Category Archives: Commentaries & Critiques

Gustav Mahler, spiked hair, eye-liner and a necklace of bullets

Luminato ad,Toronto Star, Saturday, 28 May, 2011

The people who created, approved and distributed the ad for Luminato, exhibit a  distressingly high level of  vulgarity and lack of respect.  It looks like something a young school boy would do to a history book photo, but this ad was done, I think, by adults.  There can be no doubt about the ad’s purpose. Explained in words Luminato will understand, it’s to make moola and put butts in seats.

The authors of this ad thought they were doing their job.  Audience attendance at concerts of western abstract art music is generally down and perhaps the clarity and visceral effects achieved by modern recordings and hefty ticket prices have kept young people glued to their iPods and out of concert seats.  Of course there is the recent economic disaster.

All of the aforementioned and many more subtle factors are driving administrators to make ever more desperate attempts to attract audiences and raise money.  Also reasons I believe, for the bewilderingly ugly advertisement reproduced above.

Peter Oundjian was born in 1955 about the time Leonard Bernstein began to bring his Mahler message to the  public. Bernstein’s passion for Mahler precipitated  today’s glut of Mahler music, particularly his symphonies, cycles of which have been made by every conductor with a recording contract.  Mahler was a welcomed financial boost to the recording industry and symphony orchestra attendance. All five of the recent  Royal Conscergebouw Orchestra concerts in Toronto featured a Mahler symphony and all were mostly sold out. The last of these yearly concerts featured Mahler’s Ninth Symphony.

Tim Rice, the former Washington Post, and Pulitzer Prize winning music critic said he’d rather listen to anything by Rossini then anything by Mahler. I happen to agree. And yet I have as many Mahler CDs in my collection as I have of any other composer save some contemporary favorites and a slew of piano pickers. When I ask myself why I collected all these recorded performances, I am reduced to a few basic answers.

Mahler employs vast orchestral resources – who can object to those  hammer strokes of fate? –  and uses them in dramatic ways, usually during climactic movement endings which for length and loudness rival anything in the orchestral repertoire. These are juxtaposed with simple folk tunes,  Klezmer and German beer hall music.  Mahler’s rubatos, combined with passionate string glissandi, contend with any Hollywood depiction of unrequited love. I can only absorb so much of Mahler’s angst. Enough already!  So I listen to  Rossini. (My latest buzz is his opera IL Viaggio a Reims.)

To whom was the Luminato ad addressed? As I gaze at the desecrated face of Mahler, I try to think of anyone I’ve seen at a  Toronto Symphony concert with spiked hair, eye-liner and a necklace of bullets. Or, anyone who socializes with same. The point seems to be, “Let’s shock customers into looking at the ad.” They succeeded. I looked.

The only weakness is the ad’s failure to make me want to attend the concert. Hyperbole. Isn’t it grand? Is hyperbole Mahler’s Fifth or pathetically juvenile marketing stratagems, or both?

The building on Toronto’s Bloor Street West which houses The Royal Conservatory of Music, The Glenn Gould School of Music and the Koerner Concert Hall, is wedged between Philosopher’s Walk and a small, uncovered university stadium.

The Royal Conservatory was raised in Victorian splendor, but in recent years its creaky floors had become a constant reminder of its age and the fragility of its pedagogical standing . A fund raiser was begun to bring the building into the twenty first century.  A modern expansion in stainless steel and sheets of glass was built, the concert hall its linchpin and major attraction.

After a schedule of opening concerts, praise from musicians and audiences was ecstatic. A national newspaper called it “The Temple of Tone”. I suspect there were many  bruised egos in the artistic community  when the performers chosen for  the Hall’s opening season were announced. Some local ensembles, able to afford the higher rent and hoping no doubt to rejuvenate themselves and their audiences, moved their concert series, in whole or part, to Koerner.  Practically overnight, it became the place to play and the hot ticket.

