Noteworthy

By Kyle MacMillan

With a catalogue exhibiting a modernist edge, but also a folk sensibility and perhaps surprising approachability, Béla Bartók stands as one of the most respected and performed composers of the 20th century. 

Music Director Gustavo Gimeno and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra will celebrate this Hungarian musical giant on November 21–23 with Brilliant Bartók, a program to be recorded live for the prestigious label Harmonia Mundi. “It’s really a tour de force,” the Spanish conductor said of the lineup. “Lots of layers, colours, effects, and emotions, and it’s definitely very demanding and really engaging for us on the stage and great fun for the audience to witness.”

Two of Bartók’s most popular pieces will be featured—his Concerto for Orchestra, far and away the best-known work in the form, and The Miraculous Mandarin, a one-act pantomime that caused a scandal at its 1926 première. In the case of the latter, orchestras usually perform a suite that contains about two-thirds of the music from the pantomime, but Gimeno has chosen to present the entire work, which runs about a half hour. “To have both pieces in a program is really a statement,” he said.

Serving as a kind of musical palate cleanser between the two Bartók masterpieces is the sediments, a 2021 work by Emilie LeBel, who served as the TSO’s RBC Affiliate Composer from 2018 to 2022. She now holds the post of Composer Advisor, providing counsel on contemporary programming, particularly compositions by Canadian creators, and mentorship to emerging musical voices.  

Gimeno attended the première of the TSO-commissioned work, led by the TSO’s late Conductor Laureate, Sir Andrew Davis, in 2022, and he was taken with it. “I remember right from the very first notes I was immediately engaged and very interested in the composition,” he said. “Maybe it’s good to know a bit about it, but on the other hand, just by the music itself, the textures, harmonies, dynamics, and the arc of it, it’s also very telling.”  

Born in 1881, Bartók was famously influenced by folk music, first venturing into the countryside in 1908 with his lifelong friend, fellow Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály, to collect centuries-old folk songs. His music could be quite experimental, with its complex rhythms and his own distinct mix of tonality and atonality, yet it remains accessible, especially to 21st-century ears used to adventuresome sounds.

The TSO is highlighting concerti for orchestra during its 2024/25 season, with seven such works sprinkled throughout, including Ana Sokolović’s take on November 16 and 17, and Michael Tippett’s Concerto for Double String Orchestra on January 15, 18 and 19, 2025. Instead of spotlighting one or a small group of instruments alongside the orchestra, as in Dvořák’s Cello Concerto or Brahms’s Double Concerto, a concerto for orchestra highlights full or multiple sections of the ensemble.

Bartók wrote his Concerto for Orchestra in 1943, two years before his death, and it has become one of his most popular works. The five-movement piece evokes a panorama of emotions and even quotes a song from Franz Lehár’s operetta The Merry Widow, which was also referenced in Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7 “Leningrad”, which premièred a year earlier. “It’s quite a classically shaped composition but the content is like always with Bartók—folk music, mysterious harmonies, and virtuoso playing,” Gimeno said.

The Miraculous Mandarin dates to the middle period of Bartók’s career. Because of the provocative themes in the story, the pantomime was rarely staged after its première, but its music has lived on with its many evocative orchestral effects, including trills, tremolos, slides, and cluster chords. Gimeno believes it is an even stronger piece than the Concerto for Orchestra. “It may be in a way less accessible, but it’s so incredibly colourful,” he said.  

As noted, the TSO will perform the entire pantomime score, including what Gimeno called a “short but important” choral section at the end that will feature the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir. “It feels different to play a whole piece as it was conceived and not just a highlight version of it,” he said.

The conductor believes it’s impossible for a contemporary composer to escape the influence of Bartók, and he hears certain tinges of the 20th-century creator’s music in the sediments. “I think there are points of contact, but they are also contrasting compositions,” he said. LeBel does not see any direct connection in her work to the Hungarian master, but she notes that he was the first composer she encountered during her college studies who inspired her to become one as well, and she learned a great deal from his music. “There is a personal connection there that no one else in the audience is going to know,” she said. 

Nearly all of the Toronto native’s pieces have a connection to literature or the natural world, and this work can claim both. A key impetus for the piece and the sound world she wanted to create was a quotation from The Sea Around Us (1951), a book by noted environmentalist and writer Rachel Carson: “The sediments are a sort of epic poem of the earth. When we are wise enough, perhaps we can read in them all of past history. For all is written here. In the nature of the materials that compose them and in the arrangement of their successive layers the sediments reflect all that has happened in the waters above them and on the surrounding lands.”   

The sound world of the sediments includes what LeBel described as large, lingering, “almost spectral” chords. They suggest a kind of stasis that is offset by penetrating colours and textures. Particularly important to the work is the large array of percussion instruments it demands, including tubular bells, multiple kinds of gongs, crotales (small tuned brass or bronze disks), and a rainstick. 

The upcoming Bartók recording builds on the TSO’s two prior recording projects with Harmonia Mundi, both featuring other major 20th-century masterpieces—Olivier Messiaen’s epic Turangalîla-Symphonie, which was released in February, and Igor Stravinsky’s ballet Pulcinella.

“We all know what we are going to be facing,” Gimeno said. “We know it’s going to be very intense, but we now have a good degree of confidence in realizing that it will be demanding but, at the end of the week, also gratifying. And in a year’s time when we release the CD, I think we will be very proud.”