MRDe-music review: Beethoven 6 and other works not worth listing in the programme name
The Toronto Symphony Orchestra
Peter Oundjian, conductor
Robert McDuffie, violin
Dec. 9 2009 (Wed.) 8 pm
Roy Thomson Hall
Christopher Theofanidis: Rainbow Body
Philip Glass: The Four Seasons
Beethoven: Symphony No. 6, "Pastoral"
I learned something tonight ...
"What is that thing, o do tell" I hear my innumerable fan say.
It is that it's really amazingly difficult to hear, let alone properly listen to, music in a concert hall with cows in it.
Yes, cows ...
Given that it the good ol' Canadian sickness season, I expected sniffling and hacking from those unable to dose themselves up properly with cold supressants prior to the show. But a herd of cows, ceaslessly lowing at one another as the music started and all through the first half of the program ... that I was unprepared for.
Perhaps I should have been impressed by the fact the entire mass of ruminants managed to squeeze themselves into little black cocktail dresses. Or that one of these escapees from the dairy factory floor managed to operate a cell phone well enough to turn it to vibrate and text incessantly. But I was not ... for that is not the akmazement that interests me in a concert hall. A cell-phone using cow in a fair, that's different.
On to the concert impressions ...
Christopher Theofanidis's Rainbow Body started with some interesting effects in the brass; accented notes from the muted trumpets or trombones echoed immediately ...
Mooooo ..... mooo ...
... by the horns, then a hushed statement by strings of a theme by Hildegard von Bingen. A promising start, but a tsome point not to far in an isolated and jarring single note on the piano seemed to herald the point where ...
mwaaaa ..... mooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
... the work seemed to loose steam. As one of my fellow concert-going friends ...
mmmooooooo ..... giggle giggle .... mooo
... put it (to paraphrase), it's like the composer assembled a list of things they liked in other composer's pieces then ...
click click .... mooooooo.... [nasty glare]
... strung them together. Not a particularly gripping work, but the orchestra was well used through the bulk of it.
For the bulk of it ....
bzzzzzz .... bzzzzzz ... mooooooooooooooo .... {key clicks}
until a final peroration, a restatement of the Bingen ...
mooo ... mreoooow ... mooo
... theme rising out of the barnyard noise. Everyone played really loud and the percussionists hit their percussiony thingees and made more noise.
One who has practiced orchestration could say that that percussion can be used to give the impression of a climactic moment, but that this is cheap way to a peroration. That could be said, but I couldn't possibly comment on that myself.
Then followed the new Violin Concerto, The Four Seasons, by Philip Glass ... a more introvert ...
moooo .... hahahahah .... [nasty glare] .... mmmooooooooo
... work than I expected, as it was written to be paired with Vivaldi's extroverted The Four Seasons. Each of the four movements was preceeded by an unaccompanied solo violin section (a "song"). The first 2 movements ...
mmmo ...... ooo .... moooooooooooooooo ... click click click
... were quiet, downtempo, the small string-only ...
mwwwooouuuuu .... moooooooo ........
...orchestra employed allowing the solo violin to be heard with no balance issues, the small ensemble ...
mooo ...... moooooo ..... bzzz bzzzzz ..... SSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!! [nasty glare]
... imparting a chamber music feel to the dialogues and occasionally contrapuntal relationship between the soloist and the ensemble. The ...
mmmoooooooomooooooooo ....... click click
... third and fourth ...
click click clickkk .... bzzzz ..... mooooooo
... movements, energetic, rhythmically vital.
bzzzz ..... mooooooo ..... mmmoooooooomooooooooo ....... click click ...... ooo .... moooooooooooooooo ... click click click
In summary, as the incessant calling of the hooved heifers has again distracted me, the parts of this work I heard were nice ... however, introverted works don't sound well in a barnyard. I will thank to my dying day the be-cocktail dressed cattle present, seated in section C5 Row F (I didn't get the seat numbers) of Roy thomson Hall on the 9th day of December anno 2009, for taking what could have been a pleasant memory and bedecking it with their excrementally poor behaviour.
Intermission, and a quick word with customer service resulted in new seats for the second half and the Beethoven Pastoral Symphony. The incessant and inappopriate mooing was gone, and Beethoven's sonic vision of nature was left alone, its cookoos and birdcalls unsullied by the bleating of bovine simians. Cleanly played, unlike the Shostakovich performance I recently reported on, this performance allowed one to enjoy the interplay between solists and instrumental sections, and take in the solid architecture of the work. Oundjian's opening comments, in which he alluded to the similarites between Beethoven's use of repetition in the Pastorale and the processes used by Glass in his "minimalist" style, were also aptly demonstrated.
It was, despite the weakness of the opening piece, an interesting concert. The pairing of Beethoven and Glass was a felicitous one, as it illustrated clearly both the continuity and the massive stylistic changes that are part of the long and varied european-american concert music tradition.
EDITOR'S NOTE: We wish to apologize to cows everywhere for the content of this review. We intended no insult to cows, which we know to be well behaved animals aside from their regrettable tendancy to defacate in public view, unlike the aforementioned ill-mannered audience members (who, frankly, had less ability to comport themselves genteely in public than did a three-year-old child with ADD) characterized above as cud-chewing idiots.
Sorry cows ... and to, by extension, other barnyard creatures ... for the truly demeaning analogy.
If you wish to, contact MRD ... for any reason ...
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