The TSO Announces Tour: Celebrates 101 Years with D’Angelo, Gimeno Conducts

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To celebrate Canadian music-making in its 101st year, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra (TSO), led by Music Director Gustavo Gimeno, will appear at Montreal’s Maison symphonique and Canada’s National Arts Centre in Ottawa on May 4 and 5, 2024. In advance of the tour, on May 1 and 2, Toronto audiences will have the opportunity to experience the same program — featuring the North American première of enargeia, with JUNO Award–winning mezzo-soprano and TSO Spotlight Artist Emily D’Angelo as soloist — at Roy Thomson Hall.

Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa comprise the three most populous cities in central Canada, and they are home to three of the nation’s largest and most prominent orchestras—the TSO, Orchestre symphonique de Montréal (OSM), and the National Arts Centre Orchestra (NACO). In the spirit of orchestral camaraderie and musical citizenship, the TSO will perform a collection of works, both classic and contemporary, in the acclaimed halls of its sister symphonies.

From the TSO Beck Family CEO Mark Williams:

“When we talk about Canadian music and musicians, we often emphasize the importance of international exposure and recognition—but equally crucial is the championing of this nation’s cultural creations and institutions right here at home. This is precisely what we’ll do on our upcoming tour, and we’re proud to represent Toronto in Montreal and Ottawa by bringing a piece of this city—something that doesn’t exist anywhere else—with us.”

Repertoire & Soloist

At the centre of this multi-faceted program is enargeia, a suite of primarily vocal works written by women over a span of more than 800 years: medieval German composer and saint Hildegard von Bingen, contemporary Icelandic composer Hildur Guðnadóttir, and contemporary American composers Missy Mazzoli and Sarah Kirkland Snider. The pieces were selected by Canadian mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo for her début album of the same title (which is ancient Greek, and roughly translated means “extreme vividness”) on the Deutsche Grammophon label, and arranged by Jarkko Riihimäki. The recording was named one of the 50 best albums of 2021 by National Public Radio and one of Canada’s top 21 classical albums of 2021 by the CBC, and it won the 2022 JUNO Award for Classical Album of the Year (Solo Artist) and the 2022 Gramophone Concept Album Award.

Called “one of the world’s special young singers,” by The New York Times, D’Angelo has rapidly become an artist in high demand at opera companies and orchestral ensembles across the globe—and she joins Gustavo Gimeno and the TSO for the North American Première of enargeia. This marks her second appearance of the season as a TSO 2023/24 Spotlight Artist.

Alison Yun-Fei Jiang

Kicking off the concert in Toronto and Ottawa is the World Première of Illumination, which the TSO commissioned from RBC Affiliate Composer Alison Yun-Fei Jiang. Based in North York, and holding a PhD in composition from the University of Chicago, Jiang is completing her two-year tenure on the TSO’s Artistic Leadership team. Her award-winning music explores the intersections of cultures, genres, people, memories, and emotions. Illumination draws inspirations from diverse light forms and natural phenomena depicted in a four-line verse from the Diamond Sutra, an influential text in East Asian philosophy. The sutra, titled with the evocative imagery of the diamond or thunderbolt, an abstract term for formidable power, symbolizes wisdom’s ability to cut through and shatter illusions to reveal ultimate reality. In Montreal, attendees will be treated to Beethoven’s dramatically tumultuous Coriolan Overture, written for a revival of the play by Heinrich Joseph von Collin based on Shakespeare’s tragedy of the doomed Roman general Coriolanus.

All performances conclude with a monument of the classical repertoire—Brahms’s Symphony No. 1. The Romantic masterpiece — which took the composer more than 20 years to complete — is widely considered to be one of the greatest symphonies ever written and was so obviously influenced by Beethoven that conductor Hans von Bülow referred to it as “Beethoven’s Tenth.” Deeply emotional, it takes listeners on a transformative journey from the depths of despair to towering triumph.

Mezzo Soprano Emily D’Angelo

“The orchestra and I are thrilled to bring this wonderfully rich and incredibly nuanced program to Montreal and Ottawa after we perform it for our hometown audiences in Toronto,” says Gustavo Gimeno. “I have always believed that, when it comes to programming, the whole is indeed greater than the sum of its parts—and this concert is the quintessential example. Though it features compositions both brand new and time honoured, by bringing them all together, a sense of interdependence and synthesis is generated. This is perhaps most strikingly evident in enargeia, and I’m delighted to collaborate with Spotlight Artist Emily D’Angelo on this live adaptation of her extraordinary album. Emily’s voice is simply sublime, and I’ve been eager to work with her for years.”

Concert Program

Gustavo Gimeno, conductor

Emily D’Angelo, mezzo-soprano (2023/24 TSO Spotlight Artist)

Alison Yun-Fei Jiang: Illumination (World Première/TSO Commission)*

Ludwig van Beethoven: Coriolan Overture, Op. 62^†

Hildegard von Bingen, Hildur Guðnadóttir, Missy Mazzoli & Sarah Kirkland Snider/arr. Jarkko Riihimäki & Sophia Muñoz: enargeia (North American Première)

Johannes Brahms: Symphony No. 1 in C Minor, Op. 68

*Toronto and Ottawa only

^†Montreal only

Schedule & Tickets

Toronto

Brahms’s First: May 1 & 2, 2024 at 8:00pm—Roy Thomson Hall

Montreal

May 4, 2024 at 2:30pm—Maison symphonique de Montréal

Ottawa

May 5, 2024 at 8:00pm—National Arts Centre, Ottawa