Toronto Symphony Orchestra 2021-2022 # 7: Beethoven's Immortal Ninth: Gimeno Presents His Calling Card

Over the years, Beethoven's immortal Symphony # 9 in D Minor, Op. 125, has become the ultimate best-seller of symphonic music in Toronto.

 

Each time the work is remounted, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra gives it three or four (or more) performances, all of which are generously filled, if not sold out. The famous "Choral Symphony" has become the all-but-compulsory calling card for each new music director to present as early in their contract tenure as possible -- preferably either at the beginning of the first season, as a rocket launcher, or at the end, as a showstopper finale. This "rule," by the way, applies to many other orchestras in many other cities.

 

The orchestra's prior music director, Peter Oundjian, staged the work multiple times (4 or 5 different occasions in all over 14 seasons), and his development as a podium maestro could be effectively gauged by hearing how his interpretation of this masterpiece evolved through the years.

 

Now, the orchestra's newest maestro, Gustavo Gimeno, has chosen the mighty Ninth to conclude his first full season at the helm, with four performances in all. I attended the last one, on Sunday afternoon.

 

Oddly enough, I never heard the Ninth performed live until some years after I had sung it half a dozen times as a member of the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir! 

The symphony by itself typically lasts for some 65-70 minutes, depending on tempo choices of the conductor and length of pauses between movements. At one time, this was felt to be sufficient for an entire concert. A popular tale (perhaps an urban legend) states that when Philips Electronics was developing the first generation of compact discs back in the 1980s, they consulted the famed German maestro Herbert von Karajan about the ideal playing time of the disc. His reply, so the story goes, was that 74 minutes would be perfect because "that's how long it takes me to play Beethoven's Ninth."

Today, though, it is accepted practice in a live performance to pair one or more other works with the Ninth. For these concerts, Gimeno chose to present no less than three contemporary works by three different Canadian composers as his curtain-raisers before the main event. 

The three contemporary works heard in the first half of the programme were all TSO commissions, and all were world premieres. Adam Scime's A Dream of Refuge, Bekah Simms' Bite, and Roydon Tse's Unrelenting Sorrow shared a couple of features in common. Each one began with a single emphatic chord followed by quieter music. Each one made use of a large orchestral ensemble with ample percussion. As the titles suggest, each piece was in some way shaped or inspired by the difficult pandemic experience of the last two years. Each one was introduced by a detailed programme note from the composer. 

Since I generally leave programme notes to be read after a performance, I have to say bluntly that those detailed essays apparently bore little or no relation to the music I heard. Contemporary composers far too often try to use words as a crutch to explain what they are doing. I feel that a work of music ideally should tell me all by itself what I need to know.

A Dream of Refuge was indeed dreamlike in places, a bit nightmarish in others, but notable above all for the fascinating array of textures that Scime deployed, including creative use of the large number of percussion instruments.

Bite had the strongest rhythmic pulse of the three, a pulse that you could always sense in the background even when no one was actually playing in rhythmic fashion.

Unrelenting Sorrow had a few moments where the swirling masses of sound suddenly alighted on a clear diatonic chord for a moment, to fascinating effect, before launching again. 

All three works were definitely worth re-hearing.

An intermission followed before the Beethoven. This performance of the epic Ninth was, for me, rather problematic. I have never heard the symphony performed so quickly. Gimeno dispatched the entire score in 60 minutes flat, and if he hadn't taken the rare repeat in the middle of the scherzo, and a 2-minute pause after the scherzo while the soloists and the balance of the choir were seated, the running time would have been closer to 57 minutes! 

Some advocates of the "authentic performance" movement, notably Sir Roger Norrington, adhere to Beethoven's metronome marks, and I sense that this is what Gimeno was doing -- although I'm reasonably sure his first movement tempo was even faster than Beethoven's marking.

This brings up a situation which I've encountered before in Beethoven's music, especially among the later works. I'd sum it up as a case of "either the metronome markings or the tempo descriptions must be wrong, since they can't both be correct." In this symphony, a fast-flowing tempo in the first movement blurs together notes which should ideally be heard discretely in the omnipresent dotted figures that open the main theme. The large acoustic space of Roy Thomson Hall needs to be to be taken into account here, compared to the much smaller halls found in some other cities. Also, the speed deprives the music of majesty, instead making it almost playful -- yet Beethoven's description clearly states Allegro ma non troppo, un poco maestoso. Similarly, going with the metronome mark in the third movement creates a flowing lyrical river of almost Schubertian lightness and makes nonsense of the direction Adagio molto e cantabile.

