Recording: The GGS New Music Ensemble

Artist: The GGS New Music Ensemble

Songs: Gran Turismo [composer: Andrew Norman] + Dérive II [excerpt] [composer: Pierre Boulez]

Recorded at The Royal Conservatory of Music's Conservatory Theatre, May 5, 2016.

The GGS New Music Ensemble - Gran Turismo

The GGS New Music Ensemble - Dérive II [excerpt]

Under the leadership of Brian Current, the Glenn Gould School's New Music Ensemble continues to thrive, challenging young musicians to tackle intricate works. That was especially evident in the presentation of the sprawling "Derive II", which took up more than half of the programme. "The elementary phenomena of pulsation and repetition are often blurred," the notes mentioned — they seemed to be at a pain to find fancy ways of saying "this has a lot of notes". That fact made this fully satisfying as a technical exercise, in watching the students (plus the inestimable Wesley Shen on piano) hang on to the raft as they shot the rapids, so to speak.

Things were somewhat less frenzied earlier on with Ana Sokolović's Carl Stalling-meets-John Cage "…and I need a room to receive five thousand people with raised glasses", which included some fun extra-musical dramatic flourishes like a twirling conductor and a series of players popping up in their chairs like figures in a Whac-A-Mole game. Andrew Norman's videogame-inspired opener saw eight violin players arranged in a crescent in a piece which spacialized the sound quite nicely in the room, with musical phrases being passed down the line in a musical car chase.

Recording: MG Encore Ensemble

Artist: MG Encore Ensemble

Songs: I Am Concrete [composer: Erik Ross; poetry: Darren O'Donnell] + Retablo: 2nd mvt, "Almayne" [composer: Allison Cameron]

Recorded at The Music Gallery ("X Avant X"), October 16, 2015.

MG Encore Ensemble - I Am Concrete

MG Encore Ensemble - Retablo: 2nd mvt, "Almayne"

This year's X Avant not only celebrated the festival's tenth anniversary, but also the Music Gallery's 40th season. No surprise, then, that the festival incorporated various methods to look back at the MG's legacy. This night, excellently curated by Chelsea Shanoff, paid tribute to the Gallery's place in the local New Music scene, bringing together several pieces that had been commissioned by the Music Gallery along with a couple tributes to noteworthy local composers who had been part of the MG's milieu. The pieces were executed by a fine ensemble of players, including: Wesley Shen (piano), Mara Plotkin (clarinet), Sharon Lee (violin), Bryan Holt (cello), Wallace Halladay (sax, melodica), Xin Wang (voice) and Dan Morphy (percussion).

The first piece here came from 2008's Concrete Toronto Music concert (celebrating the city's brutalist architecture) and is a love song from the sidewalk's perspective ("I am humble/ skin your knees on me") while the second comes from a decade earlier (when the MG was on Richmond Street), commissioned by Martin Arnold's Burdocks ensemble. It's too often the fate of contemporary Canadian chamber pieces to be premiered with some fanfare and then left to moulder in the score library, so it was exciting to see these get a proper "encore". (Arnold's "Rubber Wain", commissioned by the Gallery in 2007, even got a major revisioning, shifting the orchestration toward free reed instruments and giving it a new bounce.)

Recording: TorQ Percussion Quartet

Artist: TorQ Percussion Quartet feat. Greg Oh and Wesley Shen

Song: Workers Union [excerpt] [composer: Louis Andriessen]

Recorded at The Music Gallery, March 6, 2015.

TorQ Percussion Quartet - Workers Union [excerpt]

One of my favourite parts about this 1975 Louis Andriessen "symphonic movement for any loud sounding of instruments" is the instructions contained in its score. Besides setting the mood ("make the piece sound dissonant, chromatic and often: aggressive") is this instruction, which ties its title into a concrete political statement: "only in the case of every player playing with such an intention that their part is an essential one, the work will succeed; just as in the political work."

The members of TorQ brought the right even-handed sense of solidarity to the piece, alongside Greg Oh and Wesley Shen, their evening's collaborators joining in on duelling grand pianos. Tackled by Thin Edge at their recent gig, it was a somewhat unusual scheduling quirk that saw two different groups present the Andriessen piece at the Music Gallery within weeks of each other — a rare chance to compare and contrast the differing approaches each ensemble brought. A new-found familiarity might have helped, but I found TorQ's take to be a bit more engaging.

Meanwhile, the remainder of this gig was equally interesting. The first half was given over to Steve Reich's large-scale "Sextet", which was quite captivating for most of its length; "Urban Wildlife", a new piece from TorQ's Jamie Drake, was also a success with its sounds evoking bird feeder-sabotaging squirrels, sunbeam-seeking cats and garbage-bin conquering raccoons.