Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra; Emilie LeBel: the sediments (TSO Fee); Bartók: The Miraculous Mandarin. Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Gustavo Gimeno, conductor; Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, Jean-Sébastien Vallée, TMC Inventive Director. Nov. 21, 2024 at Roy Thomson Corridor. Continues Nov. 22 and 23; tickets right here.
A Hungarian sandwich with up to date Canadian filling — this was a live performance for connoisseur tastes, during which a lower than capability viewers loved a feast of dazzling and infrequently stomach-churning drama, contrasting with the blander pop on supply elsewhere on the town.
Composed in U.S. exile, Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra is definitely the very best identified of this season’s sequence of seven examples of the style, all of which practice the highlight onto the collective abilities of the TSO.
Accessible and evasive in equal measure, it’s a celebration of all that an orchestra can supply, from tremulous thriller to folk-like joviality, to nocturnal anguish, sarcasm, and finally invigorating hearth. Gimeno and his gamers struck the right stability between characterization, bravura, and architectural dramaturgy, as they fearlessly negotiated the labyrinth of metrical dislocations and transitions.
The Introduzione was tightly managed however by no means artificially contrived — at all times spontaneous, and with loads of room for particular person inventiveness. Alongside wit and mischief, there was a satisfying poker-faced high quality to the ironic episodes within the second and fourth actions, particularly the Shostakovich ‘Leningrad’ Symphony send-up, which handed with out gratuitous point-making. The Elegia was hauntingly atmospheric, whereas the Dionysian dances of the finale have been nearly dangerously infectious, although right here the brass might have reduce by way of much more with out detriment to the stability.
The Sediments, a 15-minute TSO fee from the Canadian Emilie LeBel, was the proper of palette-cleanser. With an environmentalist agenda, this tone poem explores orchestral colors, particularly prolonged percussion, to attract a meditative picture of nature’s previous, current and future:
‘Water flows on, whether or not I’m right here or not. Every part that ever was continues to be right here’, in accordance with the composer’s quick assertion. Beginning with a bang, varied atmospheric figurations rise and regularly develop into additional successions of increasing clusters. These are interjected with episodes of wind and water sound results (a reminder of the New-Age composer Kitaro’s Silkroad music, however with out the tacky tunes). The entire thing shouldn’t be dissimilar to a Christopher Nolan soundtrack — epic-scale music with cosmic aspirations, that lingers within the thoughts however doesn’t dramatically evolve.
The traffic-jam noises of the concrete jungle firstly of the Miraculous Mandarin provided exactly the impolite awakening Bartók supposed. In his quick opening remarks, Gimeno, referred to however didn’t spell out the problematic story of this ‘grotesque pantomime’ as designated by its creator, Melchior Lengyel, inviting the viewers to focus fairly on the orchestral colors.
Worthy of a number of set off warnings, the lurid story is of three tramps forcing a lady to lure passers-by in order that they will rob them. The primary two entrapped males don’t have any cash and are thrown again into the streets; the third, the Mandarin, is rich and unique, but inscrutable. The lady is pressured to proceed to bop for him, resulting in a violent chase scene. The tramps overpower and attempt to kill the Mandarin by stabbing and hanging him. However it is just after the lady satisfies his need that his wounds start to bleed and he dies.
So vivid have been the characterizations and mood-paintings Gimeno drew from the orchestra that there was no mistaking the disturbing violence and eroticism of this really miraculous rating. Sharp, incisive articulation, alongside manic drive and urgency have been instantly on the agenda. Temptations to sensuality and sensuousness have been averted, to get replaced by darkish, macabre eroticism, as within the clarinet’s seductively alluring themes, fairly suggestive of Egon Schiele’s disturbing nudes.
The Toronto Mendelssohn Choir joined in for the few ghostly notes depicting the glowing physique of the Mandarin (an extravagant requirement of the total pantomime rating fairly than the Suite), earlier than the ritualistic climax because the lady embraces the Mandarin and the descending glissandi as he bleeds to loss of life. An unforgettable night, then, and a testomony to music’s energy to evoke terror and horror in addition to vigour.
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Michelle Assay is a Marie Curie/UKRI International Fellow on the Universities of Toronto and King’s Faculty London engaged on Ladies and Western Artwork Music in Iran (Womusiran.com). She holds a PhD from the Sorbonne and College of Sheffield and has been a Leverhulme Fellow on the College of Huddersfield. She is the creator of award-winning articles on Russian and Soviet music and on Shakespeare and music, and repeatedly seems in live shows as a pianist. She is an everyday broadcaster for the BBC and contributor to Gramophone, Worldwide Piano, and Bachtrack, together with Ludwig Van.