 

Personally, I hew to the theory that Beethoven's metronome markings deserve less attention than his clear written directions on the scores. I also haven't lost sight of the fact that orchestras in the 1820s were far more hit-and-miss affairs than today, often with a ramshackle assortment of random players, and fast speeds were ideal for blurring over and covering up a multitude of sins.

However, since Gimeno has opted for a hell-for-leather, high-speed chase of a Ninth, I can certainly commend both the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir for their undoubted ability to deliver the goods at such hectic speeds.

 

Apart from the acoustic blurring issue mentioned above, the orchestra's members gave an alert, energetic reading of the first movement, the woodwinds sounding particularly fine in the quieter passages where their parts are featured. The fugal passage in the middle of the movement was strongly presented. The scherzo again featured nimble, light-footed articulation from the strings and a positive but not overwhelming contribution from the timpanist (a particular hazard in this movement). Lovely wind playing again in the trio.

 

Phrasing and legato came to the fore for the strings in the third movement, with the horn making a fine contribution on the little solo cadenza. The two great fanfares near the end were played a little prosaically but with secure and mellow chording.

 

The cellos and basses sang as one voice in their recitative passages at the beginning of the finale, reminding the hearer that Beethoven had originally intended a lengthy text to be sung by the baritone soloist through all of these passages before he adopted this alternate plan. The variations were all clearly characterized with the fugue bringing an especially fiery response from the players, although the textures did become a bit muddy.

The Toronto Mendelssohn Choir came with a reduced body of 100 singers, but they proved more than equal to the test. By comparison with other choirs I've heard in this music, the Choir's tone was secure and rich, not at all strained, in the cruelly high passages for sopranos and tenors. Basses and tenors together responded nimbly to the brisk tempo in Froh, wie seine Sonnen fliegen. The entire choir gave their biggest, richest sound in the energetic variation of the main theme after the fugue, and the hectic Alle Menschen remained crisp and pinpoint-accurate.

The solo quartet included some big names with major reputations at the Metropolitan Opera and other leading venues, and it was intriguing to me to hear them in a concert setting after having encountered two of them at the Met. Angela Meade gave a strong reading of the soprano part, marred by one obvious under-the-note moment. Rihab Chaieb gave a clear performance of the well-hidden mezzo-soprano part, welding together the harmony of the quartet. Issachah Savage's stentorian heldentenor voice made a splendid effect in his major solo, but sometimes overpowered his colleagues in ensemble. Ryan Speedo Green sang with great power and security of pitch in opening the vocal finale, and lent a firm foundation to the solo quartet.

By squawking repeatedly about the speeds, I do not mean to imply that this was in any sense an unmusical reading of the work. Maestro Gimeno allowed the music to breathe with slight tempo flexibility as needed, especially in the adagio, although a little more of this in the first movement would have been welcome. He nailed the tricky tempo shift into the trio from the scherzo and similarly managed well the tempo shifts from one variation to the next in the finale. 

I do feel, though, that he overplayed his hand and that this performance, while superficially exciting, was somewhat lacking in deeper insights into the score. I'll be intrigued to see how his interpretation of the work develops and evolves with time.

National Ballet 2021-2022 # 5 The Swans Reborn

This weekend marks the premiere of a major new production in the repertoire of the National Ballet of Canada: Karen Kain's new version of the immortal classic Swan Lake.

 

I approached this premiere with an equal mixture of excitement and trepidation. The classics of ballet are continually restaged and reborn in ballet companies around the world, in the same process of revitalization that attends productions of the great classic plays and operas. I was certainly intrigued to see what Kain would bring to a ballet and a role that had been such a central feature of her own career as a dancer. More intriguing still were the advance glimpses behind the scenes which were shared by the National Ballet on its YouTube channel, and can still be viewed there.

On the other hand, since this new version was to be based on Erik Bruhn's version, last danced in the 1990s, I was a trifle fearful of too much stepping backwards instead of moving bravely forward. This, as it turned out, was not a problem at all. This is a powerful, intensely dramatic Swan Lake; it held me enthralled from first to last.

