During rehearsals for a 1937 performance, Ralph Vaughan Williams remarked about his Symphony Number 4, not two years old, in these words: “I don’t know if I like it, but it’s what I mean.” And, certainly, this is not a work whose sometimes aggressively loud and military manner one would consider right off the bat as likable. Albeit the intervals of lyrical, even mystical, passages, one is assaulted, sometimes unrelentingly, by cosmically boorish and brass-edged chords and their unpredictable eruptions. One does not sit back and listen; one waits with increasing nervousness, even as one eases into a serene dimension evoked by string and woodwind led passages, a dimension that might also might erupt at any time.
One prime quality in conductor Peter Oundjian’s seductively engaging interpretation here is his ability to create tension through a combination of elements: a subtle sense of restraint, control of the orchestra as one voice of many clearly articulated shadings, and, whatever the broad variety in the composer’s juxtaposed effects, a clarity in execution. As well, he reveals a sophisticated polish in sound and a sense of unwavering and unified purpose, both typical of his conducting. The composer maintained of this work written between two world wars that it was “not a definite picture of anything external like the state of Europe, but simply because it occurred to me like this. . .it is what I wanted to do at the time.” The Toronto Symphony impresses with both a secure precision in playing that is lyrical and explosive and as well evocative powers that suggest extra-musical interpretations, whatever one chooses these to be.
The shimmering descent in the strings, both lush and poignant, that opens the Fifth Symphony reminds us that few composers are capable of pastoral effects as Vaughan Williams. Indeed, his are one of the distinct sounds in the orchestral canon. Again Oundjian maintains an air of measured freedom that keeps complete abandon just ever so slightly contained in passages of unfolding beauty that suggest human longing and quiet resolution. This is a beautiful recording for reflection and imagination. Symphony No. 4 was recorded live in March 2011 at Roy Thomson Hall, Toronto, while Symphony No. 5 was recorded live in November 2008 at Roy Thomson Hall, Toronto, and appear on tsoLive, the Toronto Symphony’s own label.
Likewise the just released Shostakovich Symphony No. 11 “The Year 1905″ in which the composer’s systematic achievement of uncluttered orchestral effects finds a very attuned conductor in Oundjian who sustains an ominous and brooding atmosphere throughout and shapes the unfoldment of musical subplots with keen awareness as to their part in the whole. The music of Shostakovich is sometimes a window and sometimes an insinuating mirror to the Stalinist society of Russia that long tormented him, and the TSO prove passionate yet refined, emphatic yet suggestive, able to negotiate with ironic finesse the dynamics of a musical statement that is implicitly political and personal. They are exact and secure in rhythm, pinpoint and dynamic in those surprising trademark passages of the composer that elbow and unsettle the listener, and perfectly in synch with the dramatic developments within the work- This very compelling recording was made at Roy Thomson Hall in 2008.