How about concerto for a snowmobile?
North/White
(out of 4) Esprit Orchestra and guests. Alex Pauk, conductor. Koerner Hall, Wednesday. Some composers have tried to depict the sights and sounds of the natural world in art music for at least the past 300 years. Toronto’s Esprit Orchestra showcased three modern efforts at Koerner Hall on Wednesday night, with mixed results.
Esprit, which is celebrating its 35th anniversary this year under founding music director Alex Pauk, is something special in this country’s vast and varied concert landscape. It is the only full-sized orchestra to be devoted entirely to performing contemporary art music.
Unlike the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, for example, the musicians at Esprit are freelancers. But their standard of musicianship is as high as anything we experience at Roy Thomson Hall.
In fact, hearing new works at Koerner Hall is probably to their advantage. The venue’s excellent acoustics bring out the full scope of sounds and textures in the way the larger concert hall simply can’t. Wednesday’s concert featured
Dreaming, a 10-year-old, 17-minute piece by currently hot Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir, followed by two Canadian pieces: Alexina Louie’s eight-movement Take
the Dog Sled, also from 2008; and R. Murray Schafer’s North/
White, from 1973. The star work of the evening was the 23-minute Dog Sled. It’s a brilliant piece on so many levels. It was performed with verve by seven instrumentalists and two Inuit throat singers, Evie Mark and Akinisie Sivuarapik.
Unlike the other two pieces on the program, which are exercises in abstraction, Louie’s work is inspired by Inuit idioms, which were reflected in its rhythmic construction.
The choices and pairings of voices — instrumental as well as vocal — were evocative.
Alternating vocal with the purely instrumental, each movement was a freestanding gem.
Louie included found instruments, such as stones and emp- ty bottles, to embellish the already rich sonic textures.
Unlike most art music written since the mid-20th century, Louie’s work is filled with lively humour, from the jazzy riffs in the final movement “Great Dog Sled Journey (Keep Going)” to the slapstick killing of a mosquito at the end of “Bug Music.”
Schafer’s North/White comes from a decade that’s been largely forgotten in the art music world. It was a time of out-there experimentation.
Schafer’s bit of crazy is to feature a snowmobile at the foot of the stage. Perhaps this is the world’s only concerto for Arctic Cat.
Its nine-minute running time of miscellaneous sounds, bangs, crashes, whooshes and orchestral swells were about as far from evoking our Canadian fantasy about the Great White North as Toronto’s Sugar Beach speaks of a tropical seaside. Maybe that was Schafer’s point.
Adding the audience’s participation in broadcasting snowmobile sounds from our smartphones and singing along with the orchestra was fun, but did little to embellish the score’s cluttered musical closet.
Having the helmeted, anonymous snowmobile rider take a bow like a guest soloist for a traditional concerto performance was hilarious.
Thorvaldsdottir’s piece was a pleasant, atmospheric meditation that added a note of blandness in an otherwise colourful and provocative evening. Classical music writer John Terauds is a freelance contributor for the Star, based in Toronto. He is supported by the Rubin Institute for Music Criticism, San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation. Follow him on Twitter