Music not for the faint of intellect
Sustain
(out of 4) Esprit Orchestra with violin soloist Véronique Mathieu and conductor Alex Pauk. At Koerner Hall on Dec. 1.
It’s only in the last hundred years or so that going to some art music concerts could be called work.
In some ways, it was nice to escape the already overwhelming presence of holiday music in every public nook and cranny, and on Sunday night tuck into one of the many empty seats at Koerner Hall to hear Toronto’s Esprit Orchestra.
There were no cloying calls to seasonal cheer here. Instead, we heard three new or almost-new pieces of art music. Where popular taste turns to melody, the backbeats of R&B or the gut-grabbing rhythms of hip hop, the small and enthusiastic audience was served bracing intellectualism.
It was a lot like going to an exhibition of modern art. But while one can freely wander, contemplate and absorb a visual artist’s concept or techniques in a gallery space, the concert audience member is made captive by the etiquette of serious music performance attendance.
The single most valuable disposable commodity we have, besides money, is time. And the art music concertgoer must be prepared to surrender it fully to the composer’s vision. No passing glances allowed.
Alex Pauk, Esprit’s founding music director and conductor, had chosen the evening’s program with great care. Titled “Sustain,” after the final and longest piece of the concert, the program was a study in forms fed by washes of orchestral colour set up in counterpoint to often complex rhythmic skeletons.
The orchestra sounded wonderful in the hall’s generous acoustics as Pauk navigated the demands of each score.
But it was impossible to just sit back and enjoy the music in the way one might at just about any other kind of musical event offered in the city on any given night.
Instead, our seat time was given over to the careful study and appreciation of the forms, gestures and techniques used by the composers, and executed by highly trained and practised professionals.
Montreal-based composer José Evangelista gave us an engaging peek at the power of time and rhythm in “Accelerando,” which had been premiered by Esprit in 2016. Built on tonal intervals, the piece not only plays with time and rhythm, it is a compelling study of tonal colours, neatly overlaid. This is an expertly structured piece of music that deserves to be heard yet again. Young Toronto composer Adam Scime offered the evening’s premiere.
“Afterglow,” the last of Esprit’s three commissions from Scime, was a 17-minute violin concerto that seemed untethered on many levels. Virtuosic violin soloist Véronique Mathieu played repeated figures that largely avoided the most engaging and sonorous parts of her instrument’s range. The orchestration of the equally repetitive and relatively static accompaniment lacked the colour of Evangelista’s concert-opener.
With “Sustain” (2018), American composer Andrew Norman aimed to suspend our sense of time with a circular — i.e. repetitive — 35-minute study in patterns.
Norman is sort of a modern-day Haydn in terms of his sense of humour, which included having the violinists mime playing their instruments. But that did little to leaven a piece that frequently sounded like it was being played over the percussive construction noises all too familiar to anyone who lives in downtown Toronto.
Getting back out into the canned holiday-music soundscape felt like a relief.
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 @JohnTerauds