Toronto Symphony Orchestra
Maxim Vengerov, violin
Andrey Boreyko, conductor
At Roy Thomson Hall
In Toronto on Thursday 1st June 2006

by TAMARA BERNSTEIN

Special to The Globe and Mail

The Toronto Symphony Orchestra continued its celebration of the centenary of Dmitri Shostakovich by importing two native sons of the Soviet Union -- the magnificent violinist Maxim Vengerov and conductor Andrey Boreyko -- and turning them loose on a brace of postwar works, both of which have much to say about the relationship of the individual to society.

A composer automatically activates that metaphor by putting a soloist in front of an orchestra. But the question of the individual and the masses was particularly fraught in the years of Stalin's postwar terror. So it's hardly surprising that Shostakovich's Violin Concerto No. 1, written in 1947-48 and filled with musical images of lamentation, isolation and laceration, wasn't premiered until two years after Stalin's death.

Thursday's performance didn't come into focus until the third movement's cadenza, where the soloist cuts loose from the orchestra. Here was the Vengerov I had been waiting for: not just a virtuoso with one of the sweetest sounds in the business, but an artist whose performances pierce the heart and speak directly to the imagination.

When Vengerov repeated a listless "noodling" pattern in different keys, you viscerally felt the absence of a tonal centre, as if a soul had lost its moral compass -- or its reason to live. As the tension built, startling accents jerked the music like electrical shocks; when these escalated into violent chords, you felt as though you were watching a person banging his head against the wall. These disturbing musical images of self-hatred exploded into the finale: a diabolical, perpetual-motion movement that seemed both mocking and self-mocking.

Overall, though, the concerto was under-rehearsed, the usual problem when orchestras hire expensive soloists.

Shostakovich's Symphony No. 10 (1953) was a good segue from the concerto: It has so many plangent, extended solos that Shostakovich seemed deliberately to turn his back on the symphony's role as an expression of the collective spirit.
Boreyko led a committed performance that left me wanting to hear more of him. Although he had trouble sustaining rhythmic life in long, slow lines, the hushed pianissimos that he drew out of the orchestra were a treat.
The principal wind players gave magnificent solos in the symphony. The slow introduction to the finale was particularly moving, especially when oboist Sarah Jeffrey's solo wailed with Mahlerian angst, only to pull back instantly into a shell of repression. The flute's and piccolo's subsequent attempts to console the oboe seemed to come from another planet.

Still, the symphony needed a specific kind of urgency, the feeling that they were saying through music things that could not be uttered in words. And while the second movement -- one of Shostakovich's "evil scherzos" -- was suitably brutal, it would have been more interesting, and troubling, at a riskier tempo, and if they had made you feel sucked into the whirlwind.