Joonas Kokkonen: Adagio religioso; Helen Grime: Violin Concerto; Mahler: Symphony No. 5. Toronto Symphony Orchestra, John Storgårds, conductor; Leila Josefowicz, violin. April 8, 2023, Roy Thomson Hall.
Usually viewed as the prerogative of the music director, Mahler can make an equally affirmative impression under the right guest conductor. Such a visitor was John Storgårds, who led the Toronto Symphony Orchestra on Saturday night through the Fifth Symphony in Roy Thomson Hall.
This is one of the great workouts of the repertoire, especially for the brass. It says something about the athleticism of Team TSO that the chorale near the end of this 71-minute performance sounded no less lucid than the interventions of the first movement. Principal horn Neil Daland (standing in the Scherzo, an increasingly common practice) and principal trumpet Andrew McCandless (brilliant and full-toned in the opening funeral march) certainly earned their ovations.
Strings made warm and even dark sounds, reminding us in the waltz sequences that this apparent Viennese good humour should not be taken as cash. Stressed chords everywhere were forceful yet cohesive. Was there too much storm and stress in the second movement? Since Mahler stipulates that the music should proceed “mit größter Vehemenz,” this is not an easy opinion to support. Let us say simply that Storgårds’s aptitude for clear textures gave us an uncensored Mahler experience. Happily, we had the opportunity to catch our breath in the Adagietto, lushly done.
The program began with something of a post-Adagietto piece, the self-descriptive Adagio religioso movement from the Music for String Orchestra by Storgårds’s fellow Finn, Joonas Kokkonen (1921-96). Leading with smooth gestures and no baton, the conductor elicited full sonority at low volumes. Violins were introduced gradually and to good effect.
This was billed as a North American premiere (literalists should know that I heard the second performance of the program, the first having taken place on Thursday). Another premiere — Canadian — was of a Violin Concerto by a Scottish composer Helen Grime. Leila Josefowicz, an American born in Canada, did the honours.
Traditional in its length (22 minutes) and three-part structure, this score of 2016 is fiercely modern in most other respects. Opening with alternations of heavy sawing by the soloist and blurts from the lower brass, it never departed long from this back-and-forth rhetoric, even in quiet passages featuring percussion, harp and celesta.
Josefowicz, strikingly dressed in Ukrainian colours, played with great passion (and from the music), but I am not sure any application of commitment can make a success of a piece that is so fundamentally unsettled. Even the vestigial cadenza seemed over before it started.
Storgårds led the orchestra expertly. Brass played well. The ultimate impression, however, was of a domestic argument in which the participants could not even agree to disagree.
The substantial crowd gave Josefowicz a curtain call in recognition of her hard work and extroverted stage manner. There was a huge ovation for Mahler.
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