Malcolm Cook, featuring guest conductor Matthew Halls and pianist Benedetto Lupo. Toronto Symphony Orchestra Mozart Festival.
A semi-staged performance of Mozart's Requiem, a decade-by-decade look at the 20th century and a festival of new work curated by Australian composer Brett Dean are on the bill for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra's 2015-16 season, which was announced Thursday at Roy Thomson Hall by music director Peter Oundjian.
The TSO continues its annual New Creations Festival in March, 2016, with new and recent music by Dean and fellow Australians Anthony Pateras and James Ledger, plus the Canadian premiere of a piece by Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood. New commissioned pieces include a work for the TSO and the Afiara Quartet by Kevin Lau and DJ Skratch Bastid (Paul Murphy), and a piece for orchestra and projected imagery by composer Paul Frehner and filmmaker Peter Mettler. Violinist Leila Josefowicz will appear in May, 2016, as soloist in the Canadian premiere of one of the few new works presented outside New Creations, John Adams's Scheherazade No. 2.
The Decades Project, a new initiative, begins in October with performances of Debussy's La mer, Sibelius's Symphony No. 2 and Vaughan Williams's A Sea Symphony – all written between 1900 and 1909. It continues in the spring with Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and Elgar's Violin Concerto, performed with Canadian violinist James Ehnes.
The orchestra's annual Mozart festival in January will feature a semi-staged Requiem Mass in D minor, directed by Joel Ivany of Toronto's Against the Grain Theatre and conducted by festival curator Bernard Labadie. Mozart is also on the bill for Canadian soprano Barbara Hannigan's appearance as soloist and conductor in October, on a program that includes Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements and works by Luigi Nono and Gyeorgy Ligeti.
The TSO will also present three visiting orchestras: l'Orchestre symphonique de Montréal in November, with music director Kent Nagano conducting; the Victoria Symphony in March, 2016, led by Tania Miller; and the National Arts Centre Orchestra with its new music director Alexander Shelley, in April, 2016. Oundjian and the TSO will visit Florida in January for a six-city tour with pianist Jan Lisiecki, with concertmaster Jonathan Crow in a solo role he will also take for two programs in Toronto. Other TSO musicians featured as soloists at Roy Thomson Hall include principal French-horn player Neil Deland and principal harpist Heidi Van Hoesen Gorton.
The orchestra's lighter offerings include live film-score performances with screenings of Psycho (on Halloween) and Back to the Future, the reprise of The Second City Guide to the Orchestra and the return of Sir Andrew Davis's sumptuous arrangement of Handel's Messiah. The season begins on Sept. 24 with a popular classics gala featuring violinist Itzhak Perlman performing Bruch's Violin Concerto No. 1.