Media Reviews
Pleasures within the limits of the middlebrow
ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN
Globe & Mail
Sept 21, 2007
The Toronto Symphony Orchestra began its 2007-08 season on Wednesday with a performance of two middlebrow monuments of the 20th century, Maurice Ravel's Bolero and Carl Orff's Carmina Burana .
Middlebrow is often a term of abuse, but I'm just trying to be descriptive. Both of these pieces present themselves as art, yet are careful not to make any special demands on the listener.
Bolero demands only patience, while Ravel works out his very linear exercise in layered orchestration. When its insistent tattoo had finally stopped, my friend turned to me and said, "The drummer must be so glad when this piece is over!" Bolero is a work whose concept is so clear that, to use Baudrillard's phrase, the music seems to have occurred even before it begins. The redundancy of its structure is nothing compared with the redundancy of hearing it again.
The orchestra played it quite well, from the shy first statement of the theme (by flutist Nora Shulman) to the bossy, sneering flourishes with which the brasses halted the whole mechanism. I especially liked the unnamed saxophonist (the TSO doesn't name extra players in its program) whose suave performance wasn't ruffled at all by a fast switch of instruments.
Like Bolero , Carmina Burana is about doing a lot with little, and not being too fussy about it. It's a characteristic work of the 1930s, when many composers felt the need to become more engaged with the people. A lot of composers these days are trying to do the same thing (or as we say now, to become "more accessible"), which gives renewed currency to Orff's pared-down settings of racy medieval poems.
It's always thrilling to hear a huge orchestra and choir going at full throttle, and Orff's opening salvo ( O Fortuna ) has a kind of terrible majesty that never fades. His piece as a whole is a hodgepodge of styles and attitudes, some stark and modernistic (à la Stravinsky), some operatic, some quite sentimental. One section always reminds me of the cowboy music of Aaron Copland. Not very medieval, but in context, it works.
The TSO's performance with the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir and Canadian Children's Opera Company was always best when Orff was at his most robust. The quieter, slower sections were usually too artful for their own good, as if conductor Peter Oundjian and his colleagues thought they were doing orchestral lieder. Faced with the unpretentious ditty Orff had given him in Omnia sol temperat , baritone Hugh Russell loaded it down with art-song artifice. Countertenor Daniel Taylor played things much straighter, and better, in his solo turn as the roasted swan, though spoiled it somewhat with a hammy conclusion.
Simona Saturova had the right kind of crystalline voice for Orff's virginal style of soprano writing, though her parts of the work were also those in which the composer's vision of a spring awakening seems most cloying. The extreme weightlessness of In trutina was impressive, though I wasn't sure what this effect had to do with Orff's song.
The TSO added Wagner's Act I Prelude from Lohengrin to this program as a tribute to the late Richard Bradshaw. Apart from some indecision at the beginning and end, and too little dimension in some of Wagner's long phrases, Oundjian and the orchestra sounded as much at home with the accumulative beauties of this score as with the fizzy pleasures of Carmina Burana.