 

The first and key thing to understand about this production: this is not a pretty fairy tale where "they all lived happily ever after." Some versions of Swan Lake do opt for a happy ending, and the brief, triumphant apotheosis in the final bars of the score seems to indicate that direction, but here we see a darkly tragic Swan Lake which ends with Prince Siegfried dead and Odette, still a prisoner of the malevolent Rothbart, left to mourn him.

 

It's visually dark too, brooding, ominous, and at times downright terrifying. That description applies above all to Rothbart, clad in monochromatic greys and blacks with huge, enveloping feathered black wings and a makeup treatment on the face that suggests a skull, or a dead body brought back to life after decay. This sorcerer is definitely the stuff of nightmares. 

The darkness of this production declares itself right at the outset, during the brief prelude which, musically, introduces the first of the swan themes and the plangent oboe which becomes the signature sound of the swan themes throughout the ballet. In this production, the overture becomes a Prologue in which we see, through a scrim, Rothbart capturing and enslaving Odette and her friends, who will henceforth appear as swans.

 

"Monochrome" and "dark" are also apt words to describe the sets. Even in the court ballroom of Act III, the elaborate golden decorations are shown merely in outline, with a dark, foreboding sky visible through and between them. To accentuate Rothbart's pivotal role as the puppet master manipulating the entire story, the setting is dominated from time to time by a gigantic pair of wings, modelled on the ones the dancer uses, which slide down from the top of the proscenium to close in and conceal some 35-40% of the view of the stage.

Right from the opening of the work, the dominance of colours in the white-grey-black range can be seen in the costumes too. Touches of other colours in the first scene are few and far between, and even when they do appear these other colours tend to be subdued, their brilliance damped down by a hint of greyness.

 

The masquerade ball scene of Act III contains the one widespread deployment of varied and luxurious costume colours in the show, and the part of the stage up to the dancers' heads and a bit beyond is brightly lit, accentuating the sumptuous costumes -- although the light is rather on the cold side. Above that point, though, darkness sets in again.

 

It was the late Erik Bruhn's idea to collapse the entire show into, in effect, two acts by fusing Acts I and II together into a single continuous entity, and similarly joining Acts III and IV. In the days of the ballet's first production, this would have been an utter impossibility, due to the size and weight of fully constructed sets, but with the more suggestive, less literal settings and the modern stage technology used today, the scene change becomes duck soup for the stage hands. I'm sure the dressers are going crazy backstage, trying to get all the women out of their court clothes as quickly as possible, allowing the swan tutus to shine. Both scene changes went smoothly.

 

Another key element of this production which facilitates the two-act plan (I'm not sure how much of this was inherited from Bruhn), is to use a greatly pared-down version of the score, reducing the overall running time to just 2 hours 10 minutes plus a 20-minute intermission (the original score from 1877 runs for 2 hours 40 minutes in my recording).

The entire design, from sets to costumes, is the work of Gabriela Týlešová. Her work is remarkable for the incredible depth of detail, from colour palettes to intriguing shapes in the sets and from textures to painted-in effects in the "feathered" swan tutus and the fearsome wings of Rothbart. Her costuming for the court scene in Act I places the show in the time period in which the ballet was first produced, the late 1800s. Thus, the costumes for the masquerade sensibly look to a time period which was about a century earlier still, a very likely thing to happen in a party at a royal court.

 

In the programme notes, Karen Kain insists that the audience sees women, not swans. Strictly speaking, this is perhaps true, but the design vision of Týlešová appeared to be at odds with this very definite statement. The designer and costumers alike have gone to extraordinary lengths to make the tutus appear to be built out of realistic feathers, making these women absolutely the most swan-like swans I've ever seen in the ballet. Of course, the classic choreography accentuates the resemblance with both the body movements and the flexible bending of the arms. I would imagine that most of the audience would, as I did, simply forget Kain's statement and accept the traditional convention that these are indeed swans.

 

On Saturday afternoon, I saw the second performance of the run, meaning that I saw the first performance of the roles by the principals and featured soloists of this cast. It also means that all of these dancers were making role debuts, since none of them were active in ballet and many were not even born when Erik Bruhn's staging (on which this one is based) last appeared.

