Authentic brutalism opens Toronto Symphony's 101st season

The Toronto Symphony Orchestra marked the opening of its second century with a programme that packed in sparkling glamour (cue Jean-Yves Thibaudet’s Vivienne Westwood-designed attire), the promise of new discovery (Lili Boulanger’s touching tone poem) and mind-numbing energy in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.

Spring-themed works bookended the programme, with both bright and dark sides on display. With a clear nod to impressionism, Lili Boulanger’s six-minute D’un matin de printemps from 1917–18 is a delightfully fresh and airy piece, imbued with poetry and puck-like lightness and mischief and plenty of Ravelian harmonic and timbral colours. What a tragic loss to music was her early death. Sobering to think that had Stravinsky died as young as her, we would have had no Russian ballets, no neoclassicism, in effect nothing to remember him by.

Gershwin famously wished to take lessons from Ravel (who replied that in view of what Gershwin was earning, perhaps he should be the teacher). Jean-Yves Thibaudet has been championing the Concerto in F of late, and he recorded Ferde Grofé’s untastefully souped-up version in 2010. Thankfully we were spared that awkward piece of experimental jazzification (which Gershwin himself reportedly deplored). But in this jazz-meets-classical encounter, the pendulum on this occasion swung to the opposite extreme. If, like me, you expected to be treated to swagger and swing – of the kind Wayne Marshall, for instance, is so good at – you would have been sorely disappointed. Thibaudet’s manner was more Fred Astaire than Gene Kelly; more evening-dress ballet than streetwise tap.

Admittedly there was no lack of virtuosity, and certainly not of velocity. And the delicious solo trumpet of the second movement was a highlight. But was everyone really enjoying themselves? Thibaudet’s instrument sounded soft-focus to a fault, and his manner was more all-purpose routine than 1920s-urbane. His instincts for romantic languor were much better placed in his Liszt Consolation encore, which he delivered with quiet empathy and style.

And then there was The Rite. Principal Conductor Gustavo Gimeno, as a former percussionist, was always likely to be packing a wallop with Stravinsky’s rhythmical fist-fights, and he had evidently encouraged the bass drum to give it his best shot – to superb effect. At the other extreme, the Introductions to each of the two Parts were as vaporous and tantalising as they should be. So the strategy came across as float-like-a-butterfly-sting-like-a-bee: soothing and caressing, but only in order to hit harder in the long run.

The opening bassoon solo was achingly beautiful, pizzicatos were sublimely delicate, and the famous repeated chords of The Augurs of Spring were relatively light on their feet. All this was underpinned by a sense of impending danger that broke through at such moments as the snarling brass grimaces of The Procession of the Sage. Dystopia and feverish hallucination were thus already centre stage by the end of Part One. As beautiful as some of the harmonies in Part Two may be, Gimeno made sure that they were never over-cultured. Instead he seduced us into the role of willing allies in the cruelty and brutalism of the ritualistic sacrifice, which is, after all, the authentic, morally disturbing, Rite of Spring experience. In the Danse sacrale I looked from the faces and body movements of the audience to the swarming orchestra and back again, but, as Orwell put it, “already it was impossible to say which was which.”