TSO’s Creations bristles with colour
The final edition of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s annual New Creations Festival launched on Saturday evening with bursts of musical colour from the Roy Thomson Hall stage.
The first and last works on the threepiece, intermission-free program were feasts of orchestral invention, impressively rendered.
TSO music director Peter Oundjian introduced each composer and piece as well as conducting two of the works. The first, Dust Devils by Canadian composer Vivian Fung, is a taut, 10-minute classically structured creation in one movement divided into three sections — fast, slow and fast again.
Fung effectively gives the sound motion and shape through rhythm and massing voices in the orchestra rather than by working with melodies or motifs.
Composed in 2011 and revised three years later, Dust Devils is like a good abstract painting, where one can appreciate the techniques used in its composition. Fung is a clever orchestrator, using all sorts of subtle layering to achieve her effects.
The evening ended in great style with the North American premiere of Proces
sions, which dates from 2009. It is a 30-minute, three-movement piano concerto also composed around the classic fast-slow-fast sequence by Icelandic composer and conductor Daniel Bjarnason.
This is a thoroughly satisfying concerto bristling with virtuoso passages for the soloist — young Icelandic pianist Vikingur Olafsson — as well as some very imaginative orchestration. It was elegantly conducted by Bjarnason and smartly interpreted by Olafsson.
The first movement, titled “In Medias Res,” (Latin for “without preamble”) makes repeated winks at the sparkling
Piano Concerto of Maurice Ravel. The second movement, “Spindrift,” is mesmerizing, drawing its listeners into a tight, intimate circle. The third, “RedHanded,” unleashes a rhythmic party.
This is a piece I would love to hear again — and it would be wonderful if the TSO invited back both Bjarnason and Olafsson to show off more of their considerable talents.
Bookended by compelling music, the middle offering on the program, the Canadian premiere of the 20-minute Sym-
phony No. 4, composed in 2016 by veteran American composer Larry Alan Smith, was a disappointment. Its four short movements were constructed with a plodding, connect-the-dots simplicity that highlighted threadbare thematic material and unimaginative orchestration that constantly had instruments playing in unison. At any concert of new music one hopes that glimmers of greatness will predominate over so-so material. On Saturday, the great outweighed the mediocre by a wide margin — as has been the case at most New Creations Festival concerts. This is a great credit to Oundjian’s leadership.
These festivals have been a wonderful way for Toronto audiences to sample new and recent work by international as well as local composers. It is too bad that the orchestra has decided to end the festival with Oundjian’s departure at the end of this season.
Let’s hope that, when the TSO hires a new music director, new music will get a more prominent spot alongside the old. In the meantime, there are two more concerts, on March 7 and 10. Both have tantalizing works to offer.
Classical music writer John Terauds is supported by the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation.