By: Erwin Dreessen
Unlike the Lang Lang concert earlier last week, the National Arts Centre Orchestra’s concert on Oct. 2 attracted less than a full house, but the experience was most rewarding all the same.
In the concert we heard Gabriel Dharmoo‘s Wanmansho, originally written for voice and chamber ensemble in 2017, but a version for orchestra was commissioned by NACO this year. The piece portrays two mythological figures, Shreu and Djonr, that wholly sprung from Dharmoo’s imagination.
Throughout its nine sections the voice makes a wide range of sounds, high and low (sometimes appearing to be words, apparently in a language of Dharmoo’s own making) and interacts with the orchestra in a highly rhythmic, always mesmerizing fashion.
Dharmoo is a unique artist — composer, vocalist, drag artist, and more. Artistic Director Alexander Shelley must like him a lot — a piece of his was included in a 2021 concert, and a CD of his work with NACO, Vestiges d’une fable, was released last year.
The orchestra and vocalist were fully mic’ed so we’ll likely be able to hear this concert in NACO’s Video On-Demand series soon. The chamber version of the piece can be heard here. In the meantime, check out some of Dharmoo’s videos (one, two, three) or the segment of that 2021 concert here.
Wanmansho is less than 15 minutes long. The rest of the evening was filled with Richard Strauss’ last tone poem, Ein Heldenleben (A Hero’s Life). The hero in question is Strauss himself, depicting his struggles and achievements in six distinct sections.
It’s the longest of his tone poems and it demands a very large orchestra. With 47 additional musicians on stage, the band was almost double its usual size! From the start and to this date it remains a controversial piece: Cacophony or beauty? An American critic and composer, Otto Floersheim, had this to say about one particular section: “the climax of everything that is ugly, cacophonous, blatant and erratic, the most perverse music I ever heard in all my life, is reached in the chapter ‘The Hero’s Battlefield’. The man who wrote this outrageously hideous noise, no longer deserving of the word music, is either a lunatic, or he is rapidly approaching idiocy.”
I would not quite go so far, but confess that of all of Strauss’ tone poems, it’s the one I have enjoyed the least. While I’m a great fan of Strauss’ music, this one came across to me as rather chaotic, as if he wanted to say too much in too little time, even though the piece lasts 45 minutes.
Over the past two years NACO has programmed most of Strauss’ work: Don Juan and Tod und Verkläring in 2023, Till Eulenspiegel and Also sprach Zarathustra earlier this year. All were delightful.
In any case, Ein Heldenleben is firmly ensconced in the classic repertoire, with many versions available on the internet. Here is one by the Orchestre de Paris, conducted by Daniel Harding in 2024. The sections are indexed so you can pick and choose.
Erwin Dreessen writes on Substack, where he often annotates ‘classical’ musical events.