Swan Lake, far more than many ballets, is memorable for the dancing of the corps de ballet. The lines of women in white swan tutus form an indelible image in the mind after any performance. On Saturday, the corps turned in a sterling performance in the white scenes of Act II and Act IV, graceful and unified in motion and in stillness alike. As always, the famous Dance of the Little Swans made a delightful highlight. I'd love to credit this quartet by name, but the programme did not clarify which dancers from four pairs of names were dancing in which performances. 

 

When the men joined the women in the court scenes of Act I and Act III, the corps' ensemble dances sparkled with energy while maintaining impressive unanimity in such matters as height of kicks and positions of hand gestures. Only for one moment did I detect a brief uncertainty, and it was remedied almost before I had time to notice. A strong afternoon for the corps de ballet indeed.

Each of the four women presenting herself as a candidate for Siegfried's hand in Act III is supported by two to four other dancers, and these smaller ensembles also all did impressive work. Each of the four women danced captivatingly in her featured solo -- these are the "national dances", Russian, Neapolitan, French, and Spanish, here not merely a sweet and showy divertissement but an integral part of the story. Kudos to Jenna Savella in the Russian Dance, Jeannine Haller in the Neapolitan Dance, Miyoku Koyasu in the French Dance, and Tanya Howard in the Spanish Dance.

 

Among the few comic moments in Swan Lake is a brief but entertaining little dance for the Queen's Confidante. The programme tells us that Alejandra Perez-Gomez and Rebekah Rimsay trade off in the roles of Queen and Confidante, but not which one dances which role in each performance. 

Kota Sato dominated the stage on each appearance as the malevolent Rothbart, drawing all eyes even when he wasn't spreading his massive wings (or the equally huge cape he wears in Act III).

Siphesihle November dominated in another way with his strongly athletic performance as Benno, the Prince's closest friend, owning the stage in each of his featured numbers.

Tirion Law and Brenna Flaherty sparkled as Celia and Elizabeth, Siegfried's sisters. These two characters are an innovation of this production, their names a nod in honour of Celia Franca, the founding artistic director of the company, and Betty Oliphant, first ballet mistress of the company and co-founder of the splendid National Ballet School. 

Brendan Saye created a strong impression as Prince Siegfried. Expressive movement and face clearly defined the unrest in the prince's more pensive moments. Saye brought great energy to the faster work in the showpiece numbers, such as his solo in the Black Swan Pas de Deux.

 

Svetlana Lunkina balanced her interpretation beautifully between the twin roles of Odette and Odile. It's impressive to see a dancer develop both sides of this dual role so effectively. Her Odette came with a flowing grace which entirely suited the character, her arm positions a particular delight. As the evil Odile, her movements became cleaner, harder-edged, lighting up the stage with a glitter where her Odette glowed. The sudden transition back to the drooping, mournful Odette at the beginning of Act IV was especially breathtaking, coming so soon after her malicious glee at Siegfried's oath just moments earlier. 

A quick final note: instead of printing all casting information for the entire 2-week run in the already-large house programme, the National Ballet printed the casting for the first 3 days (4 shows) on a separate, single-sheet insert. I hope they will now follow the lead of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra in reducing the paper programme still further to a minimal, streamlined version, and including QR codes to link to the more detailed notes and biographies in the company website.

In sum: this new-look Swan Lake beautifully revives tradition and honours it, while giving the show an impressively unified and visually-powerful interpretation. The company's strong team of dancers bring their own considerable strengths to the stage. The result is a Swan Lake that will certainly repay many viewings for years to come.

Swan Lake continues on stage until June 26 at the Four Seasons Centre in Toronto.

New Wine in Old Bottles: The Swan Lake Problem

All major forms of the performing arts have their canon of "classics," the established central works of the repertoire which are continually being reimagined by artists in many countries.

 

Some works become classics because of their immense and enduring popularity, others because of the supreme challenges they pose to interpreters, and many fit into both categories. By and large, these classics also serve as mighty get-pennies for the professional artists who perform them. Classical music has its Beethoven 5 and 9, Schubert Unfinished, or Dvorak 9 for the orchestra, and such beauties as Schubert's Trout Quintet or the Brahms G Minor Piano Quartet in the chamber repertoire. Pianists must keep revisiting the named Beethoven sonatas and almost anything by Chopin. Choral singers are all too familiar with the essential annual Christmastime performances of Messiah.

