Esprit Orchestra. Sunday, 4 October 2015, at Koerner Hall.
Esprit Orchestra unleashed their 33rd season Sunday evening at Koerner Hall with an active, colourful programme of works by Di Castri, Adès, Daniel and Widmann, generating a sparkle of intrigue for the resilient new music orchestra’s 2015-16 ventures.
Esprit Board of Directors Chair Helene Clarkson prefaced the concert with a few remarks about Esprit’s 33rd season, noting the powerful and mystical numerological properties of the number. While I would hesitate to describe this concert as mystical or powerful, the music on Sunday evening contained the folkloric, the grotesque and the bawdy during what I would describe as Esprit’s most evocative concert in recent memory.
The concert opened with Canadian rising star Zosha Di Castri’s 2013 piece, Lineage. As the title suggests, Di Castri’s music attempts to trace ties with a forgotten, even imaginative past, and included references to folk music, haunting chorales and alternating moments of intense orchestral sparseness and density. In this context the piece failed to impress, as beautiful well-crafted moments and gestures failed to culminate into an impressionable whole. Di Castri’s music continues to generate interest and is worth keeping an eye on, though I was unable to wrap my head around Lineage.
Next was British warhorse composer Thomas Adès’ suite, Dances from “Powder Her Face”, a chamber opera about the sexual exploits of the Duchess of Argyle, and notable for being banned to air on Classic FM for its overt musical depiction of fellatio.
Adès’ music proceeds in a similar vein to the opera, presenting a raunchy, 20th century update to Tchaikovsky’s ballet dance suites. No sugar plum fairies here, though: Adès instead evokes dingy cabaret bars and worn-out dance bands, a conjuration which Esprit and conductor Alex Pauk performed with barely-contained glee.
Next up was Esprit’s commission by Omar Daniel, a sinfonia concertante titled Mehetapja Meeli Unistus (The Husband Killer’s Dream) and based on an unsettling Nordic folk tale. Daniel’s designation of sinfonia concertante seemed a bit formalized for this evocative, story-telling piece, which the orchestra highlighted with a percussion battery of mallets, wooden boxes and chilling sleigh bells. The high point of the piece included a section of languid drones by the low brass and strings, invoking a strange, frozen wasteland.
The highlight of the concert was Jörg Widmann’s 2008 piece, Con Brio. Life is tough being an orchestra composer in the 21st century – even worse is being a German composer living and working and Germany, with the ghosts of old Beethoven, Bach and Brahms hovering over your shoulders even in this postmodern, post-tonal musical landscape.
Luckily, composers like Widmann have a sense of humour, or we might all be in trouble.
Widmann’s Con Brio stole motives from Beethoven’s 7th and 8th symphonies (from the con brio movements, of course) and melded it with equally forthright contemporary symphonic gestures, including choirs of wind-players blowing into their instruments and string players ricocheting their bows violently on the strings. The result was energetic, cheeky and humorous, like a revolving door of over-the-top characters in a comedic theatre production.
Esprit Orchestra’s concert series continues November 15th with “Play”, a programme with music by John Rea, Andrew Norman and more music by Thomas Adès.
- PREVIEW | U of T Faculty of Music Brings Salvatore Sciarrino to Toronto - January 27, 2017
- PREVIEW | The Music Gallery Gears Up For The Viking Of 6th Avenue - November 25, 2016
- SCRUTINY | Esprit Orchestra Salutes The Legacy Of R. Murray Schafer - October 28, 2016
