Festival: TSO's New Creations Festival (Wednesday)

Toronto Symphony Orchestra's New Creations Festival: "Short Ride in a Fast Machine"

Roy Thompson Hall. Wednesday, March 2, 2011.

This is an an expansion of my earlier notes which appeared here.

Spring, with all its symbolism of regeneration, is an apt time for the TSO's annual festival of "new music" — meaning, basically, "classical" music made by people who aren't dead yet and/or are trying to push forward the horizons of the European art-music tradition. Because of its highbrow associations, there's a tendency to think this music has to be approached with some more elaborate conceptual framework — that you have to be learned to "get" it, and that the same instincts that tell you whether or not you dig any other kind of music are suddenly invalid. Well, poo on that — I might not have a lot of aesthetic sophistication, but that's not going to stop me from liking/not liking this stuff.

For the TSO, this is also one of their occasions to try and bring in a different crowd than the older/affluent types who show for the classical repertory. The nights of the festival were each curated as mini-events with a bit more zazz than pomp,¹ so I felt a bit less alienated than I usually do at these sorts of things. K., who kept bringing up The Soup Dragons' "I'm Free" every time the festival's name was mentioned helped to keep me relaxed as well.²

For this night, as a sort of adjunct to The Shaman, the lobby pre-concert show was by the Lightning Bolt pow-wow group. Growing up in the country on the prairies, I've seen a few pow-wows in my time, but this was certainly the by far the swankiest digs I've ever heard the drums in. As the group's voices filled Roy Thompson Hall's north lobby, I looked out the window, over the cold and windswept expanse of King Street and the illuminated PATH stacked below, where a few stray office workers were belatedly making their way to the subway. Meanwhile, my mind turned to memories of scrubby fields, the scent of woodsmoke wafting past, with fires where you could cook bannock on a stick. We live in many worlds all at once.

Then we headed into the hall for the show proper. The first concert of the series opened and closed with works by John Adams, leading off with the eponymous Short Ride in a Fast Machine, which is five minutes of straight-up symphonic go! compressed to popsong length. Backed by a constantly clattering woodblock, this is probably the closest thing you're going to get at the symphony to a "more cowbell" moment, and in its surging gusto, the piece probably owes as much to Carl Stalling as to any "serious" composer. All of which makes it top-notch in my book.

In breaking down the formality of the classical concert, composer Vincent Ho came out on stage to introduce The Shaman and to chat about it a bit. Discussing the idea of the shaman as intermediary to the spirit world, he told the audience that the best approach to the piece is to "treat it as if it's a mystical journey and Evelyn is your guide."

"Evelyn" would be Dame Evelyn Glennie, who is said to be the world's only full-time symphonic percussionist³, for whom this piece was composed. The first striking thing about The Shaman was seeing Glennie's percussion tools on stage — the Brobdingnagian kettle-drums and marimbas engendered a sort of joy just to behold, not to mention a childlike desire to want to leap down onto the stage and have a go.

So, like Short Ride, this had an obvious percussive kick to it — although it started in that quieter, mystical terrain with the music connoting a distant wind and a voice of a howling spirit. For the first few minutes with Glennie leading the charge, it felt like an electroacoustic improvisation. Once the strings kicked in the composer's hand was more strongly felt.

Glennie dashed between her three percussion workstations as the music built itself up. The orchestration during the more roiling segments was sometimes a bit of a mixed bag, with a bit of a "throw in the kitchen sink" sort of feel. Although the busier sections were entertaining just by virtue of Glennie's physicality, I think my favourite part here was the excellent quiet movement (the section entitled "Fantasia – Nostalgia", presumably) where the vibes resonated against the stillness, their sounds hanging in the air — lingering, lingering.

That worked for me more than the unabashed ornamental over-the-topness, but it was hard not to get roused up a bit by the finish. The whole piece went just over thirty minutes, and I found it, outside the one brilliant stretch to be engaging in fits and starts, but the audience liked it and a fair number of people stood to applaud.

After the intermission, the night concluded with John Adams' Harmonielehre — a word that will presumably vex me each time I try to spell it. This half of the night started with an on-stage conversation with Adams. He talked about this early piece (from 1985) being important to him because of how it proved to himself he had a voice as a composer. The compositional novelty is in its "bizarre marriage" of minimalism and motoric gestures with Germanic Romantic music.⁴ He also mentioned the dream-origins of the piece, which set it up well.

After a blasting fanfare, it started with a jarring minimalist riff before finding some Glass-ian repetition. It rolled along like it could have been called "Minimalism!" for almost five minutes before a metronomic marimba urged itself forward. Then came the opposite side of the coin, with the lush romantic theme on the strings — and the rest of the piece was basically those two forces rubbing up against each other in different ways. I found the first movement, going not-quite twenty minutes, to be be both mentally exciting and emotionally elevating.

It was interesting to see the two styles slide against each other in different ways — sometimes one dominating the other, but at a few points feeling more like a mashup of two separate compositions playing simultaneously. I was wearing down a bit by the end of it, but it was rather lovely. And the ending was rousing as hell, creating jagged wakefulness after reverie, and not just for me — as the last notes faded, just on the cusp of the crowd's applause, someone burst forth with a hearty, unsymphonic "yeah!"

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¹ There were also a lot more affordable tickets on offer than usual, which is always a bit of a sticking point for getting out to the symphony.

² K. was also fixated on why, out of all the instruments in the symphony, anyone would choose to play the bassoon. I had no strong counter-argument.

³ This is a unique status made all the more interesting by the fact that Glennie is profoundly deaf. Her "Hearing Essay" unpacks some of the misconceptions around the spectrum of deafness ("something that bothers other people far more than it bothers me") and its relationship to her musical abilities.

⁴ Harmonielehre was also the title of a book on harmonic theory written by Arnold Schoenberg, and hence a nod from Adams to his composition's rootedness in that romantic tradition.