In my previous post about last week's performance of the Verdi Requiem (Magnificent Musical Monument ) I explained about the background of the Andrew Davis concert engagements this month. This week's main program harks back to the orchestra's historic 1978 tour to China, with the same program, same concerto, and same soloist from that tour. Also included is a composition by Maestro Davis himself, one which I was especially glad to hear since I had missed the chance back in 1981 when it was first performed in Toronto.
The concert opened with the Davis work: La Serenissima, a musical tribute to Venice inspired for Davis by his often-renewed association with that city where living is an art and art is life. I was especially intrigued because Davis chose to use (in the opening and closing parts of the work) Monteverdi's haunting melodic treatment of the hymn Ave maris stella from his Vespers of 1610 (itself one of my all-time favourite choral works). The seven sections form an arch of music inspired by different aspects of the Queen of the Adriatic, often depicting them in pictorial fashion. The music was fascinating, and struck me as a true descendant of Debussy, suggesting what the French composer might have done if he had lived another forty years or so. Apart from musical quotations, the piece had a distinctive, original sound of its own, and clearly showed that the composer was thoroughly familiar with the sound of the orchestra as a body (i.e. the orchestral tutti) and not simply as a collection of individual instruments. The impressionistic opening was particularly beautiful, as was the wind playing in the succeeding Ave maris stella. Another highlight was the absolute clarity of the passage depicting Piazza San Marco with different "competing" café orchestras simultaneously playing The Blue Danube and The Barber of Seville! The final pages, with the Monteverdi theme again fading gently away to silence, were sheer magic.
Next up was Liszt's Piano Concerto No. 1, a famous showpiece of the concerto repertoire. I have to say right up front that I have never particularly cared for this work. It's 20-minute length is composed largely of solo cadenzas, and you have to wait until about the 16-minute mark before you actually encounter a melody long enough to be called a "theme". It's become popular and famous because of the opportunities it gives the soloist to show off -- but that's all it does. Liszt himself wrote many far better and more musically rewarding works than this potboiler.
But if I must hear it, then Louis Lortie would be the soloist I would choose for that purpose. His playing of Liszt stands as one of the great highlights of his extraordinary international career (though hardly the only one) and I have several recordings of his versions of major Liszt works for solo piano. His playing on this occasion was exemplary, the fiendish passagework all coming across clearly and the quiet passages played with a sense of poetry which escapes many interpreters.
His encore, a Chopin Etude, showed up the concerto for the poor cousin which it is. There's more genuine music, and more musical development, in this one short piece lasting three minutes than in the whole 20 minutes of noise of the programmed work. And Lortie gave this, too, a magnificent performance. The cheers he received were entirely merited!
After the intermission, we then heard the memorable concert overture Le Corsaire by Berlioz, the last and most accomplished of seven concert overtures which the composer produced. I've had this work lodged in my mind since childhood, as it was a firm and frequent favourite of whoever did the program selection for the morning classical show on CBC Radio -- which we always heard at breakfast in our house. The whizzing scales which launch the work were taken with great aplomb by the orchestra. The following lyrical section was played with finesse. In the final pages, the rapid march tempo lifted and rolled right along with no sense of heaviness, and the numerous chord and key changes in the final pages were nailed with energetic sforzandos.
The concert was rounded off with one of the best-known masterpieces of the Romantic era, Pictures at an Exhibition by Modest Mussorgsky. It's ironic, to say the least, that so many people know this work only as an orchestral composition. Mussorgsky composed it as a suite for piano, and in that form it's one of the great virtuoso works of the repertoire. The orchestral version which is by far the best known is that made in 1922 by Maurice Ravel, which is the one we heard tonight. I've always thought of it as a genuine tribute by one pianist-composer to another. Although I have heard the piano version of the Pictures performed three times, this is -- believe it or not -- the first time I have ever heard the Ravel orchestration in live concert!
The brass opened the Promenade with power and clarity to spare. The succeeding musical portraits call on a number of players for solo contributions, including the unusual saxophone in The Old Castle and the tuba in Bydlo (a personal favourite of mine). These parts were all played with real finesse -- that tuba line, to mention only one, has to be played quite quietly which is not necessarily the idea most people have of a tuba! The chattering woodwinds in The Ballet of the Chicks in their Shells were delightful, beautifully balanced and bouncing lightly along. The trumpet in Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle was clean and precise, not something that can be counted on as a given. The string tremolos in Con mortuis in lingua mortua were slimmed down right to the verge of audibility, while remaining clean and clear.
The final two movements bring in the big guns of the percussion department, and here is where the music can easily get muddy and confused as a result of everyone simply pushing too hard. Davis and company kept it nicely in proportion so that the percussion sounds were audible without overpowering the rest of the orchestra, and the other sections remained balanced at all times. Even with that careful control, The Hut on Fowl's Legs lacked nothing in ferocity and energy, and the centre section was disquieting and ominous -- the very picture of the Baba Yaga's hut in the middle of a dark forest. The long slow build-up to the final climactic chords of The Great Gate of Kiev were both sustained and shaped to near-perfection.
Some day it would be interesting to hear a concert in which you get both a pianist playing the Pictures as Mussorgsky composed the work, and the Ravel arrangement on the same program. I'd also like to hear Sir Henry Wood's arrangement which calls for a large orchestra plus organ (presumably to underpin the concluding Great Gate of Kiev). In the meantime, this polished performance by the Toronto Symphony under Sir Andrew Davis was rewarding enough for me to thoroughly enjoy it!
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