Featuring the CBC Radio Orchestra. At the Chan Centre for the Performing Arts on Sunday, November 19

One of the drawbacks of reviewing contemporary music, much of which goes unrecorded, is that you only get to hear it once and then it’s gone. But I got to hear Sunday’s matinee concert twice: once at the Chan Centre, then again on CBC radio on my way home. Given the luxury of a second opinion, I confirmed my first: this was an exceptional performance.

Among the thousands of centennial tributes to Dmitri Shostakovich, the CBC’s stands out as particularly inventive. Not content simply to organize concerts of the Russian master’s works, the public broadcaster invited 10 Canadian composers to work up brief pieces based on Shostakovich’s signature “DSCH” motif, a musical monogram based on the notes D, E-flat, C, and B.

Six of these premiered on Sunday and, somewhat perversely, the first three played out like wry commentary on Shostakovich’s opinion of film scoring, a trade he despised yet practised for much of his life. Barenaked Ladies bandleader Andy Creeggan’s introductory DSCH Suite No. 1 would have worked well behind the credits for a French policier. The Gallic waltz of Robert M. Lepage’s Crimes et chí¢timents appears to depict a spring assignation on Montreal’s Rue St-Denis. Douglas Schmidt offered a dark, driving piece, The Shostakovich Project: think car chase. Following this portion of the program, conductor Alain Trudel led the orchestra through snippets of Shostakovich’s incidental music for Nikolai Akimov’s 1932 ballet treatment of Hamlet, interspersed with fragments from the composer’s biography, read by Bill Richardson. Although this music was more evocative of a property dispute between peasants than Oedipal undertakings at Elsinore, it was undeniably well played. (And the conceit of the readings worked even better on radio than in concert.)

The second half offered richer fare. Jocelyn Morlock’s Disquiet suggested a capsule history of the Soviet Union: rising in rugged optimism, plunging into deliquescence, then struggling forward again before evaporating—in this case, beautifully. John Korsrud’s Wood Eye was a tightly written rush of shifting textures. And Michael Oesterle’s Compression offered concertmaster Brent Akins a winding course on which he could display his considerable slalom skills.

The evening ended with cellist ?Yegor Dyachkov joining the orchestra for a sinewy interpretation of Shostakovich’s Violoncello Concerto No. 3 in E-flat major, whose four movements alternate between bleak melancholy and grim determination. It might be a cliché to say that in this work the composer captured the Russian soul—but clichés be damned, he did.