TORONTO — After their usual long summer layoff, the musicians of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (TSO) were back onstage Sept. 25 at Roy Thomson Hall to open their 2024-25 season. Music director Gustavo Gimeno was back, too, after an equally extended absence. Together, they seemed to have no trouble finding the chemistry that carried them through last season. They were all in great form, and a near-capacity audience obviously enjoyed what they heard.
To make sure the TSO audience was wide awake to begin the season, the concert opened with Wake Up! Concerto for Orchestra by American composer Carlos Simon, who hails from Atlanta and has had considerable success with orchestras throughout the United States, often making use of Gospel elements and Latin tropes in his pieces. Wake Up!, composed in 2023, is a true concerto for orchestra, with lots of solos for nearly every instrument or section, including tuba! The mostly rousing piece made an effective, if overlong, curtain-raiser.
I found the lyrical and quieter sections more memorable than the frequent ear-splitting outbursts. Simon used loud repeated notes in brass and percussion as a kind of punctuation, but the effect came to seem more important than what was being said elsewhere. Gimeno and the TSO had no trouble with the complex rhythms in Wake Up! The composer was present to acknowledge the generous applause.
Beethoven’s Concerto for Violin, Cello, and Piano is no masterpiece, but its instrumentation remains novel enough to merit frequent performances. On this occasion, concertmaster Jonathan Crow and principal cellist Joseph Johnson were joined by the celebrated Canadian pianist Jan Lisiecki. All three played brilliantly. The cellist has by far the most difficult part and often has to struggle to be heard. Lisiecki had to be especially careful to adjust his dynamics to allow the cello to come through. It was a fine performance and certainly warranted an encore. The threesome obliged with a meltingly beautiful performance of the slow movement from Mendelssohn’s Trio in D minor, Op. 49.
Lisiecki returns to the TSO in February 2025 to play all five Beethoven piano concertos, conducting from the keyboard, and Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 at another concert conducted by Gimeno.
Mussorgsky and the painter-architect Viktor Hartmann were friends. The composer was greatly impressed by an exhibition of Hartmann’s sketches and paintings presented in 1874 shortly after his friend died. Mussorgsky was inspired to write a suite of piano pieces he called Pictures at an Exhibition, which became perhaps his best-known work. But it was only after Ravel orchestrated the suite that Pictures really achieved widespread popularity. The orchestration was commissioned by conductor Serge Koussevitsky in 1922, and Ravel delivered a spectacular realization. But many others have tried their hand at orchestrating Mussorgsky’s piano suite, including Sergei Gorchakov, whose 1954 version Gimeno chose to offer at this concert.
Among the others are excellent orchestrations by Leopold Stokowski and Vladimir Ashkenazy. There are dozens of recordings of Pictures readily available, but Leonard Slatkin’s with the Nashville Symphony deserves special notice. Slatkin studied all of the versions and settled on a different orchestrator for every movement. Each is intriguing, especially “The Great Gate of Kiev” in Douglas Gamley’s orchestration. Gamley introduces a male chorus singing the Russian hymn “As you are baptized in Christ,” as well as an organ.
Ravel was well known for his great skill as an orchestrator, especially in works like Daphnis et Chloé, La Valse, and Bolero. In Pictures, he memorably uses a tuba in “Bydlo” and a muted trumpet in “Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle.” The Gorchakov version is far less colorful than the Ravel, and, some would say, that is a great improvement because it gets closer to the darker “Russianness” of the original piano suite.
The Gorchakov version begins, like the Ravel, with a solo trumpet playing the “Promenade.” Associate principal trumpet Barton Woomert played it flawlessly. He also had a chance to shine in “The Old Castle” in a melody Ravel famously gave to alto saxophone. Those of us familiar with the Ravel orchestration cannot fail to be surprised by the choices Gorchakov made in his orchestration. He gives some of the “Promenades” primarily to the strings and makes some of these episodes much more beautiful.
On the whole, the Gorchakov is well worth hearing. One cannot really say that Ravel is “better” than Gorchakov, or vice-versa; they are just different and equally satisfying in their own ways. In this masterful performance of the Gorchakov, not only did Gimeno make each movement convincing, but he also tied everything together to make a rewarding whole. The players were with him every step of the way in a performance of virtuosic intensity. No wonder the musicians applauded him at the end. A great way to open the season.
