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Royal Theatre
May 23, 2012
"Music is meaningless noise unless it touches a receiving mind."
Paul Hindemith would surely have agreed that the noise produced by the visiting Toronto Symphony Youth Orchestra under Alain Trudel was anything but meaningless and that the minds of the audience - alas, but typically for a mid-week concert, a small one - were most definitely receptive. And he would also surely have been delighted at the superb performance of his own Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes of Carl Maria von Weber, which ended the evening.
The programme opened with Tchaikovsky's Capriccio Italien, a work whose presence today seems largely confined to Pops concerts, which is understandable - it contains the requisite number of memorable tunes - but is unfortunate.
By directing a performance in which tempos and dynamics were tightly controlled, Trudel allowed his young players to show their prowess: sumptuous string tone; characterful, nicely blended winds, forceful yet tasteful brass - kudos particularly to the solo trumpet.
At the same time, his approach avoided the pitfalls of the music: it may well be, as Trudel himself suggested, that this is Tchaikovsky's only genuinely cheerful work, but it is hardly his most sophisticated and any performance not as tightly controlled as this one can oh-so-easily, at the big tutti just before the final whirlwind coda, tip over into banality and sound like an amateur Italian town band who have had one or two too many grappas.
Not here. A fine performance.
The Violin Concerto of Johannes Brahms is one of the great peaks of the violin's concertante repertoire (K2 to the Beethoven's Everest, one might say). The prospect of hearing a teenager play this music, albeit just the opening movement, is not one to face with equanimity; there have just been too many teenage prodigies in the last few decades with dazzling fingers, but no heart.
The only resemblance between Nicole Li and those wunderkinden is that she is just seventeen years old. From her first confident, almost swaggering entry it was clear that she is a fine musician, mature beyond her years, with absolutely nothing of the mechanical in her playing.
Li's tone was beautiful, even in the upper reaches of the E string, her intonation all but flawless and her rubato tactfully judged.
The accompaniment was also extremely sympathetic and the balance between soloist and orchestra excellent.
Despite one or two momentary lapses in the underlying tension - notably in the more reflective music - this was so rewarding a performance as to make one regret the omission of the remaining two movements.
It is not uncommon for unfamiliar music, particularly if composed within the last half century, only to grow on one with repeated hearings. It is, certainly in my experience, rather less common for a piece to grow on one while it is actually being performed, yet such was the case with Claude Vivier's Orion.
A highly colourful score, with the occasional echo of Messiaen in the wind and percussion (oddly, Vivier did not study with the doyen of modern French music, but with one of Messiaen's own pupils: Karlheinz Stockhausen), the orchestra played it as if they had known the music all their lives, with each section giving of their best.
But if there was one moment which really convinced me, it was the massive climactic tutti just before the close, with antiphonal sets of tubular bells providing a genuine frisson.
Aside from a few very vocal enthusiasts (most notably, in this country at any rate, Glenn Gould), the music of Paul Hindemith is generally regarded as dry, colourless and academic.
Although there may be parts of his considerable output to which that description does apply, Hindemith's Symphonic Metamorphoses are as colourful and engaging as any work of the twentieth century (and more than most).
Trudel led a marvellous account of the music, his musicians playing it to the hilt, from the weighty yet energetic opening movement, via the thrilling moto perpetuo variations of Turandot and the delectable winds and sumptuous strings of the andantino, to the exuberant, propulsive final march.
There is, to my mind, no experience quite like that of hearing a first-class, full-sized orchestra given their head. Simply wonderful.
While the musicians were warming up before the first work, I detected a group of the violins practising Glinka's overture to Russlan and Ludmilla and (or so I thought) the final coda of Dvořák Eighth.
I may have been mistaken about the Dvořák, but not the Glinka, as it was a sizzling, Leningrad-Philharmonic-tempo account of this which provided the well-earned (and thoroughly deserved) encore.
Let us hope that we do not have to wait another thirty-eight years before the Toronto Symphony Youth Orchestra visits again.
Mind you, on tonight's showing, they would be worth the wait.
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