Since Peter Oundjian became music director, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra has launched itself into each new year with a Mozart festival. This year’s edition, Mozart@256 — three programmes spead over seven concerts — kicks off with a piano extravaganza headlined by Leon Fleisher on Wednesday at Roy Thomson Hall.
Meanwhile, across the continent, Los Angeles Philharmonic music director Gustavo Dudamel is about to occupy Disney Hall with a Mahler Festival. As the LA Phil’s website proclaims in bold capitals: “9 symphonies; 3 weeks; 2 orchestras; 1 conductor.”
(The second orchestra is Venezuela’s Simón Bolivár Symphony Orchestra, which gets a reciprocal visit from the LA Phil next month.)
The two festivals represent the extremes of classical stuntcasting.
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
Toronto offers a safe, friendly, accessible dip into Mozartean waters that is keen to showcase a variety of veteran and young talents. There’s even a Saturday children’s programme thrown in for good measure.
Meanwhile, Los Angeles throws out a monster dare to all: Come hear some of the Western canon’s most challenging symphonic works in a marathon presentation by a daredevil 30-year-old who is going to conduct them from memory.
As Los Angeles Times’ critic Mark Swed reporter on Sunday, in an excellent feature:
“It’s a physical challenge. It’s a spiritual challenge,” Dudamel says, looking a little awe-struck. And he describes mental exercises he has devised to help him prepare. “I’m studying almost every day a different symphony, not returning to any one for a week,” he says. Sometimes he will pick a movement randomly to “check to see if things are here in my brain.”
The Mozart and Mahler festivals are two prime examples of what we could call the critical mass method of marketing classical music.
One is a a variety pack of possibilities, the other a compulsive completist’s dream challenge.
Dudamel’s Mahler bonanza is like sitting through a full Wagner Ring Cycle, a week-long Fellini retrospective or spending three days at Monet’s house and garden in Giverny. These are immersions that scrape every crumb of possibility off the tablecloth of our cultural buffet.
We confront the artist, their context and their work with an intensity and focus that have the potential to change our relationship to art, and to each other.
There is hardly a major arts insitution in the world that doesn’t attempt this sort of critical-mass programming once in a while. The Toronto Symphony’s recent heavy-duty efforts include the season-starting double-bill of Lang Lang performing all of Beethoven’s piano concertos and the immensely satisfying Sibelius festival organized around conductor Thomas Dausgaard two seasons ago.
But then there is the Mt. Everest side to the programming. If something is a significant challenge to the performers, pushing their endurance and expressivity, what does that do to the audience?
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To add some music (as well as more words) to these thoughts, here is an hour of a Young People’s Concert presented by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic in 1960:
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
