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SCRUTINY | Sir Andrew Davis And Toronto Symphony Have An Arresting Way With Beethoven

By John Terauds on May 27, 2017

TSO with Sir Andrew Davis, and Jean-Efflam Bavouzet (Photo: Jag Gundu)
TSO with Sir Andrew Davis, and Jean-Efflam Bavouzet (Photo: Jag Gundu)

Toronto Symphony Orchestra, with pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet and conductor Sir Andrew Davis. Roy Thomson Hall. May 26. Repeats May 27 & 28 (sold out). tso.ca

The concert program at Roy Thomson Hall on Friday night may have been a bit of a mishmash, but conductor laureate Sir Andrew Davis showed he can use any score as his guide to gracefully sculpt the sound of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra musicians on stage.

Did this make for a satisfying concert? Well, yes and no. There were many moments of exceptional beauty, as when walking through an art gallery and pausing to admire this or that work of art. But I came away wondering what the curator may have had in mind in hanging these pieces in the way they were presented.

The way the program repeats on Saturday and Sunday (the last date is sold out) suggests a lack of commitment to this program, as not every audience is going to be hear everything we heard on Friday night.

One thing all patrons will be able to savour is the Toronto Symphony’s balanced, focused sound, honed and displayed for a wider world during their recent tour of Israel and Europe. Freshly re-established in Eastern Daylight Saving Time, the strings sounded particularly cohesive and burnished for a conductor who has had a close working relationship with the orchestra for nearly 45 years.

It was the strings that started the show, with this season’s requisite Sesquie, in honour of Canada’s impending 150th. This one, by Toronto composer Chan Ka Nin, was ambitiously and extravagantly titled My New, Beautiful, Wonderful, Terrific, Amazing, Fantastic, Magnificent Homeland. It takes almost as long to read the title as it does to hear Ka Nin’s almost neo-classically rendered enthusiasm for the country he landed in 52 years ago. Can one really express that much enthusiasm for such a vast country in 4 minutes or less — in something that isn’t an obvious fanfare? Of course not. But it was a pleasant enough little piece, complete with little snippets of our national anthem.

The TSO with Sir Andrew Davis (Photo: Jag Gundu)
The TSO with Sir Andrew Davis (Photo: Jag Gundu)

Those of us who want to encourage more new music at symphony concerts have to scratch our heads and wonder why Ka Nin’s miniature ode will not be heard again on Saturday and Sunday. Because it was commissioned for a specific occasion, it may not be heard again at all. Most of the other Sesquies have met the same fate, not being given the decency of a repeat in the same program. Why are we treating these creations with the same respect as Styrofoam takeout containers?

Friday’s concert continued with a little gem hardly longer than Ka Nin’s Sesquie, by Frederick Delius, a master of subtle musical poetry. Davis used On Hearing the First Cuckoo in Spring as an excuse to show off the most difficult task any orchestra can be handed: to play very softly in perfect balance and tune, conveying colour as well as texture with the volume nearly turned down to zero. It’s a feat made all the more remarkable in a hall with imperfect acoustics. Here, as in the rest of the program, Davis treated the instrumentalists as if they were choristers. The conductor no longer uses a baton, which further underlined the way in which he tried to subtly shape each phrase and highlight this or that nuance in the score.

Davis did the same with one of the best-known piano concertos in the repertoire: Edvard Grieg’s youthful work, written the year of Canada’s first birthday. The soloist was French pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, making his debut with the TSO, five years after first being invited to Ontario by the Stratford Summer Music Festival. Bavouzet brought a similar aesthetic as Davis to the work, looking to plumb expressive possibilities. Unfortunately, Bavoizet pushed his way past thoughtful interpretation into the realm of indulgence. In wishing to contrast exuberance with introspection, the pianist allowed quieter and softer passages to almost disappear, both concerning sound as well as momentum, while crashing through the loud bits with hard-driving intensity. This gave the concerto a Jekyll-and-Hyde quality that I’m not sure it deserves.

Davis is not a conductor attracted to such stark (and sometimes simplistic) contrasts. Instead, he tends to focus on highlighting points of interest, and on building and releasing tension along a long arc, from the beginning to the end of a movement. Nowhere in the concert was this more in evidence than in Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, which received an engrossing interpretation on Friday. The careful teasing of inner orchestral parts and deliberate pacing might have given the interpretation a premeditated feel in less accomplished hands, but the musicians kept everything moving in such a way that the music felt like it was coming off the printed page for the very first time.

Hearing Davis conduct Beethoven’s Seventh is reason enough to try and get a ticket to Saturday’s concert.

One last treat was getting a solo turn from TSO principal flute Nora Shulman, in Charles Tomlinson Griffes Poem. Shulman has been with the orchestra since 1974, and was appointed principal flute by Davis in 1986. She is retiring in the fall, and was given this opportunity to show off her craft. While filled with virtuosic passages for the soloist, Griffes’ Poem is really a piece of chamber music writ large, in the way the soloist is treated as a part of the orchestral whole. All concerned acquitted themselves beautifully in a work that was, whether intentionally or not, a showcase of how, regardless of what a musician’s official job title is, orchestral life is a matter of all for one and one for all.

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