2023/24 Concert Photos

September 21, 2023

Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty

Photos by Jag Gundu

Wednesday, November 29, 2023

Tchaikovsky’s delight for his original ballet score for The Sleeping Beauty, and his desire to adapt it into an orchestral suite, languished due to the monumental task of editing down the volume of enchanting numbers. It was not published in suite form until after his death. Your Toronto Symphony Orchestra performs the beloved suite as compiled by guest conductor Maxim Emelyanychev, revered for its dramatic fantasy, colourful orchestration, and enduring charm. A second fantasy plays across the stage with the prelude to Humperdinck’s fairy-tale opera, Hansel and Gretel. The charming score, adapted from the Brothers Grimm story, is brought to life in the leitmotifs of the characters, from the lilting innocence of the children to the dissonant chords of the evil witch. Also on the program, Toronto Symphony Orchestra Principal Bassoon Michael Sweeney performs the hauntingly beautiful Bassoon Concerto by Italian-Canadian composer Marjan Mozetich. In 2003, Sweeney commissioned and premièred the intriguing soundscape, which merges new concepts with the familiar.

Mahler's Fifth

Photos by Stelth Ng

Wednesday, November 22, 2023

Guest conductor David Robertson makes his TSO debut leading Mahler’s tempestuous Fifth Symphony, with its movements of darkness and light, triumphant horn fanfares, and ebullient fugues. Ardent Mahler admirer Alban Berg’s romantic and expressive compilation of seven art songs, written in his youth, opens the program, featuring one of the TSO’s 2023/24 Spotlight Artists, the exquisite Canadian mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo.

Dvořák Symphony No. 8

Photos by Jag Gundu

Thursday, November 16, 2023

Celebrated Ukrainian conductor Oksana Lyniv leads Dvořák’s lively Symphony No. 8, inspired by the Bohemian countryside and rousing Czech dances. The spotlight shines on the 2022 Honens Piano Competition Laureate, and Lyniv’s Ukrainian compatriot, Illia Ovcharenko, who performs Liszt’s sparkling First Piano Concerto, with its intricate piano-and-orchestra dialogue, lyrical passages, and romantic bravura. The Canadian Première of composer Zoltan Almashi’s Maria’s City, dedicated to the city of Mariupol, rounds out a program paying tribute to the unwavering spirit of the Ukrainian people.

An Evening with Audra McDonald

Photos by Jag Gundu

Thursday, November 2, 2023

Singer extraordinaire Audra McDonald joins your Toronto Symphony Orchestra for a sparkling, one-night-only affair. The Broadway sensation, Tony, GRAMMY®, and Emmy recipient, recording artist, and star of film and television highlights her expansive career, from musical theatre to opera to jazz, as she takes the audience through a musical journey of the Great American Songbook and Broadway’s biggest hits.

Beethoven's Seventh

Photos by Gerard Richardson and Allan Cabral

Wednesday, October 26, 2023

Toronto Symphony Orchestra Concertmaster Jonathan Crow takes on the fascinating Violin Concerto of György Ligeti in honour of the 100th anniversary of the composer’s birth. The work explores the outer limits of instrumental sound, combined with a hint of humour and the folk tunes of Ligeti’s native Transylvania. Opening the performance is the Canadian Première of Olga Neuwirth’s rhythmic, one-movement Dreydl, underlining the passage of time and destiny, and Beethoven’s celebratory Seventh Symphony rounds out the program with an animated, harmonically energetic interpretation of unabashed joy, one that the composer himself described as “one of the happiest products of my poor talents.”

James Ehnes Plays Barber

Photos by Allan Cabral

Saturday, October 21, 2023

One of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s 2023/24 Spotlight Artists, GRAMMY® Award–winning violinist James Ehnes headlines a spirited program celebrating two monumental 20th-century American works. Both Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto and Leonard Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story rely upon lush melodies, passages of tender lyricism, and percussive interludes. The performance also features The Prairies by composer Karen Sunabacka, inspired by nature and her Métis heritage; Ehnes’s take on the virtuosic third movement of French-Cuban composer José White Lafitte’s Violin Concerto in F-sharp minor (a rarely used key); and the Afro-Caribbean rhythms of Sensemayá by Mexico’s Silvestre Revueltas.

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Seong-Jin Cho Returns + The Poem of Ecstasy

Photos by Allan Cabral

Thursday, September 28, 2023

A feast for the senses, this evocative program opens with an imaginative musical journey through touch, smell, taste, sound and sight by Peruvian composer Jimmy Lopez Bellido. Maurice Ravel’s lush and sensual Rapsodie espagnole captures the intoxicating flavours, sounds, and colours of Spain, while his Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, filled with dazzling cadenzas and left-hand acrobatics, beguiles listeners into an illusion of two hands touching the keys, performed by the incomparable Seong-Jin Cho. The program concludes with the sumptuous Poem of Ecstasy by Alexander Scriabin, a musical depiction of experiences that transcend the physical senses and exist on a mystical plane.

Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring

Photos by Allan Cabral and Gerard Richardson

Wednesday, September 20, 2023

Your Toronto Symphony Orchestra proudly kicks off Year 101 with a musical mosaic, highlighted by the multi-faceted Jean-Yves Thibaudet’s electrifying take on Gershwin’s jazz-influenced Piano Concerto in F. The performance opens with Lili Boulanger’s vibrant and delicate tone poem D’un matin de printemps, countering the controversial score of Stravinsky’s wildly hypnotic and primal The Rite of Spring.