Applause for 'Dust Devils' from Toronto Star
Toronto Symphony’s New Creations bristle with colour
Local premieres see great new and recent work outweighing the mediocre by a wide margin.
"The final edition of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s annual New Creations Festival launched on Saturday evening with bursts of musical colour from the Roy Thomson Hall stage.The first and last works on the three-piece, intermission-free program were feasts of orchestral invention, impressively rendered.TSO music director Peter Oundjian introduced each composer and piece as well as conducting two of the works.The first, Dust Devils by Canadian composer Vivian Fung, is a taut, 10-minute classically structured creation in one movement divided into three sections: fast, slow and fast again. Fung effectively gives the sound motion and shape through rhythm and massing voices in the orchestra rather than by working with melodies or motifs.Composed in 2011 and revised three years later, Dust Devils is like a good abstract painting, where one can appreciate the techniques used in its composition. Fung is a clever orchestrator, using all sorts of subtle layering to achieve her effects..." Read the full article...