Performer: Joseph Johnson

Gustavo Gimeno kicks off the TSO’s new season with new perspectives on the familiar and not-so-familiar

Gustavo Gimeno leads the Toronto Symphony in a programme of absorbing musical abstraction and storytelling, let down by a banal new trombone concerto.

“What makes Mahler’s music like opium,” I once got asked. If you enjoy listening to lush melodies and pompous brass calls in fine Wagnerian traditions, or get stimulated sonically by a large orchestra, you have got a foot in the door.