Noteworthy

There is a tendency to think of music as something we hear and dance as something we see. In the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s upcoming Petrushka & Passions of Spain, that distinction gets enticingly slippery. Here, a clarinet dances, a flamenco voice gives shape to a ghost story, and an orchestra brings a wooden puppet startlingly to life.

Marking the 150th anniversary of the great Spanish composer Manuel de Falla’s birth, the evening places his El amor brujo at its centre. Around it gathers the music of Falla’s world: Spanish song, dance and flamenco traditions on one side, and the modernist energy of early-20th-century Paris on the other.

Taken together, the works offer a robust portrait of Falla, while exploring a shared fascination with how music can create movement, character and life.

First, Make It Dance

To understand Falla’s music, it helps to begin with the musical culture he draws from.

TSO Principal Clarinet Eric Abramovitz opens Petrushka & Passions of Spain with José González Granero’s Canto y Danza, an unaccompanied work whose title translates simply as “Song and Dance.”  With no orchestra or conductor behind him, one clarinet has to manage both.

For Abramovitz, the connection between playing and movement begins with breath. “Like a dancer’s movements, the air of a wind player is always in motion,” he says. “Whether intensifying or relaxing, it is never static.”

In the piece, Granero draws on Spanish music without quoting specific folk melodies, leaving much of its character in the hands of the performer. Abramovitz, in turn, approaches it almost like a language, listening for its “speech/language, rhythm, character and colour,” an instinct he developed as a player and composer of klezmer music.

Through, the clarinet moves between the two roles promised by the title, from lyrical, song-like passages to music with the agility and momentum of dance. It is that dancing material that returns near the end, only now it seems to be moving farther away. The pitches gradually disappear until there is little more than air passing through the instrument, “as if the dancers are disappearing in the distance,” Abramovitz says.

It is a striking image: an absent body made visible through sound.

A Ghost in the Room

In El amor brujo, Falla takes that idea into more complicated territory. The body is gone, but its presence is very much alive.

At its heart, El amor brujo is a supernatural love story. Its protagonist, Candelas, is a young Andalusian Romani woman haunted by the jealous ghost of her dead husband. She loves another man, Carmelo, but the spectre refuses to release his hold on her.

Song, dance and ritual become the means through which Candelas tries to free herself. And Falla draws deeply on flamenco to tell that story, particularly cante jondo, or “deep song,” a tradition associated with grief, longing and mortality — granting the drama its emotional language.

That language is still evolving more than a century later.

María Toledo, the Spanish flamenco singer and pianist performing El amor brujo with the TSO, has carried the work with her for more than a decade. “I’ve been singing El amor brujo for half my life,” she says. “This work is part of me.”

For Toledo, what Falla puts on the page is not a tradition frozen in time. “Flamenco is the musical genre that is constantly evolving,” she says. Falla’s achievement, in her view, is creating something that can continue to change with it. His greatest legacy is that “he left it written down,” she says, allowing musicians to “reinterpret it for a lifetime.”

Toledo’s own performance becomes part of that continuum. She combines classical conservatory training with the flamenco she has known since childhood and, in Petrushka & Passions of Spain, extends that conversation with Con el tiempo, one of the first songs she composed. She accompanies herself at the piano, an instrument so closely associated with her work that she calls it her “signature.”

It is a reminder that the flamenco tradition Falla drew from has continued to move in the century since El amor brujo. But bringing that tradition into the present also means bringing it into new spaces.

The Duende Can Appear Anywhere

Flamenco is often experienced at close range, in venues such as a tablao where there is little distance between artist and audience. Roy Thomson Hall places Toledo’s voice in a very different environment, surrounded by the scale of a symphony orchestra.

What happens, then, to that intimacy?

“The duende can appear anywhere,” Toledo says.

Duende resists a tidy English translation. Within flamenco, it describes an elusive expressive force: the emotional charge that can emerge in performance and pass between artist and audience.

Toledo acknowledges that proximity can make that connection easier, but does not see intimacy as simply a matter of distance. “The emotion comes from within you,” she says, “and you have to be able to transmit it wherever you are.”

That idea is particularly apt for El amor brujo. Falla takes music rooted in a deeply embodied tradition and gives it a form that can travel: across performers, generations and, in this case, into the symphony hall.

The concert’s final work places Falla in another kind of conversation altogether.

A Puppet with a Problem

The move from Falla’s Spain to Stravinsky’s Russia might initially seem like a sharp turn. But what makes the pairing so rewarding is discovering how closely their musical worlds intersected.

The connection runs through Paris. Falla and Stravinsky both spent time in the French capital in the early 20th century, when it was one of the centres of the musical world. They knew and respected one another, and both were shaped by the French music and modern ideas surrounding them.

That makes the pairing particularly rewarding. Falla’s music is deeply Spanish at its core, drawing on folk traditions, flamenco and the music of southern Spain. But around that core, he absorbed the orchestral colour and modernity he encountered in Paris. Hearing Stravinsky alongside him helps bring that other side of Falla into focus.

Petrushka makes the connection especially vivid. Stravinsky created the ballet in 1911, setting it amid the commotion of a Shrovetide Fair in St. Petersburg. Among the merchants, dancers and entertainers, three puppets are brought to life. Petrushka has the unfortunate problem of developing very human feelings while remaining trapped inside a puppet’s body.

He falls in love, suffers rejection and humiliation. Around him, the fair carries on.

That collision between private heartbreak and public spectacle gives Petrushka its peculiar emotional pull. It also takes the concert’s fascination with music and movement to its largest scale.

Across Petrushka & Passions of Spain, music keeps finding ways to become physical: a dancer suggested by a clarinet, a ghost summoned by a voice, a wooden puppet made startlingly human.

The notes are already on the page. The task is to make them move.

Jonathan Dekel is a Toronto-based journalist. His work has appeared in The Globe and Mail, National Post, Toronto Star, and on CBC.

Eric Abramovitz is the Sheryl L. and David W. Kerr Principal Clarinet Chair.