TSO with violinist Augustin Hadelich at Roy Thomson Hall, Wednesday, May 6, 2015.
[Originally published in the Toronto Star]
Light, blithe and airy is a good way to describe the performance by Augustin Hadelich on a warm spring evening yesterday with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Unfortunately it had to be counterbalanced by a weighty program that sat in the room like The Blob (a.k.a. The Molten Meteor). And just like the 1958 horror flick, the mounting alien amoeba from outer space dissolved and ate nearly all of Roy Thomson Hall’s unsuspecting citizens.
The program opened innocently enough with the final performance of RBC Affiliate Composer Kevin Lau, who took to the stage to be congratulated for his three-year tenure with the TSO. They performed his 11-minute “Treeship” – a murmuring and imaginative work that fuses a mythical tree and ship as one. With wanton string sweeps and abounding brass spills (an a Twitter-like 140-character limit) it was like the soundtrack to an imaginary film. It had car chases, romantic scenes on the beach, and a killer hiding under the bed. You name it, and it was in there. The last four-minutes were the finest – and incidentally the point where everything finally starts to coalesce. It ended with the strings playing in a high register to great dramatic effect.
After Lau’s foretaste, came a white-gloved Mendelssohn Violin Concerto cooked up by superstar soloist Augustin Hadelich. TSO Music Director Peter Oundjian conducted from an odd crouching position that looked as if he were about to leap over the second violins. The orchestra was thin against Hadelich’s direct and lush tone – especially through the kaleidoscopic chromatic legwork in the Allegro. It was a shame, considering the extraordinary force of skill standing before them.
Hadelich’s playing was dainty and agile. He easily manoeuvred the rapidly ascending runs and ricochet bowing on the Allegretto, which started off slow, but was bubbling in no time with hints of the opening theme. The winds, in particular, were on-point, and touched up against Hadelich’s unrelenting technique.
Hadelich played an impressive Paganini Caprice No. 5 for his encore to an appreciative crowd.
The closer (literally) was Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7. I stopped counting the number of people walking out. It was a painfully amateurish performance that seemed to lose steam immediately after the opening bars. The brass, which blew the bow resin clean off the violin section, looked bored to death. Save for a few glowing climaxes, which were like triumphant battleships amongst a sea of small sailboats, it was a major disappointment.
Ending with a question mark, the red gelatinous alien blob receded into the night unidentified.
The TSO will move on to consume Ottawa on May 8, and Montreal on May 9.
#LUDWIGVAN
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