Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra; Emilie LeBel: the sediments (TSO Commission); Bartók: The Miraculous Mandarin. Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Gustavo Gimeno, conductor; Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, Jean-Sébastien Vallée, TMC Artistic Director. Nov. 21, 2024 at Roy Thomson Hall. Continues Nov. 22 and 23; tickets here.
A Hungarian sandwich with contemporary Canadian filling — this was a concert for connoisseur tastes, in which a less than capacity audience enjoyed a feast of dazzling and occasionally stomach-churning drama, contrasting with the blander pop on offer elsewhere in town.
Composed in U.S. exile, Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra is surely the best known of this season’s series of seven examples of the genre, all of which train the spotlight onto the collective talents of the TSO.
Accessible and evasive in equal measure, it is a celebration of all that an orchestra can offer, from tremulous mystery to folk-like joviality, to nocturnal anguish, sarcasm, and ultimately invigorating fire. Gimeno and his players struck the perfect balance between characterization, bravura, and architectural dramaturgy, as they fearlessly negotiated the labyrinth of metrical dislocations and transitions.
The Introduzione was tightly controlled but never artificially contrived — always spontaneous, and with plenty of room for individual inventiveness. Alongside wit and mischief, there was a satisfying poker-faced quality to the ironic episodes in the second and fourth movements, especially the Shostakovich ‘Leningrad’ Symphony send-up, which passed without gratuitous point-making. The Elegia was hauntingly atmospheric, while the Dionysian dances of the finale were almost dangerously infectious, though here the brass could have cut through even more without detriment to the balance.
The Sediments, a 15-minute TSO commission from the Canadian Emilie LeBel, was the right kind of palette-cleanser. With an environmentalist agenda, this tone poem explores orchestral colours, especially extended percussion, to draw a meditative image of nature’s past, present and future:
‘Water flows on, whether I am here or not. Everything that ever was is still here’, according to the composer’s short statement. Starting with a bang, various atmospheric figurations rise and gradually grow into further successions of expanding clusters. These are interjected with episodes of wind and water sound effects (a reminder of the New-Age composer Kitaro’s Silkroad music, but without the cheesy tunes). The whole thing is not dissimilar to a Christopher Nolan soundtrack — epic-scale music with cosmic aspirations, that lingers in the mind but doesn’t dramatically evolve.
The traffic-jam noises of the concrete jungle at the start of the Miraculous Mandarin offered precisely the rude awakening Bartók intended. In his short opening remarks, Gimeno, referred to but did not spell out the problematic story of this ‘grotesque pantomime’ as designated by its author, Melchior Lengyel, inviting the audience to focus rather on the orchestral colours.
Worthy of multiple trigger warnings, the lurid tale is of three tramps forcing a girl to lure passers-by so that they can rob them. The first two entrapped men have no money and are thrown back into the streets; the third, the Mandarin, is wealthy and exotic, yet inscrutable. The girl is forced to continue to dance for him, leading to a violent chase scene. The tramps overpower and try to kill the Mandarin by stabbing and hanging him. But it is only after the girl satisfies his desire that his wounds begin to bleed and he dies.
So vivid were the characterizations and mood-paintings Gimeno drew from the orchestra that there was no mistaking the disturbing violence and eroticism of this truly miraculous score. Sharp, incisive articulation, alongside manic drive and urgency were immediately on the agenda. Temptations to sensuality and sensuousness were avoided, to be replaced by dark, macabre eroticism, as in the clarinet’s seductively alluring themes, rather suggestive of Egon Schiele’s disturbing nudes.
The Toronto Mendelssohn Choir joined in for the few ghostly notes depicting the glowing body of the Mandarin (an extravagant requirement of the full pantomime score rather than the Suite), before the ritualistic climax as the girl embraces the Mandarin and the descending glissandi as he bleeds to death. An unforgettable evening, then, and a testament to music’s power to evoke terror and horror as well as vigour.
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