  

In the world of opera there are Carmen, Tosca, Traviata, really just about anything by Verdi or Puccini, and the huge music dramas of Wagner.

Where would the world's great theatres be without the taut tragedies of Shakespeare (Hamlet and King Lear in particular), such classic comedies as The School For Scandal or The Importance of Being Earnest, or the plays of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller?

In the world of ballet you have to count Giselle, Romeo and Juliet, and the three great ballets of Tchaikovsky: Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, and the eternal Christmas go-to, Nutcracker.

 

Among all these central classics, Swan Lake suffers from a unique and inescapable difficulty that is shared by no other piece I've mentioned in this list. Swan Lake carries with it a bigger load of traditional baggage than any other classic ballet, in the form of the world-renowned choreography by Marius Petipa and his assistant Lev Ivanov, originally staged for the Imperial Ballet in the revival production at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg in 1895 (the original production at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow had flopped in 1877). 

 

This choreography must not on any account be changed or replaced. Ignore this stricture at your peril! The hordes of classical ballet fans are ready to descend on you and rend you limb from limb, scattering swan feathers everywhere, if you dare to discard Ivanov's masterly white scene in Act II, especially the famous Dance of the Little Swans, or Petipa's showstopper Black Swan Pas de Deux with its infamous 32 fouettés for the prima ballerina in Act III. 

 

A side note: oddly enough, the role of Odile was never danced as a black swan until a 1941 production in New York by the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo, but the concept quickly spread from there throughout the ballet world.

 

As a point of comparison, imagine what Hamlet would be like if every actor assuming the role was required by tradition and convention to give an exact imitation of Sir Laurence Olivier in presenting the famous "To be or not to be..." soliloquy.

 

The only way a choreographer can avoid this pitfall is to follow the lead of Matthew Bourne in his radical revisioning of the work first staged in 1995. By moving wholesale into a modern dance vocabulary with only the slightest references to the poise and grace of classical ballet, Bourne shifted the entire debate away from sticking to Ivanov and Petipa and onto much broader ground -- to say nothing of his wholesale rewriting of the story.

 

Then there's the music for the Petipa/Ivanov version, which is itself rather a mixed bag. It's believed that Tchaikovsky had planned to revise the scoring of the original Swan Lake, but never got to work on that project before his death in 1893. Riccardo Drigo, ballet composer and conductor of the Imperial Theatre, stated many years later that he had received Tchaikovsky's authorization to orchestrate several of the master's piano pieces and incorporate them into a revised score of Swan Lake for 1895. He did just that as well as composing a couple of numbers himself but, for obvious reasons, his statement remains stubbornly unprovable.

 

Drigo's score as a whole, though, reveals the traditional disregard for the music as music which was so deeply rooted in the ballet world of the 1800s. The carefully-planned key sequences of the original score were both truncated and mutilated by the usual shuffling of individual numbers to different locations, and by Drigo's insertions -- which, for me, offer no benefit.  Drigo's radical surgery was done in accordance with the instructions of Petipa, and proceeded with the approval of Tchaikovsky's younger brother, Modest (for whatever that's worth). I've always felt that the piano pieces in question were not out of Tchaikovsky's top drawer anyway, and the numbers actually composed by Drigo himself are even less rewarding. So the musician in me finds live performances of Swan Lake a frustrating experience and would rather sit down to listen to a complete recording of the original score.

This problem with the music is intimately tied into the previously-stated issue with the choreography, since some of the most drastic changes and additions from Drigo's pen are found precisely in the Act II white scene and in the Act III Black Swan Pas de Deux. Thus, it's become virtually inescapable that any new production of Swan Lake in classical style will use the Drigo score of 1895 rather than the original of 1877. This original version can normally be found only in audio recordings, where any recording of the 1895 score is a rarity -- the reverse of the situation with live ballet performances.

 

Both musically and choreographically, any new classical-ballet version of Swan Lake is likely to become a case of trying to pour new wine into old bottles.

This brings me up to the new version created by Karen Kain for the National Ballet of Canada, which premieres tomorrow night (June 10) at the Four Seasons Centre in Toronto.

