TSO makes pilgrimage to Prague
PRAGUE— Between concerts in Regensburg and Essen, Germany, on its recent tour of Israel and Europe, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra made a kind of pilgrimage to Prague, capital of the Czech Republic.
The two concerts it performed there as part of the high-profile Prague Spring International Music Festival were dedicated to the memory of perhaps the most distinguished musician ever to serve as the orchestra’s music director, the Czech maestro Karel Ancerl.
Ancerl came to Toronto immediately after having been music director of one of Europe’s foremost symphonic ensembles, the Czech Philharmonic, and when he did so he knew there would be no going back.
The year 1968, you may recall, bore witness to the famous Prague Spring, that brief period of liberalization in the communist regime terminated by the arrival of Russian tanks.
Ancerl had sided with the reformers and one of the most poignant of my musical memories concerns his opening of the Prague festival that year in Smetana Hall, with thenpresident Svoboda and then-premier Dubcek entering the presidential box and the whole audience standing to sing their national anthem with a fervour that sent tingles down my spine.
Ancerl then proceeded to conduct his orchestra in that most patriotic of Czech masterpieces, the cycle of tone poems by Smetana known as Ma Vlast ( My Country). Years later, as head of the Czech record compa- ny Supraphon, Toronto’s Jana Gonda was able to release a live recording of that performance. It makes thrilling listening.
It was in that same Smetana Hall that the Toronto Symphony Orchestra played its warmly applauded concerts, following a news conference at which violinist Terry Holowach, the last remaining player from the Ancerl years, recalled the sheer beauty of the late conductor’s music-making.
Earlier this season, Jiri Belohlavek, most recent music director of the Czech Philharmonic and one of the TSO’s most frequent guest conductors, visited the Royal Conservatory to see the bust of Ancerl displayed in the reception hall alongside that of the orchestra’s founding conductor, Luigi von Kunits.
“I was too young to have worked with him.” Belohlavek remarked, “but I remember above all his kindness toward us when I was a student.”
Sadly, Belohlavek himself died last week at the age of 71.
Ancerl’s first family died in a Nazi camp and his own health was permanently undermined during internment at Terezin. He finally succumbed after only four memorable years in Toronto.
Though regarded as a traitor by the communist regime, Ancerl has enjoyed a posthumous rehabilitation in his homeland, with Czech television currently preparing a special program on his life and work.
The appearance of his Canadian orchestra on Czech soil could hardly have been more timely.
Conscious of the nature of the occasion, the orchestra’s music director, Peter Oundjian, highlighted Czech music in his Prague programs, beginning with the late Czech-born Toronto composer Oskar Morawetz’s Carnival Overture, and following it with Dvorak’s Symphony No. 7 in D minor and Smetana’s Overture from “The Bartered Bride.”
Audiences at both concerts demanded encores (a pattern repeated throughout the tour) and a happy orchestra left the elegant art-nouveau setting of one of Europe’s handsomest concert halls.
Soon to return? When the orchestra undertook its first European visit in several years three seasons ago it arrived with a time-diminished international profile. The success of that short tour and this year’s successor confirm the TSO’s ability as an international player.
The real question now is not the orchestra’s welcome, as interim CEO Gary Hanson puts it, but the cost of putting close to 100 musicians on the road and in the air.
Having witnessed the impact of both tours on the players, I can vouch not only for the positive effect on morale (as violinist James Wallenberg suggests, the musicians bond on tour in a manner beyond what is possible at home) but the way the actual playing standard rises.
That is why Hanson is not alone in claiming that touring is basic to the development and preservation of an international-class orchestra. It is up to Toronto to decide whether it wants and is willing to support such an orchestra. According to audiences in Europe, it already has one.