I will quietly keep calling Gustavo Gimeno the Toronto Symphony’s “new” music director in my head, but maybe not for the reason you think.
Yes he started in 2021, delayed over a year by the pandemic’s impacts on performing arts. But every time I go to a TSO concert he’s conducting I find myself challenged to hear music differently. Gimeno is re-training our ears with the bold combinations of music we encounter at Roy Thomson Hall, as the curator of what we hear and how we hear it.
Not only has he conducted a lot of new pieces, including world premiere compositions such as the two in last night’s concert, but in the process he re-calibrates the way the rest of the program sounds as well:
-Des(re)pair: Celebration Prelude by Eliot Britton
-I Want to Be Alive (Echo/Narcissus – First Part of Trilogy for Orchestra) by Daníel Bjarnason
-Piano Concerto No. 24, K. 491 by Mozart with pianist Víkingur Ólafsson
(intermission)
-Symphonie fantastique by Berlioz
Hindsight is 20-20 of course, so I can see the cleverness of the TSO programming now that I’ve heard it and can try to explain its magic retrospectively.
Three compositions with big loud orchestras surround a Mozart piano concerto, the jewel set in starkly contrasting velvets. That jewel was courtesy of the unique artistry of Víkingur Ólafsson, his suave sound and musicianship unafraid to playing long lyrical passages softly: something that’s much harder to do than you’d expect.
The original cadenza he created for the first movement unexpectedly showed us a virtuosity reminiscent of Liszt, playing not just an eloquent piano solo but seemingly taking us into a transcription of the orchestral exposition as well complete with heroic octaves. And yet the whole was still on a size & scale appropriate for a Mozart concerto.
I noticed that Mozart employs woodwinds in ways you wouldn’t expect, as they seem to take over for parts of second and third movements. The larghetto includes a dialogue resembling call and response between piano and woodwinds. The episodic finale takes us into different sound-worlds in each segment. The way Mozart encourages us to listen to every note and its colours led us nicely into Berlioz after intermission, recalling that the introduction to that piece begins softly with the woodwinds.
But before the concerto we’d heard two works employing a huge orchestra, often encouraging us to ask:
…what am I hearing?
…what instruments are those?
…how did they do that?
The question is really a matter of orchestration.
To begin the concert Eliot Britton’s Celebration Prelude grabs you right away, a satisfying array of sounds, effects and timbres. The program note by the composer (mentioning Berlioz’s nightmare in Symphonie fantastique) would suggest that Britton was likely aware of the way his music was to be programmed and used, perhaps even a bit intimidated, daunted by having to prepare something to be heard alongside such a formidable specimen, one of our touchstones of creativity and romanticism. While his program note speaks of the challenges of being a composer, his composition also speaks, to suggest he’s fearless. This short piece seems larger than life even as it may have articulated some of that fear, breaking through to the other side by dramatizing his predicament. I think the program note may have been fun to write even if it sounds a bit like a recollection the morning after an ordeal, delivered with a big sigh of relief.
As I applauded I wondered if the complaint implicit in the program note is in some respects a chance to brag, given that music on this scale must be larger than life, with no room for a shrinking violet. The composer seemed to have overcome his demons, at least for the moment. I bravo’d enthusiastically.
The main thing I took away from that first piece though was to wonder about how he made certain sounds, peering at the orchestra trying to ascertain which instruments were playing to make that intriguing mix. Where Britton’s piece and its title made a lot of sense to me in its few minutes, I wasn’t quite so clear about the second piece, by Daníel Bjarnason. While there were a few places where something in the music was repeated I didn’t have a sense of Echo, let alone something/someone as complex as Narcissus. Perhaps it’s meaningful to the composer at some level? but without more explanation of his process, it meant little to me as I wasn’t able to reconcile the myths to the music.
There were passionate sounds, beautiful effects, and an absorbing composition holding our attention for 20 minutes, which is a wonderful achievement. While I don’t know what it might mean it was enjoyable and again I applauded enthusiastically. It was good that for both of these premieres we were able to applaud the person of the composer, coming up to take their well-deserved bow. Just as with Britton’s piece there were moments when I wondered about Bjarnason’s creation. How did they make that sound?
So I thought as we went into the Mozart that perhaps the question of orchestration was central to the program, recalling that Berlioz is known as one of the best orchestrators, Symphonie fantastique being a uniquely original assembly of sounds and timbres and effects, bows dancing on strings to suggest ghosts and ghouls, bells ringing during a witches sabbath. And so when those two big modern-sounding pieces were followed by the delicacy of Mozart, it helped attune us to softness and subtlety, perhaps to perform the impossible. What we may wonder was it like to hear Berlioz as he sounded to the ear of the listeners in 1830? That’s a mere 44 years after the Mozart concerto premiered. While Berlioz is called a romantic he is also a classicist firmly grounded in forms and traditions. There’s sonata form to the first movement (once you get past the long introduction) complete with repeats (and thank you Gustavo Gimeno for observing them, as I am old enough to remember a time when they weren’t observed) development and a recapitulation. The programming of this concert invites us to feel this work emerging from its time, consistent with the classical impulse even as the romantic wants to burst free of such restraints.
Full disclosure: I wasn’t sure about the program, but Berlioz is my favorite composer, under-represented in concert halls possibly because he’s expensive, calling for big orchestras requiring lots of rehearsal. So I would have been there no matter what they put alongside the Berlioz.
Gimeno gave us a very subdued and introspective start to the work, the opening phrases spaced properly between silences as though we were overhearing a soloist (the mind of the orchestra) sing a recitative, as though a series of thoughts from a character in a drama. When the exposition begins with that statement of the main theme, we’re off to the races, Gimeno happily propelling his team like a charioteer proud of the horses at his command, the TSO never sounding better. They played up the theatrical aspect of the work, placing a pair of harps at each edge of the stage to make their back and forth resemble the sounds you used to hear in stereo head-phones. Am I dating myself?
This is a reading of the piece that’s quick, the way I prefer my Berlioz. He’s challenging to any orchestra and to the ear who may miss details. TSO can sound very transparent in Roy Thomson Hall, provided that there is attention to balance. So for much of the work Gimeno held back his team as far as their volume, even if the chariot was flying along at a good pace, saving the chops of the brass for the climactic passages that end four of the five movements. That also increases the drama. Maybe we’ve heard Berlioz too much from modernist conductors (those who are known for their Wagner and their Mahler) without proper recognition for its classicism, its vestiges of episodic construction. That’s another benefit of hearing Berlioz right after Mozart. While we may bring our mental pigeon holes to the concert hall the music may not really fit as we’ve previously understood it.
I felt I heard it anew.
The concert (a good one in my opinion) is repeated Thursday and Saturday.