Photos by Nick Wons
The cellist we met on the tube warned us that her fingers would be a blur during Beethoven’s 9th Symphony that night at Roy Thomson Hall. And so it was, during the first of Peter Oundjian’s last three concerts as the Toronto Symphony’s conductor, one that emphasized musicality over metaphysics in this masterwork of the man from Bonn.
If a Toronto critic had only this week declared that he “would be overjoyed to never have to hear Beethoven’s Ninth again,” I, much to the contrary, was immediately gripped – as always – by the ambiguously suspenseful notes of the Allegro’s opening. And what followed was an interpretation less cosmically frantic and more humanly celebratory, one that at times suggested the step and sway of dance and less a vortex of existential push and pull. We felt daily human life.
I knew immediately why I would miss Oundjian. Beethoven’s instrumental combinations here felt fresh and newly heard, as if the composer’s creative mind was unfolding before us, fueled by a need for exploration of musical potential. Under Oundjian’s guidance, I heard passages that had passed me by during many, many previous listenings to the 9th. But the conductor was once first violinist of the Tokyo String Quartet and no doubt has brought, much to our benefit, a chamber musician’s sensitivity to the podium.
Yes, Oundjian’s orchestra sounds organically one and refreshingly new. In the second movement one felt singing throughout, here, for one, from open-throated horns. One sensed that an aural sense of humour had not abandoned Beethoven to deafness. One felt glad to hear both the composer’s human heart and human mind, and not necessarily the intimidating colossus one hears about in musical legends, united through a conductor’s guidance.
Yes, I’ll miss how every instrument, every combination of instruments, is given due weight and distinct musical flavor. And also, how a sense of mature reflection prevails over unquestioned sentiment. Such it was also at a TSO concert of Brahms 1st Symphony a few weeks ago, although the Gershwin concerto on the same program did seem given more to volume than genuine exuberance. But as a rule, Oundjian often draws our attention to so much in a composition and turns that composition into wealth of integrated riches.
The TSO is a large orchestra, but it also can have the feel of a much smaller one, one that functions at times like a jazz combo of potent individual voices whose presence is felt as natural and unforced but certainly crucial to the whole. Thus, in the fourth movement that apparently drives some critics, through its ubiquitous use, to despair, one had the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir – talk of potent! – creating a sense of human variety ignited into collective celebration. Here was a burst of gladness, a vague sense of something of value in human potential, a time when the individual voice sings and the choir takes over.
I bought my first 9th, an LP set, too many years ago at Sam’s on Yonge. It cost me $5.96 and eventually, through a process of selection I found that Toscanini’s Beethoven sounded too much like Verdi opera, that Klemperer sounded a bit too ponderous and weighty, that some like Harnoncourt or Gardiner sounded sometimes a bit too deliberately interesting, that Kleiber was right on, and that Furtwangler’s knack for eerily detailed and wisely-judged narrative in music was repeatedly thrilling. In this process, for 14 years, I could hop a Go Bus to TO and check what Oundjian was doing with a composer in whose apartments in Vienna, I, several times, became quite speechless.
A concert or recording of Beethoven is an encounter with one’s own life, to be sure. I don’t mean the kind of ordeal a friend, a soprano who sang the 9th and whose vocabulary has since become most colourful in recalling the experience -nope, Beethoven ain’t easy, by any means – but instead one that brings one’s human qualities of intellect, emotion, and selfhood to the fore. I’ve heard many TSO conductors take on Beethoven over the years – including Ancerl, Davis, Susskind, Herbig, Ozawa, Saraste, Feldbrill, maybe MacMillan – and I feel lucky that Peter Oundjian has constantly surprised and uniquely rewarded me with musical experiences that, alas, have now come to an end. So, darn it all, thank you!