As temperatures plunged into the negative double digits on one of Toronto’s coldest winter nights, the National Arts Centre Orchestra brought a warm, effervescent glow to Roy Thomson Hall.
The single-night concert was not only a smouldering showcase for Canada’s national ensemble, but also a brilliant send-off for Alexander Shelley, the orchestra’s outgoing music director, who was leading them in Toronto for the final time before his tenure concludes this summer.
The two-hour performance was anchored by Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 3.” Conducting from memory, with baton in hand, Shelley drew an august sound from the musicians. The mightily impressive string section, ripping through large chords in the first movement, played with extroversion, yet without ever compromising or straining their sound.
In the slower second movement, the driving melodic engine from the preceding “Allegro Animato” gives way to a heavier, grander theme, with sustained notes lending a sense of solemnity to this funereal march.
Shelley did a fine job accentuating these tonal contrasts between the symphony’s lighter and darker shades, aided by an orchestra that demonstrated impeccable, fine-tuned balance among the various instruments, particularly the strings and brass sections.
Balance, however, was somewhat of an issue during Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Piano Concerto No. 5” in the first half of the program, which featured soloist Jean-Yves Thibaudet.
The French pianist, unpretentious in his playing style, performs with a delicate touch. In the first movement, he takes the concerto’s lyrical melodic lines and gorgeously weaves them in and out of the string accompaniment, like a lilting dance. Later, he draws out the second movement’s Nubian love theme with melancholic plaintiveness. (The piece is nicknamed the “Egyptian” concerto because Saint-Saëns wrote it while he was in the country, drawing from its sounds.)
But Thibaudet’s light touch was at times overpowered by the orchestra’s more muscular accompaniment, even obscuring some of his graceful technical runs.
This was merely a minor fault, however, in an otherwise excellent Toronto program, which opened with Jocelyn Morlock’s “My Name is Amanda Todd,” a Canadian orchestral work that pays tribute to Amanda Todd, the B.C. teenager who died by suicide in 2012 after sharing her story of facing cyberbullying and blackmail.
The National Arts Centre Orchestra commission from 2015, composed with the blessing of Todd’s family, is an extraordinary piece of music. In its first half, it captures a small sense of the torment that Todd experienced. Its dissonant chords are chilling, like a winter’s frost sweeping over a pond, turning water into brittle sheets of ice. Plucked notes slice through the strings.
But in the work’s second half, hope appears out of that darkness — hope in how Todd’s story has resonated with so many Canadians, kick-starting a nationwide conversation about cyberbullying. In the closing seconds of the piece, a buoyant melody emerges, carried by the flutes and piccolos. Even in the desolate heart of winter, spring will always arrive.
