Capping Off Year 1 for Gimeno, 10 for New Orford
Summer is usually dry season for classical music in Toronto. The performance calendar ends in June, and musicians disperse to various summer festivals. Audiences follow. Some, like Verbier, have become tourist attractions in their own right. These festivals — with the notable exception of the Proms in London — are nice for those audience members who can get away But what about those who cannot?
My concern was assuaged by two local concerts that I heard this summer, both of which were attended by full — or nearly full — houses.
The first, presented by the TSO and their incoming music director Gustavo Gimeno on June 30, was a bread and butter programme of Sibelius (the Violin Concerto), Prokofiev (the Classical Symphony), and Stravinsky (the 1945 Firebird Suite). Gimeno first led the TSO in February 2018, and has returned several times since. His term officially starts next year. The youthful Spaniard is clearly no slouch in the standard repertory; his Prokofiev, for example, was fleet-footed and incisive. But the true test of his mettle will be determining the orchestra’s overall orientation, beginning in 2020.
The standout performance was the Sibelius. The soloist was the TSO’s own concertmaster, Jonathan Crow. The Concerto is played so often that its musical gestures have become tropes: barnacle-encrusted and predictable. For me, this does not diminish the work’s impact, but it makes it more difficult for a soloist to provide a (convincingly) distinctive take. I believe Crow managed that. His interpretation stressed the lyrical element in the score. An illustrative point of comparison is Heifetz’s rather — in my view — relentless 1959 recording. Compared to Heifetz, Crow was restrained, though by no means did his tone lack fibre or propulsive force.
About two weeks later, on July 12, Crow made an appearance at Walter Hall, this time as a violinist in the New Orford String Quartet. The Quartet was celebrating its tenth anniversary at the Toronto Summer Music Festival, of which Crow is the artistic director.
The group — comprising principals from the TSO (Crow), Montreal Symphony (violinist Andrew Wan and cellist Brian Manker), and Detroit Symphony (violist Eric Nowlin) — presented a programme of Haydn, Hatzis, and Beethoven. According to the members, they had played an almost identical set at their first-ever concert ten years prior (Haydn, a Canadian piece, and Beethoven).
I applaud the Quartet’s commitment to Haydn’s depressingly underrated op. 20 “Sun” Quartets. Their performance of the fourth quartet was supremely refined; the same was true of their Beethoven. The Hatzis, the Greek-Canadian composer’s fifth string quartet, was disappointing. I found the ideas fragmentary and underdeveloped. Overall, the piece lacked the emotional sweep of the composer’s own “Old Photographs” or — to take a more recent example — The Isle is Full of Noises.
After a deserved standing ovation, the Quartet returned to the stage for an encore by another living Canadian composer, Dompierre: the “Pavane solitaire” from Par Quatre Chemins. That movement, along with several other pieces commissioned by the New Orford, is available on the Quartet’s new album. Like all of their work, worth a listen.