From the sound of taste and smell in contemporary Peruvian Jimmy López Bellido’s Synesthésie to the orgasmic explosions of the Cosmic in Scriabin’s Poème de l’extase, Gustavo Gimeno and the Toronto Symphony’s second programme of the season took us on a kaleidoscopic journey of sensuousness and sensuality. Built around Seong-Jin Cho’s first public performance of Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand, it mined the first third of the 20th century for coloristic gems, while showing that there is still a rich seam to explored a hundred years on.
Composed in 2011 to a commission from Radio France, López Bellido’s Synesthésie is in effect a concerto for orchestra, consisting of five inter-related two-minute miniatures. Each of these represents a sense, while exploring its interdependence with others through the phenomenon/neurological condition of synaesthesia. Touch is dominated by the cross-rhythmic energy of percussions; smell uses chromaticism to evoke exotic perfumes; taste deploys sweet-and-sour Scriabinesque harmonies mainly on the woodwind (I certainly registered the sour!); audition foregrounds brass and metallophones and returns to the rhythmic energy of the first movement; finally vision brings the full orchestra together in a polyphonic bacchanalia.
However stimulating the concept and the sound world, for an ‘organism’, as Lopez Bellido calls his work, the piece lacks a degree of tenderness and heart. Ravel’s Rapsodie espagnole immediately showed how a master can keep all these elements in balance, adding to the mix a healthy dose of Iberian blood, sweat and sexiness. This is not the world of de Falla’s or Albeniz’s bright sunny colours. Rather, Ravel ushers us into a feverish nocturnal stillness. Gimeno was the perfect guide through the hypnotic haze.
A different, more ominous shade of dark opens Ravel's concerto, with its sinuous double basses and contrabassoon. Dismissing far-fetched fantasies that would relate this passage to the storm-clouds gathering over Europe in 1930, the Ravel expert (and dear late friend) Gerald Larner astutely suggested that Ravel “introduces the orchestra as, in a sense, left-handed too”. Whatever, the intention, Gimeno eschewed murkiness, retaining clarity and translucency at no cost to the uncanny atmosphere. The stage was set for a phenomenal performance by 2015 Chopin Competition winner and established Toronto favourite, Seong-Jin Cho.
A master of the broad brushstroke as well as of pointillistic refinement, Cho also displayed his understanding of Ravel’s distinctive tones of voice, from biting sarcasm to poetically hued sorrow to steely determination, topped off by a fine grasp of the overall architecture and frictionless integration with the orchestra. Liszt’s Petrarch Sonnet no. 104 made for an achingly intimate encore: further proof of the Korean pianist’s breadth and depth of total musicianship.
The concerto’s trajectory from Stygian darkness to dazzling sunlight was an excellent prequel to Scriabin’s more epically conceived journey: towards the ecstasy of Creator-man reuniting with World-woman. In some ways it was a pity not to have the composer’s 30-verse doggerel in the printed programme... but on second thoughts, maybe not. There is enough to marvel at in Scriabin’s forests of free-floating themes and luscious harmonies, in the contrasts of ‘languid’ and ‘flying’, in the delayed-gratification surges, in the cathartic mid-way climaxes, and in the all-consuming final affirmation, without his egocentric verbal effusions to weigh the whole thing down; enough orchestral virtuosity too, not least from the hard-pressed but here superbly imperious trumpet. Gimeno paced and balanced the score beautifully, ensuring that conviction and dazzling flair were never exhausting, either for the orchestra or the audience, but instead made part of a natural progression towards the deafening, dazzling final affirmation.
