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.