Toronto Symphony Orchestra with conductors Victor Feldbrill and Alain Trudel, and soloist Alain Lefèvre. At Roy Thomson Hall. January 21.
The classical Canadian top 40 is not an especially competitive list, perhaps owing to our national habit of commissioning premieres rather than reviving scores of proven worth. On Saturday the Toronto Symphony Orchestra brought some former favourites to the stage of Roy Thomson Hall as a means of launching its Canada 150 celebrations.
It was an interesting night for a few reasons, including the appearance on the podium of 92-year-old Victor Feldbrill. He was an authoritative choice of conductor of the suite from John Weinzweig’s Red Ear of Corn – and not only because he participated, as a violinist, in the 1949 premiere of the ballet in the Royal Alexandra Theatre.
With his upright stance, steady beat and close observance of the score, the snowy-haired veteran was a throwback to a day when doing your job was paramount, and looking good while doing it was a natural byproduct. He liberated the colour and counterpoint of the (non-serial) music as well as its balletic rhythm. The hoe-down-ish Barn Dance might be the best-known movement, but I found the central Ceremonial Dance more intriguing, with its subtle use of timpani to evoke Iroquois influence. Interest in First Nations culture was not invented yesterday.
The longest piece on the program (given without intermission) was the 23-minute Rhapsodie romantique of André Mathieu. A prodigy who was recognized as such in Paris and New York, this Montreal pianist and composer (1929-68) eventually went to seed, but not before writing some fetching music in Rachmaninoff mode. No one could call this reconstruction by Gilles Bellemare a masterpiece of architecture, but it was ravishing one minute at a time, especially as played by Mathieu’s modern-day champion, the pianist Alain Lefèvre. His singing tone and sure feeling for late-romantic curvature were entirely in keeping with the idiom. The sizeable crowd seemed happy with what they heard.
On the podium for this was another Montrealer, Alain Trudel, former conductor of the Toronto Symphony Youth Orchestra. He kept the pot simmering in Mathieu and evoked the pastoral colours of Jean Coulthard’s Introduction and Three Folk Songs from Canada Mosaic.
The evening opened, appropriately enough, with the singing of God Save the Queen and O Canada, followed by comments in English and French by the Lieutenant Governor Elizabeth Dowdeswell. We also heard a brief fanfare written by Trudel, which included some oddly sinister allusions to O Canada.
First of the repertoire pieces was Godfrey Ridout’s joyous Fall Fair of 1961, followed by Pierre Mercure’s Kaléidoscope of 1949 (the latter arguably No. 1 on the classical Canadian hit parade, even if Claude Vivier’s Orion is now posing a challenge). Trudel led orderly but tame performances — the Ridout short on Elgarian expansiveness and the Mercure short on Stravinskian energy. Indeed, the orchestra itself was at about two-thirds strength. Are four double basses really enough in Roy Thomson Hall?
Our host for the evening, Tom Allen, spoke with equal haste in English and French. For more information on the TSO’s federally-funded Canada Mosaic programming, go to canadamosaic.tso.ca. Take note also of performances on Feb. 4 and 5 of Mathieu’s Concerto de Québec by Lefèvre with the Buffalo Philharmonic under its music director JoAnn Falletta. To judge by Google Maps, the drive from Roy Thomson Hall to Kleinhans Music Hall costs you one hour and 44 minutes.
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