For the first time in seven years the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, with their music director Otto Tausk, played Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall. Following the usual speeches Tausk launched into a blistering rendering of O Canada with a near capacity house joining in with enthusiasm. Six months ago this would have been unthinkable but these are strange times indeed.
But that was about as exciting as it got. The second piece on the programme was Marcus Goddard’s Mountain Visions. It’s a setting of Pierre de Ronsard’s Ciel, air et vents and it aims to evoke wilderness and longing. It is written for very large orchestra and, while the heavily layered score with its scooping brass and arpeggiated strings evoked Nature effectively enough, the vocal line, sung passionately by mezzo-soprano Marion Newman, rather disappeared into the mix and the text seemed more or less superfluous.
Vadim Gluzman was the soloist for the next work on the programme; Brahms’ Violin Concerto in D major. It’s a lyrical rather than a dramatic piece with a delicate first movement cadenza and it was played with real lyricism but little drama. The second movement was similar, enlivened by some fine playing by the woodwinds. Only in the Romani influenced finale did something more dramatic emerge. Here Gluzman played with a virtuosity that matched the grandness of the climactic orchestral sections. Overall it was a fine, if a little unexciting, reading.
After the interval we got, appropriately enough, that great response to a paranoid dictator, Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony. This was the most understated version of this work that I have ever heard, played with great beauty but little tension. The first movement was elegant with quite beautiful playing from the brass. But what place has “beautiful playing from the brass” in this piece? I found myself longing nostalgically for the stridency of the Leningrad brass in the early recordings of the piece.
That was the story for the other three movements really. The third movement was really slow and the edgy violin section just sounded melodious rather than uncomfortably tense. Things improved a bit at the start of the Allegro non troppo with some real attack from the strings but, alas, it didn’t last! The bombastic conclusion was properly loud but not nearly fierce enough and the brass was still overly polite. I guess it’s an aesthetic choice to go for elegance and beauty over tension and drama but given the place of this piece in musical history, and the mood of the moment, it seemed an odd choice.