 

Kain had stated in advance that she intended to stage a new version largely based on the choreography of Erik Bruhn, whose 1967 version for the National Ballet of Canada was last danced in the 1990s. I was particularly relieved to see, from advance publicity, that Kain was not pursuing the one serious misfire in Bruhn's staging: the replacement of the evil Rothbart by an enigmatic Black Queen, a character role representing the evil force in the story, but whose main purpose and activity seemed to be physically blocking Prince Siegfried from getting near Odette. With little in the way of choreography, purpose or intention to build upon, the character artists who performed this role, from Celia Franca to Victoria Bertram and beyond, struggled with making sense of her. This production will restore the traditional demonic figure of Rothbart. Another question is whether this new staging will use Bruhn's own modifications to the running order of the Drigo score.

A final feature which has made me curious is that this staging will combine portions of Bruhn's 1967 choreography with additional new choreography by Christopher Stowell and Robert Binet. Sorting out who has done what, when, would be challenging unless the viewer remains intimately familiar with Bruhn's version. Not many people outside of the company and its alumni would, I think, be able to make that claim. Certainly, I cannot.

 

The good news? Despite these restrictive limitations forced on artists by audience familiarity and the popularity of certain sequences, there is still ample room in Swan Lake for the individual and distinctive stamp of the creators to be accommodated. I will look forward with anticipation to the particular vision of Karen Kain and her collaborators which awaits when I see the show on Saturday afternoon.

 

 

 

Toronto Symphony Orchestra 2021-2022 # 6: Two Treasures and a Well-Loved Classic

This week's Toronto Symphony Orchestra concerts uncovered a hidden treasure from the past as well as presenting a treasure from one of the finer contemporary composers I've encountered -- before wrapping up with a true mainstream classic.

Typically, the programme title and publicity seized on the mainstream work and billed the concert as "Oundjian Conducts Brahms." Well, I rarely turn down a chance to listen to the music of my first great love among composers, but on this occasion I was even more intrigued by a first chance to hear a live performance of Clara Schumann's Piano Concerto and Samy Moussa's Nocturne.   

 

The Moussa work opened the concert. One of the most intriguing aspects of Moussa's music is his ability to coax fascinating textures out of the orchestra, making use of unusual combinations and specific techniques for various instruments to create unique sound worlds. This skill is on full display in Nocturne. Equally intriguing, and far rarer in contemporary music, is Moussa's desire to build a work over a larger time scale, and sustain interest by giving the music a distinct rhythmic profile that gives both energy and motion to the music.

 

In the case of Nocturne, this profile comes from the tiny little 4-note motif which dominates the work, due to its distinct rhythmic pattern. That rhythmic cell becomes the motor force of the entire piece, which -- although in slow tempo -- does keep moving steadily forward for its entire 13-minute length. With many contemporary composers, 13 minutes of their music would be an agonizing ordeal. Nocturne kept me engaged, involved, even intrigued, every step of the way -- and more than willing to hear it again. The work has in fact been performed by many orchestras, so I am not alone in judging that it has sufficient merit to justify further performances.

 

This was in no small measure due to the careful balancing of the different sections of the orchestra by conductor Peter Oundjian, the orchestra's Conductor Emeritus. It's particularly tricky in that Moussa has deliberately turned to the low ranges of many of the instruments, giving a dark, quiet sound to many passages. In these, and in the several snarling climaxes, the orchestra's playing was sure and effective. The shimmering, mysterious textures of the closing pages were played to haunting effect.

 

While many people automatically seize on Clara Schumann's short-lived career as a composer as more proof of women despised, the truth is a bit more complicated. If anything, it was her burgeoning career as a solo performer that short-changed her composing. Schumann was one of the first pianists, certainly the first significant female pianist, to develop her career on the basis of giving solo recitals, and her formidable skills as a virtuoso put her in great demand across Europe. Her home life and family added the rest of the strain that caused her composing activity to fall gradually by the wayside.

It's the scandalous disappearance of her music from public view since her death that is the real proof of women composers despised.

The Piano Concerto in A Minor, Op. 7 was begun at the age of thirteen (!) with the completion of a Konzertsatz for piano and orchestra, a flashy virtuoso showpiece that gives definitive proof of her abilities as a virtuoso pianist. A year later, she decided to expand it into a full concerto, and added a partial sonata-form first movement and a slow movement, with subtle thematic links in the first movement foreshadowing the flashy earlier piece which now became the concerto's finale. 

