Vancouver Symphony Orchestra opener finds fun amid precision and passion

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      A Vancouver Symphony Orchestra presentation. At the Orpheum on Friday, September 22. No remaining performances

      A season opener, for a major arts organization such as the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, doubles as an entertainment and a statement of purpose—and on both counts the first concert of the VSO’s 2017-18 campaign can scarcely be faulted.

      So what did Friday night tell us? That the VSO is committed to fun. That it’s also capable of playing the most complex contemporary music with passion and precision. And that it can revert to some of the most familiar works in the classical canon and make them, if not exactly new again, living works of art.

      Let’s get to the fun first—a decision VSO music director Bramwell Tovey made by programming his own Time Tracks as the opening opus. The premise behind Time Tracks is, admittedly, not all that comical: it’s extracted from Tovey’s opera The Inventor, which tells the story of Sandy Keith, a 19th-century con man and fantasist. Keith, it should be remembered, committed suicide after causing an explosion that killed 80 people—and in Time Tracks we get that explosion, generated primarily by the VSO’s exemplary percussion section, with timpanist Aaron McDonald leading the way.

      But we also get a kaleidoscopic tour through the music of Keith’s era and slightly beyond, a steampunk re-envisioning of Victorian salon music, ragtime, military-band pieces, early jazz, and the sweet-sour harmonies of Kurt Weill—along with melodies so evocatively played we can almost hear the singers.

      Dale Barltrop and the Australian String Quartet.

      True, it’s a magpie’s piece, with its invocation of multiple musical styles, but what better way to adorn a gala than with something that glitters?

      There’s also something glittering about John Adams’s Absolute Jest, in which the California-based composer surrounds a core of motifs borrowed from Ludwig van Beethoven with a sonic penumbra of his own devising. But where the shining in Tovey’s piece is mostly attributable to the composer’s wit, in Absolute Jest it’s animate—in the form of a cloud of orchestral textures that surround the work’s musical core, performed here by the lightly amplified Australian String Quartet. These textures morph and twist and glow, like a murmuration of starlings shining in the sun or a school of perch coursing through kelp, and Adams shows his minimalist origins by keeping the music moving inexorably forward. Minimalist, however, no longer serves to adequately describe this composer, who has gone beyond schematic abstraction to create gorgeous and challenging sonic ecosystems.

      Fronted by first violinist and former VSO concertmaster Dale Barltrop, the ASQ performed impeccably in the soloist’s role, delivering the Beethoven quotes with suitable gravitas and Adams’s extrapolations with fierce focus. Percussionist Vern Griffiths also shone, playing an Indonesian bonang (a rack of kettle gongs) that added a surreal layer of alternative intonation to the music.

      And then, after intermission, came Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 in E Minor—a finale that initially irked this listener, who would rather have gone off into the night still savouring Adams’s complexity. Tovey and the VSO soon won me over, however, taking the piece at an almost contemplative pace that allowed its rich textures to fully bloom—and that spotlit the sublime sound of the orchestra’s brass section.

      Wit, adventure, and a warm place to recover: who could ask for anything more?

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