If you’re going to attend one Toronto Symphony Orchestra concert this year, make it this one. There’s nothing like leaving Roy Thomson Hall with your feet six inches off the ground — especially when it’s snowing.
Igor Stravinsky
Stravinsky genius and a great TSO
JOHN TERAUDS [Toronto Star, 10 Mar 05]
If you're going to attend one Toronto Symphony Orchestra concert this year, make it this one. There's nothing like leaving Roy Thomson Hall with your feet six inches off the ground -- especially when it's snowing.
It was an all-Stravinsky program the TSO presented last night, under the baton of Gianandrea Noseda, a young, patrician Milanese-born conductor who held the music and musicians in absolute control. The concert repeats tonight, offering Torontonians another earful of Stravinsky's genius, as expressed in his short, three-act opera The Nightingale (premiered in Paris in 1914) and the Symphony in Three Movements (debuted in New York, in 1946).
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From Rusia with Love and Harmony
ROBERT EVERETT-GREEN [The Globe and Mail, 12 Mar 05]
The Russian aristocracy's fondness for fairy-tale theatre must have seemed bitterly apt to the hard-headed Soviet regime that followed. But the czarist taste for the marvellous gave us the Tchaikovsky ballets, several fantastical operas by Rimsky-Korsakov and Stravinsky's Firebird.
The Toronto Symphony Orchestra revived a rare specimen from that era on Wednesday and Thursday, in two performances of Stravinsky's Le Rossignol. This pocket-sized opera, based on Hans Christian Andersen's The Emperor and the Nightingale, drew a large and curious crowd of musicians, Russian émigrés and thrill-seeking listeners under 30.