21C Festival finds fresh use for half an orchestra
Toronto Symphony Orchestra (out of 4) With pianist Stewart Goodyear and members of the 21C Ensemble of the Glenn Gould School on Jan. 16. Tania Miller and Simon Rivard, conductors. Koerner Hall. The 21C Festival continues to Jan. 20.
Nothing speaks more eloquently to the divisions within the art music world than the Toronto Symphony Orchestra presenting two concerts on the same night.
Concert No. 1 on Wednesday evening was a traditional program featuring the music of 18th-century master Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart at Roy Thomson Hall. The other program opened the sixth edition of the Royal Conservatory of Music’s annual 21C Festival at Koerner Hall.
The traditional “classical music” crowd headed downtown to see the TSO with violinistconductor Pinchas Zuckerman, while a smaller group of more adventurous listeners congregated on Bloor St.
The Mozart program (which repeats to Sunday) did not let modernity intrude. The 21C Festival program looked resolutely around today’s world for its inspiration. One appealed to the music-as-museum-display esthetic. The other was about a fully living art form.
The 21C Festival’s showcase composer is American Terry Riley, who rose to fame in the 1960s for his explorations in minimalism.
Wednesday’s opening concert also included contributions from this country’s best and brightest younger talents, led by visiting conductor Tania Miller and the TSO’s young resident conductor Simon Rivard.
Did it feel like we got half an orchestra’s worth at Koerner Hall? Not at all. And it was a blast hearing 41members of our city’s marquee orchestra — augmented by 14 top students of the Conservatory’s Glenn Gould Professional School — playing in sparkling acoustics on a relatively intimate stage.
Although the program had variety to it, the works were between seven and 15 minutes in length. Hearing six pieces of such similar duration can make the listener hyper-sensitive to form, and the musical narrative structures started to sound too similar over the course of the evening.
That said, Riley (“Half-Wolf Dances Mad in Moonlight”) and Vancouver-based composer Jocelyn Morlock (“Nostalgia”) each offered compelling takes on music for orchestral strings built on note patterns. Vancouverite Dorothy Chang and Torontonian Dinuk Wijeratne each contributed a movement from True North: Symphonic Ballet, commissioned by the Calgary Philharmonic to celebrate Canada’s 150th last season.
Chang’s “Northern Star” was the most conventional tone poem of the evening. It showcased an assured hand in both narrative structure and orchestration. Wijeratne’s “First Winter” was a candy box of timbres and textures.
Emilie LeBel, recently transplanted to Edmonton, pre- miered “They do not shimmer like the dry grasses on the hills, or the leaves on the trees.” Percussion player Nicole Joshi deserved a medal for the sustained notes she had to blow into a harmonica while playing other instruments with her hands.
The evening ended with the premiere of Ur, a new piano concerto by Toronto pianist Stewart Goodyear. It is a clever piece of writing that introduced all of the essential musical material in a series of chords at the opening.
The result was lively, occasionally jazzy musical banter that showcased Goodyear’s remarkable abilities as the keyboard. I may have imagined some trumpet-challenging allusions to the opening of Wag- ner’s opera Das Rheingold in the slow movement, along with other winks at the Western musical canon.
On the whole, it was a refreshing evening that spoke well to how new music is not nearly as scary as it may have been a generation ago.
The concerts continue until Sunday, when the Esprit Orchestra closes this year’s 21C Festival with another program of works for large ensemble.
The details are available at www.rcmusic.com.