This week, the Toronto Symphony opened its 101st season with celebrated pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet as soloist.
Photo: Gerard Richardson
While Thibaudet played brilliantly, it was the orchestra and its masterful conductor who stole the show. In the second half of the concert, the orchestra’s interpretation of Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps practically blew the roof off. The piece’s famously generated confusion and outrage at its 1913 premiere in Paris, when the ballet’s performance, with choreography by Diaghilev, almost caused a riot. The audience reaction was quite different, though, on September 20 2023, when the performance was met with cheers from a crowd who had obviously loved what they had heard.
Orchestras and conductors these days are bending over backwards to make amends for neglecting women composers all these years. And so they should. One piece which is now turning up frequently on concert programs is D’un matin de printemps (Of a Spring Morning), a short piece by Lili Boulanger. Her sister Nadia (1887-1979) was a celebrated teacher and young composers – among them Aaron Copland and Canada’s John Beckwith – flocked to Paris to study with her. Lili was far less well-known but she was at least as gifted as her sister. She concentrated on becoming a composer and focused primarily on religious music. Tragically, she suffered ill-health most of her life and died at the age of only 24. One of her last works was D’un matin de printemps. It was composed originally for violin and piano and later orchestrated. It is a colourful piece not unlike Debussy’s orchestral music and deserves to be in the repertoire. Gimeno and the TSO gave it a beautiful performance.
Jean-Yves Thibaudet has a vast repertoire and he has been delighting audiences around the world for decades now. Among his many interests is jazz and he has recorded albums of the music of Duke Ellington and Bill Evans. The Gershwin Piano Concerto is one of his signature pieces and he plays it with a total understanding of both its jazz and classical elements. There is no improvisation in the piece but the trick is to make it seem as if there is without damaging the form of the work. Thibaudet knows how to do it better than almost anyone. There is a freedom and joy in his playing that recalls the spirit of Gershwin himself. The TSO and Gustavo Gimeno gave him everything he needed to make this a fine performance. The slow movement of the concerto has one of the loveliest trumpet solos in the classical repertoire and Steven Woomert played it to perfection. After the concerto Thibaudet was called back for an encore. He calmed things down with a stately reading of Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte.
With his other orchestra – Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg – Gustavo Gimeno has been recording much of Stravinsky’s orchestral music, including Le sacre du printemps. Generally speaking these are excellent performances, but nothing I have heard on those CDs prepared me for what I heard this week with the TSO. Le sacre du printemps remains daunting in its rhythmic complexity and extreme demands on almost every instrument in the orchestra, But Gimeno and the TSO played this music both with authority and panache. Gimeno was so firm and clear in his beat that there were no rhythmic issues at all. And Gimeno inspired the orchestra to go far beyond that to play with total involvement and, at times, even abandon. And, I must confess that while I have known this music all my life there were things in the score, especially the percussion, that I had either never heard before or never heard realized so brilliantly.
It should be noted that while the Roy Thomson Hall audience went wild after the performance the orchestra played its conductor the highest compliment by refusing to stand for one of the curtain calls. They were saying, in effect, “We know what you did to make us play so well and we like it.”
So the TSO season is off to a great start and tickets should be very hard to come by, at least when Gimeno is on the podium.
Toronto Symphony Orchestra/Gustavo Gimeno, conductor
Jean-Yves Thibaudet, piano
Roy Thomson Hall
Wednesday, Sept 20, 2023
Music by Lili Boulanger, Gershwin and Stravinsky
