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).
Click here for remainder of article.
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.
Click here for remainder of article.