Written by: Ken Winters
New Creations Festival
Toronto Symphony Orchestra
Hugh Wolff, conductor
At Roy Thomson Hall
In Toronto on Saturday
Contemporary serious music, both in the 20th century so recently past and in our new one, still so young, has had a long uphill struggle. The contemporary music scene in Canada exists in a kind of bubble. It has its own vigorous, sophisticated life but seldom intersects very naturally with, say, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra or the Canadian Opera Company.
This season, the TSO has made a cautious attempt to redress this situation by mounting a short, three-concert event it calls its New Creations Festival. The second concert Saturday night, was not, however, dazzlingly new. Two of the four pieces on the program, while premieres of a kind, had been created some time ago.
John Weinzweig, the only Canadian in the lineup, composed his Rhapsody for Orchestra 65 years ago, in 1941. It had its premiere by the CBC Symphony Orchestra in 1957, then languished unattended until Weinzweig, at the age of 91, made some revisions to it in 2003 and 2004. It was the revised version that had its premiere Saturday in a performance under the TSO’s guest conductor for the evening, the American Hugh Wolff.
I’m not sure Wolff quite got it. It was clear and neat and not just noisy, but it seemed not to speak or grip the attention. Weinzweig is one of the great men of our music, and the performance seemed not to convey this, seemed too little almost too late — even though seeing him there, now 93, wheeled on in his chair to accept his applause, was indescribably touching.
The concert’s other not-exactly-new creation was Paul Hindemith’s Keyboard Music with Orchestra, which Hindemith composed in 1929 for the noted one-armed pianist Paul Wittgenstein. The terms of the commission gave Wittgenstein complete power over the performing rights. He never played the piece himself, but refused to let anyone else play it or to let it be published. In the Wittgenstein estate, which became accessible only in 2002, a single copy came to light, and had its first performance in Frankfurt by the American pianist and teaching icon Leon Fleisher.
It was Fleisher who gave its Canadian premiere Saturday. The work is a fairly soft bomb, the outer movements replete with Hindemith’s characteristic busyness and only the middle movement yielding more. This movement has a lovely long solo for English horn, delicately embroidered by the piano. The outer movements might have come into clearer focus if Fleisher had played them with a harder edge, or Wolff had quietened the brass; as it was, the audience caught fleeting glimpses of the solo part through a heavy underbrush of orchestra.
We did have the very first public performance of a new Concerto for Double Bass by the American composer John Harbison. This is a pleasant work, if not exactly a toe-tapper. The first movement, Lamento, has its feet in medieval viol music. The second, and most immediately attractive, is a cavatina, which makes the most of the double bass’s singing qualities. The third is a rondo, and comes closest of the three to vigour. What I missed in the piece as a whole was any exploitation of the solo instrument’s sonorous depths. Joel Quarrington played it immaculately, with remarkable musicality and refinement of tone, but the range of the work itself seemed narrow.
The fun of the evening was thus pretty well concentrated in the final work, in its Canadian premiere, a flashy and colourful Percussion Concerto written for the brilliant Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie by Chinese composer Chen Yi.
Chen has designed a striking visual as well as aural piece for a large battery of tuned and untuned percussion, all inspired by the arts of the Beijing Opera, in which she formerly played violin. In addition to the highly choreographed physicality of Glennie’s performance, the middle movement requires that she speak, while still playing, a long dramatic poem in Chinese, in the exaggerated inflections of the opera. We had no idea what the words meant (no translation was supplied) but even so, the sonic effects were riveting. The diminutive composer, who came on stage for the ovation, was obviously thrilled with the performance.
