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Soprano Bayrakdarian soars with passion, panache

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  • Soprano Bayrakdarian soars with passion, panache

    The Globe and Mail, Canada
    April 2 2004

    Soprano soars with passion, panache

    TSO program features a miscellany of good things and ends with a zinger

    By KEN WINTERS
    Special to The Globe and Mail


    The Toronto Symphony Orchestra
    Isabel Bayrakdarian, soprano
    Sir Andrew Davis, conductor/pianist
    At Roy Thomson Hall
    In Toronto on Wednesday

    The Toronto Symphony Orchestra's concert Wednesday at Roy Thomson
    Hall was very much a "this, that, these, them and those" affair,
    musically verging on the miscellaneous, though full of good things,
    including the services of the trimmed down and remodelled conductor
    laureate Sir Andrew Davis and the superb, gorgeously gowned young
    Canadian-Armenian soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian.

    The "those" (of my opening conceit) were the Symphonies of Wind
    Instruments by Igor Stravinsky, which began the concert and which
    would have been another of the good things in another context. These
    tiny, severely elegant pieces are not symphonies in the 19th-century,
    symphonic-hall sense of the word. In them, Stravinsky returned to the
    original meaning of the word symphony: "a sounding together of
    instruments."

    To achieve the very particular "soundings-together" he had in mind,
    he used only 21 wind instruments to create what he called "an austere
    ritual . . . unfolded in terms of short litanies between different
    groups of homogeneous instruments."

    In other words, a large but not very large chamber piece, almost by
    definition out of place in Roy Thomson Hall, however neatly done by
    Sir Andrew and the Toronto Symphony winds.

    The "this" was Mozart's Concert-Rondo in A, K. 386, a beguiling
    little movement for piano solo, two oboes, two horns and strings,
    which Mozart had left only partially orchestrated.

    Sir Andrew had completed the orchestration, and in Wednesday's
    performance he both conducted and played the solo, the latter
    stylishly if not impeccably. (He was fine in the lyric bits but he
    fudged the pyrotechnics.) But the Rondo was nicely placed between the
    "these," a brace of arias from the young Mozart's opera Il Re
    pastore, K. 208, and the great concert aria with obbligato piano Non
    temer amato bene, K.505, which the mature Mozart composed for himself
    as pianist and the English soprano Nancy Storace (who had been his
    Susanna in The Marriage of Figaro) to perform at her farewell Vienna
    concert.

    Isabel Bayrakdarian sang all three arias exquisitely, her radiant
    soprano calmed for the first aria, brilliant for the second and
    impassioned for the concert piece, with Sir Andrew graduating from
    the Rondo to Mozart's own role in the last, again playing very well
    except in the fancy bits.

    The "them" were two Rossini arias, the one Miss Bayrakdarian did sing
    after intermission and the one she didn't but might have sung as well
    if the Stravinsky had been replaced by something more in keeping with
    the rest of the occasion.

    The one she sang, with stunning panache, was En proie à la tristesse
    from Le Comte Ory. The contrasting one she didn't sing, alas, might
    have been the beautiful Willow Song from Rossini's Otello (less
    famous but more lovely even than Verdi's), or possibly the melting
    Sombre forêt from the same composer's dramatic masterpiece Guillaume
    Tell.

    But all musical errors and omissions were redeemed by the splendid
    "that" which ended the program: Beethoven's Eighth Symphony, in a
    zinger of a performance, with Sir Andrew and the orchestra at their
    sonic and rhythmic best, which is saying quite a lot.
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