On Thursday, I went to the TSO with Ben, Victor and some of his friends. I didn’t have this performance circled as one of my must-attends because it wasn’t a well-known soloist, nor was the program especially appealing. But it’s hard to say no to TSO!

The first piece was the Canadian Premiere of Chinese composer Chen Yi’s Momentum. The conductor, Ludovic Morlot and Yi spent a couple of minutes before the concert discussing the piece and it seemed like it would draw upon Chinese folk themes and melodies. The piece started and it was totally different. It was a very modern piece in a bad way, atonal and uses instruments to produce specific sounds rather than a melody. There were kids in the audience, probably on a field trip to experience orchestras and classical music. I can only imagine how traumatic this experience would have been, and how turned off from classical music they would be now.

The second piece before the intermission was a much anticipated Viola concerto by TSO Principal Violist Teng Li. I find listening to concertos by instruments other than Piano the same as any other piece because I don’t understand the technicalities and difficulties of playing the instrument. However, I felt the piece selection was lacking. It was a more typical classical piece but I noticed that there wasn’t a lot of orchestration which this review also picked up on.

After the intermission, there was finally a piece that I didn’t mind listening to. I’ve never heard Tchaikovsky’s 5^th symphony, but it was composed firmly in the Romantic era and produced a refreshing sound after hearing the previous two more modern pieces. I liked the interplay between instruments, and the slow second movement. This is another one of those pieces I should pick up eventually.

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