Unusually, the first movement is short-circuited after its exposition by a direct transition into the slow movement, a feature later followed by other composers (the second violin concerto of Henryk Wieniawski springs to mind). The slow movement itself is unique among all concertos I have ever heard in that the orchestra falls completely silent while the piano sings a gentle Romanze, joined partway through only by a solo cello. Another linking passage, marked by quiet, ominous drumrolls, then launches the fiery finale, the longest and most fully developed of the three movements.

 

The Concerto marked the Toronto Symphony Orchestra debut of Toronto-born pianist, Tony Siqi Yun. His playing was noteworthy in all three movements: strong and forthright in the march-like opening, with gentle cantabile and subtle phrasing following on in the song of the slow movement, where he was joined by the nuanced playing of principal cellist Joseph Johnson. In the finale, the endless cascades of octaves and arpeggios were dispatched with skill, finesse, and almost nonchalant ease. In short, Yun made an excellent case for the music as music, even in the first movement which is, in many ways, the weakest of the three.

An enormous standing ovation greeted the final notes, entirely merited. Yun then presented an equally blazing and technically daunting encore, The Infernal Dance of Kashchei from Stravinsky's The Firebird. It's hard to judge of the quality of the playing here since the dense chromaticism which so effectively spices the orchestral score becomes  a mass of painfully thick noise on a piano keyboard. Ironically, the music sounds far more "modern" and less like the student of Rimsky-Korsakov in this form.

 

And so we come to the Symphony # 4 in E Minor, Op. 98 by Johannes Brahms. Although I love all the Brahms symphonies, it's likely the Fourth that I return to most often. Perhaps this is because Brahms, in this work, refused to fall in line with the tragedy-to-triumph profile which was fast becoming a facile mannerism among his contemporaries (he had used it in his First). The result is a work that, although classically inflected, is shot full of original features that almost defy imitation. The Fourth begins dramatically and tragically in the first movement, looks wistfully backwards at kinder memories from a stern and unforgiving present in the second, riotously attempts to defy fate in a compact but nonetheless complete sonata-form third movement which seems like a scherzo but isn't precisely that, and finally ends in the dark depths of a rigorous and closely-constructed theme and variations like no other movement in symphonic music.

Oundjian led the orchestra in a performance which kept the music always moving forward, reducing the amount of rubato to a much lower level than many conductors. The music still breathed and flexed, as all good music should do, but in a subtle way. There was, though, one passage in the first movement where the strings and the prominent horns momentarily got away from each other. The flowing tempo of the first movement in no way impaired the power of such passages as the thunderous eruptions in the development or the powerfully dark and tragic coda.

The slow movement was turned darker than usual by the emphatic horn signal opening, played far louder than I have ever heard it -- too loud, really, for the character of the music (a friend of mine used to describe this sort of thing as "playing blastissimo"). Later reiterations were given with much more subtlety. The recapitulation of the theme when sketched in with pizzicato strings was played with absolutely solid ensemble and no small air of mystery. The horns again became thunderous in the final coda, but here it is more excusable, perhaps.

The third movement was a virtuoso showpiece for the orchestra, played at a fast tempo with a blazing fury that was memorable indeed. If we are going to call it a scherzo (remembering that the name means "a joke"), then this was definitely a jest of gods and giants, powerful in full measure. The tricky gear shifts into and out of the brief central episode in slower time were handled well.

The finale crowned the reading, and the entire concert, with a fine combination of subtlety and volcanic fury in equal measures. A highlight was the limpid and mournful playing of the solo flute in the centre of the movement where the orchestra all but falls silent, as if listening. 

If it weren't for the moment of disconnection in the first movement and the far-too-emphatic horn in the second, this would have been a spectacular performance indeed. As it was, very fine work overall but not precisely out of the top drawer.

Yet the concert as a whole was a memorable evening of fine music, one worth remembering.

 

 

Toronto Mendelssohn Choir 2021-2022 # 4: Music For the Endangered

As in other concerts for the last couple of seasons, Saturday afternoon's performance by the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir -- titled Endangered -- centred around a theme: the theme of endangered species, suggesting lines of thought about how we react and relate to all other living creatures with which we share our space on this planet.

 

Each of the three works related in some way to the theme, with the major work, Sarah Kirkland Snider's Mass For the Endangered, speaking in a very direct way to the issue.

