Grossmann has brought to the festival a wide personal experience in music-making.Andre Cornellier
- Toronto Summer Music Festival
- The Song of the Earth by Gustav Mahler
- Roxana Constantinescu, mezzo-soprano
- Gordon Gietz, tenor
- Agnes Grossmann, conductor and artistic director
- TSM Festival Ensemble
- MacMillan Theatre
- In Toronto, Saturday night
Agnes Grossmann, born in Vienna, educated there and in Paris, first came to Canada in 1981 and for several years now has made her home in Montreal. For the past five years, she has come to Toronto to alleviate this fair city's annual July-August music drought with the valuable Toronto Summer Music Festival and Academy. Grossmann has brought to the festival a wide personal experience in music-making, a distinctive, cultivated taste, and seemingly limitless energy.
On Saturday night, she bade her personal farewell to the festival, conducting at MacMillan Theatre a much more than creditable performance of the work popularly regarded as Gustav Mahler's masterpiece: Das Lied von der Erde ( The Song of the Earth). This was in the "affordable" and surprisingly effective chamber version begun by Arnold Schoenberg and completed (consulting Schoenberg's extensive notes about the instrumentation) by the German composer and conductor Rainer Riehn.
That Riehn's version for 17 instruments and some additional percussion was able so strikingly to suggest Mahler's magical original - scored for triple winds (with no fewer than five clarinets), and a very large percussion section plus the usual lavish post-romantic array of strings and brass - was remarkable in itself. But much credit must go to the performance by Grossmann and her slim band of players, who gave their hearts, their best skills and their most sensitive Mahlerian ears to the project. Starting with what was a slender, elegant caricature of Mahler's score, they were subtly able to invoke and almost embody the real thing.
The two pleasant young singers entrusted with the exacting vocal roles - Romanian mezzo-soprano Roxana Constantinescu and Canadian tenor Gordon Gietz - had somewhat less to offer a convincing realization of Mahler's vision. Both brought fine voices to bear on their alternating six songs: Constantinescu, a lovely warm timbre, and Gietz, a virile, heroic lustre. But their delivery of the words of Hans Bethge's German translations of the ancient Chinese poems by Li Tai-Po, Chang Tsi and Mong-Kao-Jen lacked communicative clarity. Our best hope was to catch one word in 20 to keep us located in the printed German texts and their English translations. A nice sound, approximate enunciation and a sorrowful pout are not enough to convey the intense and specific emotions of the Abschied ( Farewell, the famous sixth song). The other five songs were scarcely better served, although the picturesque third ( Von der Jugend - Of Youth) had some of the required vivacity from Gietz, and Constantinescu invested the second ( Der Einsame im Herbst - The Lonely One in Autumn) with a decent if generalized melancholy.
The Song of the Earth, for all its considerable charms and substantial length, does not fill an entire evening, so the opening makeweight on the program was a new work by Canadian composer Glenn Buhr, 56, commissioned by the festival and having its premiere.
Titled Red Sea (Song of the Earth), the work takes it cues from the Mahlerian aesthetic and Riehn's chamber orchestra, and sets a prologue, three verses and an epilogue written for Buhr by the Canadian poet Margaret Sweatman.
As makeweight, the new work didn't make a lot of weight, though it was tactfully accessible and adroitly scored, as Buhr's pieces usually are. There's no harm in it, and it does attempt to frame Sweatman's strong concerns over environmental damage. But the nearest thing to a vivid creative stroke comes in the penultimate line of the last poem, which Buhr iterates three times, each at a lower pitch. And the nearest thing to a really touching musical passage is Buhr's quotation from Mahler's Fourth Symphony in the second section. Constantinescu sang the work attractively if not compellingly, and Grossmann and her players found in the sleek scoring all there was to be found.
Special to The Globe and Mail.