Opinion | ‘It’s a pleasure to see you’ – TSO and National Ballet welcome audiences in person for the first time in more than 20 months

Standing ovations usually follow a performance. The opposite occurred Wednesday night when musicians from the Toronto Symphony Orchestra took the stage for the launch of their 2021-2022 season, and for several compelling reasons.

Despite maintaining a public presence through online concerts, live drive-ins, and a variety of community-oriented events, this was the first time the TSO played for an in-person audience at their Roy Thomson Hall home in more. 20 months. No one seemed bothered that the program started 20 minutes late due to the ridiculous time it took to check clients’ vaccination passports. This was an eager audience excited to be pleased.

The evening also marked the first time that 45-year-old Spanish conductor Gustavo Gimeno officially took over as TSO’s musical director, the 10th in the orchestra’s 100-year history. When the graceful Gimeno made his entrance, the continuing ovation increased audibly. As he explained the next morning, Gimeno has had several opportunities during the pandemic to perform in-person performances in cities on both sides of the Atlantic, but the enthusiasm of the Toronto audience and the personal understanding that he was finally taking the helm of the TSO brought a lump in the throat.

“I was overwhelmed,” Gimeno said. “It was a unique and wonderful moment, as if the last 20 months had been a nightmare and now we have woken up.”

Based on preliminary evidence from this week’s show, Gimeno’s precisely deployed baton may inspire the TSO to moments of exceptional musicianship. Gimeno has made it clear that he is in favor of mixing things up. Thus, the uninterrupted program of about an hour — Haydn, Hindemith, Schubert, and a recent composition by American composer Anthony Barfield — spanned more than 240 years of Western musical history.

Given the uncertainties of public health mandates, the concert was planned months in advance to allow a degree of physical distancing between the players, some in masks; others, such as various delinquent audience members, do not – and must be compact in length. A smaller orchestra limits the programming options.

Every orchestral concerto today has to bow to a new work, but the choice of Barfield’s “Invictus” (Unconquered), scored for a 15-piece brass ensemble, albeit reduced to 12 players here, proved puzzling. It was composed in the summer of 2020 as a “pièce d’occasion” aimed at a New York audience and reflecting difficult times, a horrendous pandemic of the dead and Black Lives Matter, but also paying tribute to the resistance of the iconic city in between. of adversity. Check out the online recording of the Lincoln Center Plaza outdoor premiere and you can feel its original power and imagine its impact on a citizenry that has been stretched to the breaking point. But today, in cozy Toronto? Not that much.

Joseph Haydn’s Overture to “L’Isola disabitata” (literally, the uninhabited island) revealed the Austrian composer in a mood of light and shadow more emotionally animated than one associates with this bastion of musical classicism. Gimeno led his orchestra through a lucidly detailed performance that is noted for its keen attention to dynamics.

“Concert Music for Brass and Strings, by Paul Hindemith, op. 50 ”was possibly the highlight of the evening, demonstrating Gimeno’s firm understanding of the architecture of a work, founded in this case on a harmoniously modernist conversation between two contrasting orchestral sections. Given its shifting rhythmic complexities, it’s a work that can easily jump the rails, but Gimeno kept it firmly on track, meanwhile, uncovering dazzling details in the score that all too often get lost in confusing performances.

What about Franz Schubert’s all-too-familiar “Symphony No. 5” other than that if one were looking for a catchier title, “Mozart on my mind” would do very well? It is not a bad symphony. It’s just that his boyish adulation of Mozart leaves a longing for something more convincingly Schubertian. It was played elegantly, but it was still a somewhat flat ending to the night.

On Thursday night it was the turn of the National Ballet of Canada to launch its 2021-22 season, as the TSO after a 20-month absence from its local headquarters, the Four Seasons Center, but with only a 10-minute delay in the vaccination passport record.

“Welcome back,” was the slogan emblazoned on the front curtain of the room. “Nice to see you,” was the simple but heartfelt greeting from company CEO Barry Hughson as he later stepped out to talk about what appeared to be a sold-out crowd. Unlike the TSO, which is currently holding at 60 percent capacity, the National Ballet is taking advantage of the latest guidelines to potentially sell at 100 percent.

The program itself, however, was planned in the spring amid continuing uncertainty about what could be afforded in the fall; thus a fairly short program without intermission of two one-act ballets separated for logistical reasons by the projection of “Soul”, a short work that the National Ballet commissioned more than a year ago from the choreographer Jera Wolfe for its virtual programming. Its small cast of two couples is a reminder of the rigorous public health guidelines in place when “Soul” was recorded. His frame of mind speaks of a longing for human connection that prevails throughout the pandemic.

Ballets are programmed not only to attract an audience, but because a great company must keep busy. This dual project of the now iconic “Serenade” by Russian-American choreographer George Balanchine from 1935 and the work commissioned by Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite’s “Angels’ Atlas” from February last year qualifies on both counts. Outnumbered, the men play a supporting role in “Serenade.” In “Angels’ Atlas,” they have the same presence.

Both are, in different ways, enigmatic ballets. It is useless to try to attribute a specific meaning to either of the two. Joy and sadness, encounters and farewells, life and death, signs of divinity? There is plenty of room for speculation but, like music, these ballets are felt not by reason but by instinct. Regardless, both are deeply absorbing jobs and the National Ballet dancers gave them everything they had.