Joonas Kokkonen: Adagio religioso; Helen Grime: Violin Concerto; Mahler: Symphony No. five. Toronto Symphony Orchestra, John Storgårds, conductor; Leila Josefowicz, violin. April eight, two thousand twenty-three, Roy Thomson Hall. Generally viewed as the prerogative of the music director, Mahler can create an equally affirmative impression below the right visitor conductor. Such a visitor was John Storgårds, who led the Toronto Symphony Orchestra on Saturday night through the Fifth Symphony in Roy Thomson Hall. This is one of the grand workouts of the repertoire, particularly for the brass. It says something about the athleticism of Team TSO that the chorale close the finish of this 71-minute performance sounded number less lucid than the interventions of the first movement.
Principal horn Neil Daland (standing in the Scherzo, an increasingly common practice) and principal trumpet Andrew McCandless (brilliant and full-toned in the opening funeral march) certainly earned their ovations. Strings made warm and even shadowy sounds, reminding us in the waltz sequences that this obvious Viennese excellent humour shouldn't be taken as cash. Stressed chords every were forceful yet cohesive. Was there too much storm and stress in the second movement? Since Mahler stipulates that the music should proceed “mit größter Vehemenz,” this isn't an simple opinion to support. Let us declare simply that Storgårds’s aptitude for clear textures gave us an uncensored Mahler experience.
Happily, we'd the opportunity to capture our breath in the Adagietto, lushly done. The program began with something of a post-Adagietto piece, the self-descriptive Adagio religioso movement the Music for String Orchestra by Storgårds’s fellow Finn, Joonas Kokkonen (1921-96). Leading with smooth gestures and number baton, the conductor elicited full sonority at low volumes. Violins were introduced gradually and to excellent effect. This was billed as a N American premiere (literalists should know that I heard the second performance of the program, the first having taken space on Thursday). Another premiere — Canadian — was of a Violin Concerto by a Scottish composer Helen Grime. Leila Josefowicz, an American born in Canada, did the honours. Traditional in its length (twenty-two minutes) and three-part structure, this score of two thousand sixteen is fiercely modern in most other respects.
Opening with alternations of heavy sawing by the soloist and blurts the lower brass, it never departed long this back-and-forth rhetoric, even in noiseless passages featuring percussion, harp and celesta. Josefowicz, strikingly dressed in Ukrainian colours, played with grand passion (and the music), but I'm not sure any application of commitment can create a success of a piece that's so fundamentally unsettled. Even the vestigial cadenza seemed over before it started. Storgårds led the orchestra expertly. Brass played well. The ultimate impression, however, was of a domestic argument in which the participants couldn't even consent to disagree. The substantial crowd gave Josefowicz a curtain call in recognition of her tough work and extroverted stage manner. There was a enormous applause for Mahler.
