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National Arts Centre Orchestra

Roy Thomson Hall

Toronto on Saturday

January has become Mozart month for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, which three years ago held a birthday festival called Mozart@250. The thing was so popular that it has become an annual event.

As a title, Mozart@253 has a slightly comic sound. I doubt that even Peter Oundjian, who saw the joke coming when he announced the first festival, would claim that the TSO aims to chart yearly adjustments in our thinking about Mozart's music.

As if to underline that point, this year's festival began with a guest performance by the National Arts Centre Orchestra and Pinchas Zukerman, now in his tenth season as NACO music director. I can't think of any major musician less susceptible to new ways of performing Mozart's music than Zukerman, who played the solo role in the Violin Concerto No. 3 in G major.

As usual, it took Zukerman only a few minutes to prove that he's one of the master violinists of his time. The technical efficiency of his playing was really quite amazing, and his silky robust tone was never less than lovely.

The slow second movement brought these virtues into close contact with aspects of Zukerman's playing that I find less appealing. The melody flowed from his violin like syrup from a bottle, except for those times when he chose to make a big rhetorical show of distinguishing one phrase component from another. It was like hearing a plummy-voiced actor recite lines of Shakespeare as a liquid stream of phonemes, with no thought of how the words link up into expressed ideas. Zukerman and the orchestra never settled on a common approach to some of Mozart's ornaments, and his approach to trills was often gauche.

There were some wonderful moments in Beethoven's Symphony No. 5, such as the shapely, noble opening of the second movement in the violas and cellos, and some of the big brass exclamations in the last movement. But the first movement got quite dishevelled before it ended, and in the finale the players were forcing the sound. I never got the feeling that Zukerman had a broad view of the piece; more that he was going through it like a man driving at night, seeing only as much of the road as his headlights would allow.

Charles Dutoit once told me that he liked an orchestra to play with a minimum of cholesterol in its sound. Zukerman has spent 10 years in Ottawa going the opposite way, injecting the formerly lean NACO sound with butterfat. It now has a heavier, richer tone, and more players – I counted 65 for the Beethoven. Of course it's a music director's right and responsibility to shape the sound as he sees fit. Unfortunately, from what I heard on Saturday, the NACO seems to have lost some of the precise, nimble response that made the orchestra's early reputation.

The concert also included Peter Paul Koprowski's Sinfonia Concertante, an ambitious 1993 piece that was added to the program at the last minute. I found it a bit boggling to realize that we were hearing, in one evening, exactly as much Canadian music as Zukerman plans to perform in Ottawa with our “national” orchestra during this entire season.

Koprowski's tonal piece is full of a sinewy kind of lyric polyphony, beginning with a prologue for string quartet with bass instead of cello. The first movement, the strongest in my opinion, included a couple of eerie unison passages for piccolo, E-flat clarinet, English horn and marimba. For me, this was the most memorable sound of the whole concert. The second movement (Burlesque) had the fleet, sarcastic tone of a Shostakovich scherzo, though Koprowski took his rhythmic cues from the Polish mazurka.

The sharp focus of the work's first half was blurred somewhat by the lengthy chromatic noodling of the final two movements. Both halves ended with a big concord that felt somewhat imposed upon the material, though I think that was the point.

The Toronto Symphony Orchestra's Mozart@253 festival continues at Roy Thomson Hall through Jan. 24.