Wednesday night’s concert at Roy Thomson Hall began with a short tribute to Sir Andrew Davis, who died on 20th April, by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra's current music director Gustavo Gimeno, who also dedicated the evening’s performance to Davis’ memory. Few people have had a bigger impact on the development of the TSO than Davis and the spirit of the tribute was reinforced by a majestic version of “Nimrod” from Elgar’s Enigma Variations, which Davis had conducted often in that hall.
The published programme began with the world première of Alison Yun-Fei Jiang’s Illumination. Inspired by the Diamond Sutra, it’s a complex and ambitious twelve minute piece. A meditative central section is bookended by more abrasively textured sections featuring plenty of extended technique for the winds before fading out more lyrically. Its central theme of the transience of human existence is reflected in the lack of anything substantial to grab onto. Instead it invites the listener to find reality in the moment.
The longest section of the first half of the programme was a suite of the music from Emily D’Angelo’s enargaia CD arranged by Jarkko Riihimäki, who also contributed two short instrumental linking sections. The vocals began and ended with two different arrangements of Hildegard von Bingen’s O frondens virga, the original inspiration for a CD of music entirely by female composers. The meat was made up of Hildur Guðnadóttir’s Fólk fær andlit plus extracts from Missy Mazzoli’s opera Song From the Uproar and Sarah Kirkland Snider’s cycle Penelope.
The Guðnadóttir piece could almost be by Abbess Hildegard. It’s a spare and plaintive lament for the expulsion of refugees from Iceland in 2015, with a haunting repetition of the word “Miskun” (mercy). The Mazzoli extracts, “The World Within Me is Too Small” and “You Are The Dust”, have that driving, pulsing energy that characterizes her music, which is of a piece with Royce Vavrek’s almost nihilist text.
The Kirkland Snider cycle sets text by Ellen McLaughlin and is a version of the Odyssey told from Penelope’s point of view. It’s complex. In “Dead Friend”, an abrasive introduction is followed by a lyrical a capella section. “The Lotus Eaters” is a kind of ballad for singer and pizzicato strings, gradually augmented by heavier strings, a drum kit and finally the wind sections which build layers of texture around the repetitive vocal line. “Nausicaa” uses pulsing strings and tuned percussion to reinforce the disorienting lyric of loss and homecoming.
D’Angelo’s performance was impressive. She was clearly audible even in the more densely scored music (by no means always the case at Roy Thomson) and she varied her vocal style to suit the music: plain tone in the Bingen, classical infused with rock for Mazzoli and a more relaxed, ballad singer style for Penelope, all the while conveying the text with perfect clarity and depth of meaning. The orchestral accompaniment was fine too, especially given that with the spare instrumental writing, individual sections were often quite exposed.
After the interval it was Brahms’ monumental and well known Symphony No.1 in C Minor, Op. 68. It was a very decent performance of a piece familiar to orchestra and audience alike. The first movement moved from its monumental slow movement into the Allegro with a real sense of forward propulsion. The lyrical slow movement was played beautifully and perhaps a touch more briskly than it sometimes is and the third movement sounded appropriately playful. There was real grandeur in the last movement with its majestic hymn-like, Beethoven inflected theme and the chorale; the two seamlessly integrated into a rousing finish. No doubt this is a work the orchestra is extremely familiar with but Gimeno succeeded in infusing it with his own personality to create a very satisfactory conclusion to an intriguing concert.
