Led by their new music director, Alexander Shelley, the NACO brought a rich program with them to Toronto.Dwayne Brown
In these darkened days for the Toronto Symphony, with the abrupt departure of its president and CEO Jeff Melanson, it's interesting and instructive to cast a glance northeastward, to see how the TSO's musical relative, the National Arts Centre Orchestra, is doing.
And based on the NACO's annual visit to Toronto Saturday night, they're doing very well indeed. Led by their new music director, Alexander Shelley, who is finishing his first season with the band, the NACO brought a rich program with them to Toronto, beginning and ending their concert with a Richard Strauss tone poem, with a Mozart piano concerto and a fine Canadian composition sandwiched in between. It was a meaty, satisfying program that, among other things, gave off the strong suspicion that they're having a lot more fun at the symphony in the nation's capital than Toronto is these days.
The entertainment on Saturday coalesced primarily around the compelling figure of Gabriela Montero, the pianist for the Mozart concerto, world-renowned for reviving the art of improvisation in classical music, something that was common practice from Bach to Liszt, but no more. Montero is famous for taking a tune given to her from the audience and riffing on it at the keyboard. On Saturday, it was the main tune from Strauss's Don Juan, which had opened the program, that formed the basis of her improvisation. Within seconds, she had turned it into a Rachmaninoff prelude and then a Scott Joplin rag, before an astonished and delighted audience. A tour de force.
Of Montero's idiosyncratic performance of Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 20, one of the great wrenching masterpieces of classical music, it's harder to know what to say. Basically, Montero took that same improvisatory spirit she displayed in her encore into the Mozart itself to fashion a quite unique performance. She played all the notes Mozart wrote (although with the addition of her own cadenzas drenched in Romanticism in the first and third movements), but sometimes made them sound like Bach, sometimes like Liszt, sometimes like Mendelssohn, sometimes like Rachmaninoff.
It was all Shelley could do to keep up with Montero's rapidly accelerating tempo in the third movement, which must have ended 10 metronome markings faster than it began. If you were looking for an authentic Mozart performance, whatever that might mean, this wasn't the one to choose. But Montero, as well as reviving the art of improvisation, also reminds us that the flamboyant, unique performance is also a part of our musical history. We've gotten very prissy about our classical compositions in the past little while, and Montero may be many things, but prissy isn't one of them. The audience loved every bar she played.
The fun of the NACO concert also extended into the opening piece on the second half of the program, Canadian composer Ana Sokolovic's charming remembrance of the merry-go-rounds of her Balkan childhood, Ringelspiel, an NAC commission. From mimicking the grinding sound of the gears turning the machinery, to fashioning wispy recalls of the tunes the carousels of her youth played, Sokolovic masterfully presented a portrait in sound with her composition. She is just a wonderful composer, with a great sense of whimsy, along with a fine feel for musical structure and a superb mastery of the orchestra. Under Shelley's direction, the full value of her creativity was on fine display on Saturday night.
So, you might not think Strauss's tone poems, Don Juan, and especially Death and Transfiguration, which opened and closed Saturday's concert, were a barrel of laughs, but actually, the sheer exuberance with which a 25-year-old Strauss fashioned both his masterpieces – the one a portrait of the great seducer, the other a vision of a man approaching death – make them highly enjoyable, highly satisfying works, where the sheer joy of creation is on spectacular display.
And certainly, the NAC Orchestra was up to the virtuosic challenge of both these works, which are taxing to any orchestra. The NACO is sounding great these days. Shelley has certainly built on the work of his predecessor, Pinchas Zukerman, in improving the calibre of the NACO's playing.
The strings were burnished and perfectly integrated; winds and brass perfectly balanced; percussion well-controlled; everyone playing as one unit and one musical mind. For all the cavils about the acoustical inadequacy of Roy Thomson Hall, you can hear beautiful sounds in that hall all the time, and Saturday night was obvious evidence.
If there was any deficiency in the Strauss tone poems, it was in Shelley's conception of them. This is highly dramatic music, but Shelley sometimes seemed to lack that killer instinct to really draw full value out of the contrasts and colours Strauss lavishly wrote into his scores. The direction and structure were more clearly outlined in Death and Transfiguration, which Shelley conducted with calm and assurance, but there was more he could have coaxed out of his fine orchestra in both pieces, especially in the Don Juan – or at least that's how it seemed to me.
But for an evening's classical music entertainment, with great music, a fine band, interesting works and bigger-than-life performing personalities, Saturday night with the NACO was hard to beat.