I went to my second TSO concert of the week on Saturday. When I looked over the schedule for the season, this week popped out to me with two interesting programs. I enjoyed the DSO on Thursday and Saturday’s concert featured another piano concerto, this time Chopin’s 1^st. The evening was titled A Star Is Born as it featured members of the Toronto Symphony Youth Orchestra as well as the winner of last year’s Toronto Symphony Volunteer Committee Piano Competition.

The evening started off with O Canada again, weird. Maybe this is a new thing they are trying, but at least it was on the program. After Oundjian said a few words, the TSO along with select members from the TSYO, played Nimrod from the Enigma Variations by Elgar. It was pretty good, although every time I hear Nimrod, I think of Green Day. Next was Chopin’s 1^st Piano Concerto, and while I had bought the CD for it a couple of years ago, I wasn’t familiar with it, so I listened to it a few times before going. The concerto is better than I remembered, although the first movement is structured a bit weird. The second movement also starts off with a very lyrical theme.

The soloist for the Chopin concerto was not as well known as Kuerti on Thursday obviously, however from her bio it was fairly obvious that she is one of those whiz kids that excel at everything. In addition to winning variety of musical awards, she’s won a bunch of medals from the government(s) for excelling in school. She played well for an amateur but she had some technical mistakes with slightly inaccurate jumps and what sounded like tempo (speeding) issues.

After the intermission was Mussorgsky’s Pictures From An Exhibition as arranged for orchestra by Ravel. This seems like one of the TSO’s signature pieces as I’ve seen it on various nights in the season. They were recording it that night too, no doubt it will appear on next season’s TSO CDs.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: classical, concerts, tso