Moussa concerto lets down absorbing Toronto Symphony programme

On paper this was another thoughtfully conceived and thought-provoking Toronto Symphony Orchestra programme, moving from the purest abstraction of Ligeti’s Lontano towards the most concrete storytelling of Strauss’ Don Quixote, with a link provided by the elevated spirituality of the Prelude to Wagner’s Parsifal.

Wagner’s religious symbolism also supplied a connection to ‘Yericho’, a new trombone concerto co-commissioned by the TSO from Montreal-born, German-based composer-conductor Samy Moussa, receiving its North American premiere. And here was the rub. Despite its biblical theme, reinforced through the symbolism of ‘seven’ – seven movements, seven ‘horns’ embodied by the soloist, two trumpets and four French horns – the music had hardly more substance than that of a super-hero or Marvel film score, or indeed their spin-off video games. At least a video-gamer has the option of turning off the music.

The 25-minute work is a lazy amalgam of Philip Glass-like figurations and recurring glissando sighs, which follows predictable progressions through jacked-up transpositions, more suited to a baseball pitch or ice-hockey stadium (an impression reinforced by the presence of an organ) than to the concert hall. As for depicting the destruction of the Jericho walls, this was a case more of epic fail than epic fall. Despite the cheapness of the music, the agile soloist Jörgen van Rijen and the orchestra were worthy of the audience’s enthusiastic response; the more discerning chose not to applaud at all.

The rest of the concert was another showcase of the TSO’s current high standards, albeit with slight reservations over their Wagner, where they sounded not fully settled. That might have been a side-effect of Gustavo Gimeno’s decision to run Wagner straight on from Ligeti, without pause. This enjambment – a repeat of the formula previously tried out with Ligeti’s Atmosphères and Wagner’s Prelude to Lohengrin – was effective in highlighting the emergence from silence in both works, and the control of continuity in the face of change, in Lontano’s fascinations with condensed polyphony, was effectively set off by Parsifal’s cathedral-like monumentality. But it is asking a lot of an orchestra to go from one kind of precision-tool finesse to another without a break.

In the second half, Don Quixote projected a different kind of monumentality – elusive and illusionary. The quasi-solo roles were allocated to the orchestra’s principals, Joseph Johnson (cello) and Rémi Pelletier (viola), with the latter almost stealing the show as Sancho Panza. Johnson is a superbly accomplished musician, but the sad knight demands a larger-than-life presence, which is not really his thing. The balance of interest hence tipped towards the images surrounding the naïve anti-hero, the most memorable of which, such as the bleating sheep or the surreal ‘ride through the air’ episode with wind machine, certainly didn’t disappoint. But for music so closely related to story and imagery, it was a shame that the audience was not helped along by some kind of visual prompts (such as backdrops or surtitles), or at least by a slightly more brightly lit hall so that we could follow Kevin Bazzana’s notes, which helpfully included Strauss’ own scene-by-scene descriptions.