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Guillaume Connesson: Les Cités de Lovecraft; Bernstein: Serenade; Poulenc: Suite from Les biches; Gershwin: An American in Paris. Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Stéphane Denève, conductor; James Ehnes, violin. Roy Thomson Corridor, Could 29, 2024. Repeats June 1 (8 p.m.). Tickets right here.
Concert events are available numerous sizes and styles, together with irregular, which is a technique of describing the Toronto Symphony Orchestra program heard Wednesday in Roy Thomson Corridor. It was a diverting however in the end unsatisfying night, regardless of the presence of the dependable James Ehnes as soloist.
The title choice (and solely respectable piece of orchestral music) was Gershwin’s An American in Paris. This exuberant tone poem of 1928 can hardly fail, but it surely got here shut beneath the busy baton of Stéphane Denève, a U.S.-based French conductor who valued bar-by-bar sonic phenomena on the expense of momentum and continuity. A couple of superb solo contributions (notably by concertmaster Jonathan Crow and tuba Mark Tetreault) offered respite from a soundscape that was principally loud and cluttered.
Earlier than this we heard Francis Poulenc’s Suite from Les biches, a saucy ballet of 1923. One of the best factor was the Adagietto, an urbanely elegant motion whose title implies no relation to Mahler. Denève’s fondness for tapping on the brakes had some propriety right here.
The live performance started with the Canadian premiere of Les Cités de Lovecraft by Guillaume Connesson, a French professor of orchestration (b. 1970) who put his expertise lavishly to work on this nine-minute suite of impressions ostensibly drawn from the literary fantasies of H.P. Lovecraft. Colors had been ample. Substance was extra elusive. A steadier beat would have helped. Anyway, the shortly fading applause didn’t stop Denève from forcing a curtain name and lifting up the rating triumphantly earlier than the viewers.
There was genuine enthusiasm for Ehnes, a 2023-24 TSO highlight artist. Having performed Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto final October, the Canadian returned with one other American traditional, or perhaps simply semi-classic, Bernstein’s Serenade, a half-hour work of 1954 that makes use of Platonic dialogue as a framework for 5 actions representing contrasting factors of view.
As is perhaps anticipated, Ehnes proved a paragon of heat tone and masterly phrasing — a Platonic splendid, if you’ll. But for all its subtlety, his strategy to “Agathon,” the sluggish motion, was subdued. The upbeat finale — a festivity with a touch of jazz, based on the composer — additionally might have used some additional push.
There may very well be no reservations regarding Ehnes’s magisterial efficiency of Ysaÿe’s Sonata for Solo Violin No. 3, given as a beneficiant encore. This was adopted by the Largo from Bach’s Solo Sonata No. 3, intimately executed.
Maybe Ehnes (and the TSO) may very well be persuaded to program a Canadian piece the following time he visits. Alexander Brott’s uncared for Violin Concerto involves thoughts.
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Arthur Kaptainis was classical music critic of the Montreal Gazette from 1986 to 2022 and wrote for the Nationwide Submit from 2010 to 2016. His articles seem in Classical Voice North America and Gramophone in addition to Ludwig Van. Arthur holds an MA in musicology from the College of Toronto. He’s president of the Music Critics Affiliation of North America.
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