Hyperbole abounds when a new hall is launched. No matter the flaws, it’s new. A lot of money, reputations and hopes rest on its success or perception thereof. If it doesn’t work, well .  .  .  Roy Thompson Hall, the home of the Toronto Symphony, was a good example of the Emperor’s New Clothes. The symphony board of directors was intimately involved with fund raising and a Simpson Co. executive was named point man. One of his most memorable statements was in defense of the acoustician chosen for the concert hall. “Recently he’s had two major failures and Toronto will be the beneficiary of his mistakes”.

A conspiracy settled over the project. Only good news was wanted. Conductors, hastily attached themselves and their organizations to this latest Edifice Complex erection. “Finally we can hear ourselves” said a symphony musician. But it didn’t take long for truth to begin creeping, however slowly, through the cracks in the concrete of corporate, artistic and  administrative hubris. James Galway, new to Roy Thompson and riding the crest of a fabulous career, stunned his audience by saying the hall’s acoustic was terrible and he would never play in the hall again. He didn’t.

After twenty years of silence, Galway’s comment emboldened Toronto’s senior music critic to suggest something should be done to improve the hall. I’m sure his suggestion,coming as it did from a local, had as much effect on the Symphony board and the hall’s subsequent six month renovation as did anything else.

Koerner Hall exists in large part because of  the beneficence of Michael Koerner a resident of Toronto who is an avid supporter of the arts. He and his wife  Sonja gave $8,000,000 towards the Royal Conservatory building fund including a collection of 18th century music instruments.

The Koerner concerts I’ve attended provided a wide spectrum of acoustical challenges: a symphony orchestra, a percussion ensemble, a choir, a violin recital and a piano recital.  The most successful  was the percussion concert. The house was sold out and I was seated mid way on the main floor and clearly heard the strokes of each player and their differences.

My seat for the orchestra concert was two thirds back and in a side box. The house was very close to full. An  accordion concerto was performed  with the composer as soloist. During the entire work,  I could see his feet keeping time, but, aside from a short solo introduction, I did not hear a note from his instrument. Friends in the side balcony experienced the same defect, but friends who sat on the main floor heard everything. The CBC producer told me he had problems recording the soloist because he was seated a couple of feet too far  upstage.

The choir stood on risers at the back of the stage and its sound was clear and fulsome. I spoke with the choir’s director and she told me the risers in that position created the best sound.

For the violin recital the house was full and my seat was five rows from the stage on the left side of the main floor. During the first half, the violin had an unsettling whine, a sharp, almost irritating sound. The tone problems were gone during the second half which was devoted to solo repertoire. The violinist had moved towards the audience about three steps. From my perspective, that’s all it took to correct the problem.

I also sat very close to the stage, again on the main floor, for the piano recital and at one point heard very high harmonics that echoed eerily  after certain chords in the low register. Otherwise, all was clear.

By relating these experiences, my intention is not to suggest Koerner Hall is burdened with its own style of Emperor’s Clothes. It’s far from that. It is a welcome addition to Toronto performing spaces. It seats about 1,100 people which is a perfect size for major chamber music players. But Koerner has acoustical issues that will need to be tweaked. The question is, how long will it take for artists, administrators, conductors and audiences to face up to its flaws and explore corrective modifications?  About ten miles north there is ample reason to act sooner then later.

The George Westin Recital Hall is one of Canada’s and the world’s precious gifts to music. Wigmore Hall in London comes first to mind when I contemplate comparable performance spaces. Yet Westin Is Toronto’s musical remittance man.  Its exile is plagued by location. Anything north of Highway 401, the great multi lane expressway which cuts a swath across the top  of the city, is felt  by concert goers to be a kind of Ultimate Thule.  If they have to go north of the 401, they’d rather go to dinner south of it. Too bad. Westin Recital Hall is a concert hallmark, once experienced, never forgotten.

I began this posting with the idea of writing a critique of Pierre Laurent Aimard’s piano recital. I met pianist Stephen Clarke in the lobby before the concert and his first words were, “This is the do not miss concert”. And it proved to be.