DJ Skratch Bastid Spins with the TSO for opening night of New Creations Festival
Toronto Symphony Orchestra. New Creations Festival: Fragile Absolute at Roy Thomson Hall, Saturday, March 5. Peter Oundjian/Brett Dean (conductors) with DJ Skratch Bastid and Afiara Quartet.
The TSO’s 12th-annual New Creations Festival kicked-off last night with a collection of pieces filed as “Fragile Absolute”. The title was borrowed from a book by Slavoj Žižek about the subversion of the cultural bedrock of western society. Heady philosophical dustups aside, new approaches to classical music have long since attempted to subvert established formal aesthetics. While last night’s programme didn’t exactly overturn anything in the revolutionary sense, they did present some new musical possibilities well worth slipping into.
First was György Kurtág’s “Ligatura – Message-Hommage à Frances-Marie Uitti (The Answered Unanswered Question)”, a spooky miniature by the 90-year-old Hungarian composer. While the TSO waited rapt on a dim-lit stage, an off-stage quartet and celesta played music that discreetly tipped its hat to Charles Ives from the wings.
The music moved seamlessly into Australian performer-composer Brett Dean’s Viola Concerto. With Dean on the solo Viola, the composer led the hazy opening “Fragment” that introduced the primary motives and orchestral colour pallets. All hell broke loose in the second movement “Pursuit”, which had the orchestra chasing the lone Viola like a pack of rabid hunting hounds after an exemplary red fox. Dean lives to tell the tale for the third movement, “Veiled and Mysterious,” which painted the orchestra as an icy landscape.
The intermission made way for the programme namesake by the second Australian performer-composer, Anthony Pateras’ “Fragile Absolute”. Besides the celesta getting a thorough workout, (as inspired by Bartók’s composition Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta) it was a meticulously detailed construction, and according to the programme note, followed a strategy of denying “prescribed ‘musical’ relations.” Audiences heard the onstage electronics gradually chiselled away the form to reveal a piece that slowly let go of its own ideal, and gradually allowed itself to tell its story.
Closing the festival’s opening night was former TSO RBC Resident Composer Kevin Lau’s “Concerto Grosso” for the TSO, DJ Skratch Bastid and the Afiara Quartet. It was an entertaining piece that visibly impressed the audience. Lau has a talent for producing music that could easily double as Hollywood film scores. Similar to his previous efforts (Down the Rivers of the Windfall Light, Foothills in Heaven, Treeship), Lau used big splashes of sound that shimmer like the California sunshine. Unfortunately, Lau missed the opportunity to move beyond the cliché “cool factor” of incorporating niche popular music genres. DJ Skratch Bastid is a musician every bit as earnest as a first chair violinist. Instead, Skratch Bastid (a.k.a.Paul Murphy) was pinned against the orchestra as a kind of campy manufactured antagonist. Unlike others before him (Mason Bates, Gabriel Prokofiev, and Nicole Lizée) Lau fell into the creative ambuscade of using the turntables as something to be exploited rather than explored.
An issue that deserves mentioning is that there are no female composers featured in this year’s festival. For a major Canadian orchestra to completely shut out an entire gender shows a concerning lack of acknowledgement towards the diversity of our community. Let’s hope the TSO are listening. This is 2016, after all.
The New Creations Festival continues through March 12. For tickets and details go to tso.ca.
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