Tonight is the first of three voyages into the heart of the hispanic as imagined in music, guided by Toronto Symphony Music Director Gustavo Gimeno, a program to be repeated Saturday and Sunday that feels like a genuine celebration.

While Roy Thomson Hall was completely sold out last week for concerts featuring guest soloist Yuja Wang, tonight there were still tickets available but then again we can’t expect Yuja every night. Last week is was the glory of Slavic composers Janacek & Tchaikovsky, but I am especially happy to trust Gustavo showing us his Hispanic roots. as he did tonight.

Yet there were no weak spots in the pieces curated for our pleasure tonight:

Perú Negro by Jimmy López
The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires by Astor Piazzolla (arranged by Leonid Desyatnikov)
–intermission–
Dance Scenes from the Living Room by Liam Ritz
Suites No. 1 & 2 from Carmen by Georges Bizet (arranged by Fritz Hoffmann)

The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires resembles a baroque violin concerto at first glance, played by soloist Karen Gomyo, with a small string orchestra backing her. That is until you hear the work, the strings sometimes powerfully rhythmic in their attacks, sometimes making sounds as if they had concealed percussion among them, taking us into something much more fun. The musical idiom dances on the edge of something classical and something like a popular dance both in its energetic vitality and the variety of ways the instruments were used, especially Karen’s solo part.

But of course this is not Vivaldi’s familiar old Four Seasons even if each of the four movements offers a witty quotation from the baroque violin concerti. Although we giggled aloud when we recognized the familiar music it was subtly done.

Karen followed with a superb encore, Tango etude #3 by Piazzolla.

And unlike Yuja last week, she told us what she was playing which is a big help.

The evening’s title was Bizet’s Carmen Suites, as we closed with a pair of suites running roughly half an hour. For me the biggest tragedy of Carmen is that Bizet died without any inkling of the success the opera would find. The premiere and the composer’s death happened 150 years ago. In that half hour we didn’t exhaust the melodic riches of the score. Gustavo has such a superb rapport with the TSO that we were spellbound. I heard no phones going off, a silent audience enraptured by what we were hearing.

Jimmy Lopez’s Perú Negro started our evening with another flavour of music that, while recognizably hispanic in its rhythms, took us into a much more modernist idiom than what was to follow.

After the intermission came a piece that I thought of as the highlight of the night, as it was a great pleasure to applaud the young composer himself on the occasion of the world premiere, namely Liam Ritz’s Dance Scenes from the Living Room, a TSO commission. I saw when I googled that he was born 1996, in other words he’s not yet 30 years old.

It is refreshing to read a program note about a modern composition that is accurately described and evoked. I only wish I could hear it again to delve deeper. (And I quote) The piece
“reimagines the freedom of dancing in one’s living room, lost within the music, carefree, and without inhibitions. It’s not just a celebration of that inner child, but an invitation to rediscover that same joy and freedom as an adult”.

Gustavo turned the TSO loose for eight minutes of flamboyant fun. Arguably every composer wants to show us who they are, to win us over with their music, right? Well consider me won.

The TSO will be back with the same gorgeous pieces Saturday and Sunday.