First Movement: Press conference regarding the 2011-2012 Season
Conductor Peter Oundjian is warmly chatty, richly anecdotal , ingratiating, and gently passionate about music and all else it seems. He tells us he has put together “a bold season” for 2011-12, the TSO’s 90th season. The TSO will have three residencies of “three of the greatest artists of our time” -Lang Lang, Itzhak Perlman, and Yo-Yo Ma, which will “all highlight education in some way.” Oundjian feels that education of the young about classical music is “one of the most important things we do…. it gives them a quiet moment when they are not texting.” Other guests will be Ken Dryden narrating The Hockey Sweater, Christopher Plummer doing Shakespeare, and the guest-rich, repertoire-rich 90th season will close with the Symphony of a Thousand” by Mahler in collaboration with Luminato. “We send a different message to our kids than the NHL. We stress spiritual enrichment,” says Oundjian.
Second Movement: Notes on a TSO rehearsal of Mozart’s Symphony # 34.
I’m a compulsive note-taker and some of these hurried scribblings end up in poems, some in reviews, and most in a very large box in the basement. Whatever the case, one learns a great deal about composing, orchestral interaction, recreation of music, relationships of conductors and orchestras, and one’s own response to music while watching a rehearsal. Here we go:
I Allegro Vivace
-three dozen uniformed students from Appleby school raptly watching from the stage side upper level
-lyricism and song-imbued phrasing in the collectively robust strings, a sense of emerging green vegetation
-certainly more an assertive precursor of Beethoven’s individualism than bowing in courtly ritual
-weighty and rugged but not heavy
-more stein than bone china
-proportion with inherent momentum
-more metaphysically confident than ethereal
-hearty textures in the strings
II Andante
-climaxes evolve and anticipate as part of linear development
-a masculine texture
-doesn’t solicit emotion but affirms it
-P.O. thanks violist for bowing suggestion
-not as much an overt humour in the clearly defined beat but more, one suspects, a composer of genuine inner levity
III Allegro Vivace
-P.O. asks for more Rossini
– again P.O. “Does it have an accent at 54? No? Well take out the accent you don’t have.”
-more Mozartian humour, like a large man dancing
-declarative phrasing that makes full-bodied musical points
-P.O.again: “Mozart is so regular that the two five bar phrases feel odd.”
-more country village than palatial court
-watching string players shape a sound, so much discussion of bowing, entries, clarity
Bonus: Mozart’s Adagio and Fugue
-P.O. tells the rehearsal audience, “If you’re not familiar with it, you’ll be hugely surprised, it’s very dramatic.”
-a holistic dynamism in which all the parts have one root and one feels the unity here
-P.O. tells us it’s “the wildest outburst that Mozart ever put on paper” and indeed one feels an inner battle he expresses here, one visualizes a dance company, one senses a serene madness
-an emphatic and weighty pulse that is undeniable
Third Movement: A concert themed Mozart’s World
In Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga maintains that the eighteenth was the last century in which play was integral to our culture. And what better evidence than the Toronto Symphony concert of January 29 titled Mozart’s World?
It begins with the Overture to Les Horaces by the much-maligned Antonio Salieri, a rather generic though charming composition of some authority in which the trombones add magisterial oomph to the soaring proceedings. Peter Oundjian combines hosting duties with his role of conductor and tells us that “the rest of the opera is not very good.”
The Concerto for Double Bass by Johann Baptist Vanhal features principal bassist Jeffrey Beecher who is versatile and lyrical in the Allegro. We sense unforced humour here and imagine an overweight dancer among elves that the violins seem to be. Beecher also suggests a complexity of characterization in this huge instrument of usually hidden and unused potential. In the Adagio the violins shape a context that seems more a part of the collective musical statement, whereas in the Allegro they seemed an envelope for solo playfulness. Beecher’s bass has a creamy fluidity of line and we sense an intimate conversation of emotional self-revelation from, considering the instruments size, the belly of the earth. The finale showcases rapid bowing and runs that nail the tonal character of the bass’s surprising range.
In the Allegro of the ever-popular and wondrous Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, Oundjian uses the Mozartian shapings and groupings to create an operatic dynamism. The performance has a teasing quality, it seems very naughty, mischievous, but possesses inherent grace. In the Romance there is more than calm, there is serenity, because the conductor knows the potency of understatement and restraint. As a result, his orchestra is declarative with finesse and there is also a mad urgency that never loses its poise. After the lightness of the Menuetto, one that conjures a petal floating on a reflecting pond, we have the Rondo in which the celli and basses support and actively counterbalance the higher strings without sounding merely functional. They seem instead a reality check to ethereal lightness and we feel meta-musical issues being worked out.
I used to think I knew the oboe, with its distinctly reedy and hence exotic tones, and perhaps took it for granted. But in Mozart’s Concerto for Oboe there is beauty of much variety, especially with principal Sarah Jeffrey subtly probing the instrument’s capabilities. The Concerto begins with the entry of an exotic sustained note and then articulated runs that give dynamic value to each note. Jeffrey’s accomplishment is that she extends the lyrical richness and tonal body in the solo passages into a complete human voice, as it were, and one is enchanted. A haunting experience.
Franz Joseph Haydn had a genius for writing on the verge of a joke and in there is a prankishness in his early Symphony #8. He is too light hearted perhaps for parody, with its implicit critical edge, so we find here an unselfconscious delight unfolding as Hayden composes. Oundjian and Haydn make a delightful combination as the former, in the Allegro, gives incisive attention to detail and dynamics in the string passages and also enhances the composer’s story teller’s facility of suggesting an unfolding a narrative line. There is much to enjoy as individual instruments do character against the urgency of the orchestra. With Haydn’s agreement to compose on his prince’s demand, he no doubt leaned toward variety and levity as part of his method, ergo many symphonic surprises here. Throughout the performance, thanks to the alertness and refined spirit of Oundjian’s conducting, plus the depth of his responsive musicians, we are in a frame of mind to share many laughs or at least smiles, and in the end to agree with Huizinga’s contention that the age of Haydn and Mozart and all their cohorts was a time of delight. There was play in the air when these composers composed –and played-and the TSO certainly do, in turn, a satisfying take on Mozart’s world.