Toronto’s Esprit Orchestra took its Koerner Hall audience on a trip to the far side of the Pacific Ocean on Sunday night in a programme of music inspired by gamelan, the traditional Balinese percussion ensemble.
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The exotic timbres and complex polyrhythms of Balinese music have been seducing Western ears at least since Europeans heard an imported gamelan orchestra at the Paris Exhibition of 1889. Esprit, which specializes in the music of our time, focused on some more current intersections between Bali and North America.
Bridging cultures is a delicate exercise. Composers need to consider issues like imitation, appropriation, adaptation and balancing tradition with creating something completely new. Some of these exercises work beautifully. Others are awkward.
Despite Esprit’s programme being a collection of works dating back as far as 36 years, not all of Sunday’s compositions qualified for immortality.
But the quality of the musicmaking itself was excellent, though.
The Esprit Orchestra includes some of Toronto’s finest freelancers, joined on Sunday by the Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan. The whole was conducted by Esprit founding music director Alex Pauk.
A bonus on the programme was an 8-minute Balinese dance by Putu Evie Suyadnyani to pre-recorded gamelan music. She is an artist in residence at University of Toronto’s Faculty of Music this year.
The live performances consisted of six pieces, including the premiere of O Gamelan, by José Evangelista. All save two featured gamelan percussion played by the players of the Evergreen Club. Three pieces set the gamelan in various forms of dialogue with Western classical instruments.
Not all of the evening’s selections were compelling. Alex Pauk’s 1983 work Echo Spirit Isle, Ka Nin Chan’s Éveil aux oiseaux and Projet “Peuple” by André Ristic, both from 2005, repeatedly bogged down in the lightning-swift rhythmic transitions characteristic of Balinese music.
The traditional gamelan music of Bali can have a halting quality as its rhythms shift gears, but the consistency of timbre smooths out these bumps and the short detours are compensated for with longer, more hypnotic passages. With modern Western instruments, the transitions — and there were far too many of them in both Pauk’s and Ristic’s compositions — robbed the larger narrative arc of force as well as momentum.
The aimlessness in these three works was set into high relief by both the traditional piece, Legong Condong, danced by Suyadnani, and the masterful Threnody for Carlos Chavez, by the late Lou Harrison. The latter composition is pretty much what a viola rhapsody would sound like if its solo part were accompanied by gamelan.
Douglas Perry and the Evergreens turned the piece into the evening’s highlight, a magical ride out to a world at once familiar yet also seductively new and exotic.
Evangelista’s O Gamelan and Pulau Dewata, a 1977 creation by Claude Vivier successfully translated the Balinese idiom into something coherent for a Western orchestra — but with two caveats: I could hear every bar line in O Gamelan, which made me wish for a more confident and fluid performance by the members of Esprit; and Scott Good’s arrangement of the Vivier work included much heavy brass work (as well as gorgeous colouring with strings and woodwinds) that occasionally made this version of Pulau Dewata sound like a ponderous Leopold Stokowski arrangement of J.S. Bach.
Not everything in a new music concert is going to please every listener every time, but with Esprit, a high performance standard gives every piece a fine head start. And then there was Harrison’s Threnody, which all by itself made the Sunday outing worthwhile.
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
