Both the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and National Arts Centre Orchestra have new recordings to offer for the new year. The Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s album on the Harmonia Mundi label focuses on Stravinsky, and includes the composer’s complete Pulcinella ballet and the Divertimento from Le Baiser de la Fée (The Fairy’s Kiss). It’s available on February 14, 2025.
The National Arts Centre Orchestra’s Poema: Ad Astra is the first in a planned four-part series of recordings delving into the tone poems of Richard Strauss. The album is available now on the Analekta label.
You can check out the first single, Tarantella, here.
The TSO and Igor Stravinsky have a genuine connection that goes back to 1967. The composer/conductor made his final public appearance as a conductor with the TSO, leading the orchestra in a performance of the Pulcinella Suite. Music Director Gustavo Gimeno conducts the full ballet to honour that legacy.
The TSO first performed Stravinsky’s Petrouchky in 1934, with Sir Ernest MacMillan conducting. Stravinsky came to Toronto to conduct the orchestra in The Firebird and Petrouchka a few years later in 1937.
“Pulcinella holds a special place in the TSO’s history: Stravinsky himself conducted the orchestra in a performance of the ballet suite in 1967, marking his final public conducting appearance. It feels extraordinary to return to this work—this time in its full form—while celebrating Stravinsky’s musical ingenuity and the orchestra’s legacy,” says Music Director Gustavo Gimeno.
Ballet impresario Serge Diaghilev commissioned Stravinsky’s Pulcinella in 1919. Using music of the Baroque era attributed to Pergolesi, Stravinsky reinvents and reimagines with a modern sensibility. He uses the same spirit of reinvention in the Divertimento from Le Baiser de la Fée, using early piano pieces of Tchaikovsky’s as a point of departure in creating his work.
Along with Strauss, the album features Curiosity, Genius, and the Search for Petula Clark by Kelly-Marie Murphy.
Curiosity, Genius, and the Search for Petula Clark was commissioned by the TSO from Canadian composer Kelly-Marie Murphy. The track was recorded in February 2024, with soloists Isabel Leonard (mezzo-soprano), Paul Appleby (tenor), and Derek Welton (bass-baritone). The piece was inspired by Glenn Gould’s fascination with the British pop star.
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The current release also features works by Canadian composers Kelly-Marie Murphy and Kevin Lau, commissioned by the NAC as companion pieces to Strauss’ music. The album pairs Strauss’s Don Juan with Kelly-Marie Murphy’s Dark Nights, Bright Stars, Vast Universe, and Death and Transfiguration with Kevin Lau’s The Infinite Reaches.
Don Juan was on the program when Alexander Shelley made his debut as guest conductor of the National Art Centre Orchestra back in 2009. As its now Music Director, he announced the multi-disc project in 2023. Alongside Strauss, Shelley wanted to showcase Canadian artistic excellence.
“I gave the composers free rein in how they responded to a particular tone poem. It’s been fascinating to see how they have approached the task and the wonderful individual perspectives they’ve brought to it,” Alexander Shelley says in a statement. “The new pieces on this first album are contrasting and speak to the fact that we live in an age where composers can go in whatever direction they choose.”
Kelly-Marie Murphy‘s piece In Dark Nights, Bright Stars, Vast Universe, considers what was going on in Strauss’s world as he composed Don Juan.
“One significant event for me was Vincent van Gogh’s painting The Starry Night in 1889,” Murphy recalls. “Another was the discovery of the Horsehead Nebula by Williamina Fleming in 1888. Fleming was one of a group of women who were taught to analyze stellar spectra and catalogue stars for astronomers at the Harvard College Observatory. Her extraordinary life became the subject of my tone poem.” Murphy adds that her piece engages with several themes: “questioning, searching and curiosity, perseverance and determination, and the beauty of the starry sky.”
Composer and pianist Kevin Lau’s approach involved a contemporary interpretation of Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration.
“I gravitated immediately toward it,” Lau says. “Its gripping, transcendent musical narrative resonated powerfully with my own creative sensibilities. At the same time, its central, existential question – what lies beyond death – had begun to occupy my own thoughts with increasing regularity.”
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