 

In what would have been an unthinkable lapse even half a century ago, the programme covered the theme of life in this world without once touching on Haydn's Creation -- a clear sign that musical life in our times has moved far away from its former total dependence on the central European classics.

The one piece that came closest to that tradition was the second work, Aaron Copland's In The Beginning, written in 1947. We're so used to thinking of Copland as a folksy American composer of country dances that it's easy to forget he had many other and more diverse aspects of his musical personality.

In The Beginning has roots firmly planted in the chant-and-response pattern of traditional Jewish prayers, not only in its structure but also in its harmonies which often give a nod to the age-old chants so fundamental to that religious tradition. On the other hand, it diverges strikingly by giving the role of the "cantor," so to speak, to a female soloist -- on this occasion, mezzo-soprano Julia Barber.

As pandemic rules have continued to relax by degrees, the choristers were now seated in their conventional layout at the front of Yorkminster Park Baptist Church, rather than being spread around various neighbourhoods of the building. The result was all gain as the sound was more well-rounded, firmly integrated, and rhythmically tighter than in earlier concerts. Sadly, masks had to be worn, and this brings the now-familiar interference with diction, which tends to short-circuit communication of the text.

This is especially noticeable in Copland's music, where the text is familiar and the composer's aim is to clearly communicate that text to the listener. With that caveat, the Choir and soloist Barber sang this beautiful and haunting music with great purity of tone and energy in the more vigorous sections. As always, it seems a pity that this splendid piece is not heard more often.

With the other two works, we entered a different and much more contemporary world of music, a world where communication of a text often takes a back seat to the evocation of the moods or ideas which that text presents.

Andrew Balfour's Mamachimowin ("the act of singing praises"), originally for choir and string orchestra, was heard next in a reduced version arranged by Simon Rivard for choir and string quartet, presumably sanctioned by the composer. Balfour's text is a translation of Psalm 67 into Cree, implying the tension between traditional native spirituality and imported Judeo-Christian values. The lower strings especially were intended by the composer to express the grounding in the earth which is so powerful a part of the native worldview.

However, that grounding  also comes through clearly in the repeated melodic fragments and long sustained notes of the choral parts. The choral singing in this work was notable for the security of the quiet, sustained notes over lengthy spans. Overall, Mamachimowin gives a haunting musical impressionist portrait of a world much kinder than our own.

The major work of the afternoon, Snider's Mass For the Endangered, sails perilously close to falling into the category of an "occasional" work -- that is, a piece that is so much of its time and place that it has but scant chance of entering the permanent repertoire. By using the technique of modern poetry interspersed as tropes into the immemorial Latin text of the Mass, Snider has entered a realm where the poetry itself becomes a danger -- the danger being that it won't rise to the level of the text with which it is partnered.

The modern text by Nathaniel Bellows, for my money, veers embarrassingly between poetic beauty and bathos, between sharp insight and propaganda, over and over. Perhaps this was a case where less would be more, where a few well-chosen lines here and there would say much more than the extended version as it now exists.

Snider's music too varies. In some of the more energetic passages, the work takes legs or wings and comes to vivid life. In others, though, you would require a score to tell you what rhythmic basis informed the music. The often-dense choral textures make the text less audible, a common problem in modern choral composition. Here, again, the requirement for the choristers to wear masks was no help at all.

Mind you, Mass For the Endangered is by no means a misfire. This music has much to commend it, too, and the Choir certainly made a great case for it with skillful navigation of the  complex textures and plenty of energy in the more upbeat passages. 

It's a good time, also, to remind myself with humility that critics are often wrong. Consider one of the earlier works to insert poetic tropes into the Latin text. Benjamin Britten's War Requiem got several bad reviews on its first performance, sixty years ago, and yet it has definitely entered the permanent repertoire and achieved the status of an essential masterwork of the twentieth century.

Personally, I feel that Snider's music, for all its strengths, is unlikely to achieve such status. None the less, kudos and thanks to the Mendelssohn Choir and Music Director Jean-Sébastien Vallée for presenting this brave and thoughtful work.

My personal choice, though, rests with the first two works on the programme -- Mamachimowin for the haunting impact of the music, and In The Beginning for the musically thoughtful and truly rewarding performance of a piece sadly undervalued.

The entire ninety-minute concert remains available to enjoy, on a recording of the live stream, until June 11, at this link:

Endangered