Brett Dean, James Ledger, and Paul Frehner participate in the second instalment of TSO’s New Creations Festival.
Toronto Symphony Orchestra. New Creations Festival: Two Memorials: Anton Webern & John Lennon at Roy Thomson Hall, Wednesday, March 9.
One purpose of the New Creations concert on Wednesday was to “introduce a couple of Aussie accents” to Roy Thomson Hall, in the words of Brett Dean, the elder of the two visitors from Down Under and guest curator of the annual Toronto Symphony Orchestra New Creations Festival. Alas, the sounds were mostly international and not altogether memorable.
Dean supplied a prolix and essentially athematic half-hour trumpet concerto called Dramatis personae, a title that makes reference to the existence of a programmatic storyline for each movement. In practice, the opening tutti was so vehement that the entry of the solo instrument – even as played by the name-brand Swedish virtuoso Håkan Hardenberger – seemed a feeble attempt to butt in.
The rhetoric cooled eventually, and the wheezy coda was almost literally deflationary. There was some traditional muted trumpet moonlight in the middle movement (over an excessively dense bed of strings), but another critique of the concerto genre materialized in the finale, as the soloist was forced to chatter with other trumpets and eventually migrate to the rear of the stage and join the section. Interesting how much more appealing a trumpet sounds from this location.
At the beginning of the program, we heard Two Memorials by Dean’s compatriot James Ledger. The commemorated individuals were Anton Webern and John Lennon – both the victims of gunfire, although it was never clear why this should matter.
No Lennon expert, I heard few references, although there were tacky bits that sounded like they could be references to (italics)something(roman). Recorded samples from the Webern memorial were played in reverse in the Lennon memorial. So it says in the program notes.
There was a world premiere sandwiched between these first North American (Ledger) and Canadian (Dean) performances: From the Vortex Perspective with music by Montreal-born Paul Frehner and an arty video split over three screens by Toronto-born Peter Mettler. Mettler supervised the projections in real-time (every performance is intended to be different), so the relation between music and image was never strong.
Indeed, I noticed a conflict in the opening minutes between Frehner’s age-of-iron blasts for lower brass and the mostly fluid and natural shapes on the screens. Fuzzy footage of astronauts bouncing on the moon made up one of the more grounded sequences.
If not replete with meaning, the exercise was fun and well received. Frehner’s score was economical, original and evocative. The TSO made fine sounds under Peter Oundjian. Dean, a former violist with the Berlin Philharmonic, conducted his own music and Ledger’s, and not badly. It is one thing to program contemporary music. It appears to be central to the TSO philosophy to perform it well.
#LUDWIGVAN
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