have to say that I'd frankly prefer the 1945 suite, where some of the more fragmentary and unclear passages meant to support stage mime are set aside to focus on the much clearer and more enlightening set numbers.
With that caveat, the orchestra under Gimeno again (as in 2019) gave a powerful performance of the score, highlighted by such moments as the crisply chattering scherzando woodwinds of the Dance of the Princesses, the rugged rhythmic power of Kashchei's Infernal Dance, and the slow, stately buildup to the final massive brass chords at the close (aided by three extra trumpets in the organ loft).
Within a year of writing The Firebird, Stravinsky had already moved far beyond his Rimskian stylistic roots with the considerably more acerbic Petrushka, and a year after that he had left Rimsky in the dust altogether with the notorious Rite of Spring. Later still, he came to hate the continuing popular acclaim for The Firebird, as it cast shade on almost everything else he ever wrote. But it is still a true masterpiece of its kind, spectacular, showy, musically skillful, and I for one am always grateful for a chance to enjoy it again.
No comments:
Post a Comment