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.
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