THE cryptic title of Richard S. Warren’s history of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, “Begins With the Oboe,” refers to the note A that the principal oboist of a symphony orchestra traditionally sounds to give the other players concert pitch. When the book was published in 2002 (University of Toronto Press), different titles might have suggested themselves: for one, “Ends With a Whimper.”
Mr. Warren, the orchestra’s archivist from 1976 to his death in 2002, dutifully chronicled the artistic and financial ups and downs of the Toronto Symphony, which recently announced its 2011-12 season, its 90th. (Better to take that number on faith than to try to puzzle through the orchestra’s discontinuous history, which is traced to 1908 despite abortive earlier efforts and a period under the name New Symphony Orchestra.) Its roller-coaster ride was in general perhaps no wilder than that of most other North American orchestras in the 20th century, but as the Toronto Symphony entered the 21st, many were giving it up for dead.
Even Mr. Warren, who was not among them, titled the last chapter of his book “Toward the Unknown” and headed it with a fretful epigraph from Whitman:
... toward the unknown region,
where neither ground is for the feet, nor any path to follow?
No map, there, nor guide,
Nor voice sounding....
The previous decade had been a particularly tough haul. Responding to threats of bankruptcy in the mid-1990s the players had taken a 15 percent salary cut, but when their contract expired in 1999, they staged a 74-day strike, complete with the usual animosities and budgetary strains. Then in 2001, with little more than a year’s notice, the Finnish conductor Jukka-Pekka Saraste, who had been the orchestra’s music director since 1994, left. His tenure, Mr. Warren wrote, “had been one of administrative turmoil.” Now the orchestra was in deep financial waters and essentially rudderless.
The next major public look at the orchestra’s condition came in 2005, with the documentary film “Five Days in September: The Rebirth of an Orchestra” (now on DVD from Rhombus), based on the opening week of the 2004 season, when Peter Oundjian took over as music director. The signs of rebirth that it trumpeted were evidently audible when the Toronto Symphony last appeared at Carnegie Hall, in 2008. Allan Kozinn, in The New York Times, found it to be “in superb shape.”
“Under Mr. Oundjian,” he said, “the orchestra has maintained its shine, but now it packs a firm punch as well.”
As it prepares to return to Carnegie on Saturday evening, the Toronto Symphony appears to be flourishing at a time when many North American ensembles are struggling. On my recent visit here, for the opening of a lively annual contemporary-music festival, New Creations, instituted by Mr. Oundjian immediately on his arrival, the orchestra sounded excellent in concert and in rehearsal, and it had clearly tapped into an enthusiastic and notably young audience.
Mr. Oundjian, now 55, seems to have been a canny choice to direct the orchestra. A violinist born in Toronto and educated in London and New York, he played first fiddle in the Tokyo String Quartet during its heyday, from 1981 to 1996, when he was forced to give up steady performance because of a repetitive-stress injury to his left hand. With some training as a conductor in his background, he decided to take up the baton.
His first prominent podium appearance was at the Caramoor International Music Festival in Katonah, N.Y., in 1996, conducting the resident Orchestra of St. Luke’s as a late substitute for an indisposed André Previn. He became artistic director of the festival from 1997 to 2002, and artistic adviser from 2003 to 2007. He conducted often, and although there were early grumbles from players about his raw technique, few could question his musicianship or the force of his personality.
All this proved attractive to Andrew R. Shaw, who, as the Toronto Symphony’s president and chief executive since 2002, was the one who had to find a way out of the stagnant interregnum. Even Mr. Oundjian’s relative inexperience with major orchestras at a slightly advanced age was useful.
“Peter had music in his bones,” Mr. Shaw said in an interview at the orchestra’s offices in a stately building across King Street from its performance home, Roy Thomson Hall. “He had the highest standards. All this requires a little bit of gray hair, but he also had an enthusiasm to grow. He wasn’t in a position to say, ‘Oh, another music directorship.’ He wants to grow as a music director.”
Mr. Shaw, who was himself something of an outsider to orchestras, having worked in music publishing and education, is in large part the explanation for what happened between the book’s gloomy ending and the film’s highly charged opening. In addition to hiring Mr. Oundjian, he provided a wealth of fresh ideas on different ways to present concerts for expanded audiences.
“Five Days in September” depicts Mr. Oundjian as a dynamo. Early on, in a prickly private dispute (oops, no longer private) with the longtime concertmaster Jacques Israelievitch over a bowing in Rachmaninoff’s “Symphonic Dances,” Mr. Oundjian reaches for Mr. Israelievitch’s instrument to demonstrate. “Are you going to show me up?” Mr. Israelievitch asks.
Mr. Oundjian does take the instrument and demonstrate, and — as conductors will — he evidently wins the argument. He is next heard telling the orchestra: “If you don’t like the bowing, you blame me, because it’s my bowing. But I love it.”
Conciliatory remarks follow in the film, and Mr. Israelievitch offers a rosy summation: “In the end, you know, I think the soup is going to turn out quite delicious.” Presumably his retirement in 2008 simply reflected a fullness of time.
The orchestra has been without a permanent concertmaster since, though a search is said to be proceeding promisingly. With four or five other vacancies to fill, the orchestra is now operating with a streamlined membership of 88.
But Mr. Oundjian has a fondness for blockbuster works, as the first CDs on the orchestra’s new TSO Live label show. They include Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony, Mahler’s Fourth, Shostakovich’s Seventh and, just out, Holst’s “Planets.” Like New York, Toronto has a rich pool of fine freelance musicians who can be hired as extras.
“I’m only worried when I start to see too many people I don’t recognize,” Mr. Oundjian said in an interview, though in truth he didn’t seem worried at all.
Not that success has come easily or cheaply. In addition to streamlining in personnel and other areas, funds have had to be raised in economic times scarcely less difficult in Canada than they have been in the United States. On an annual budget of $23 million, the orchestra reported a deficit of $483,000 last June, relatively modest these days. And its endowment is not huge, some $27 million. More government financing is available in Canada: about 25 to 30 percent of the budget, said Mr. Shaw, the president. But “the Canadian context for philanthropy is difficult,” he added, “more conservative, less aggressive.”
In trying to pry funds from donors, Mr. Shaw could hardly have found a more useful ally than the unfailingly personable Mr. Oundjian. “Peter could talk almost anybody into anything,” said Andrew McCandless, the superb principal trumpeter.
Mr. McCandless should know. He was one, he admits, who had written off the orchestra’s future a decade ago. “I ran for my life,” he said. He took a job with the Dallas Symphony, and one of Mr. Oundjian’s early achievements was to coax him back to Toronto.
Mr. McCandless seemed to speak for many (and others spoke for themselves) when he described how happy he was to be working with Mr. Oundjian. Against all odds, the honeymoon between music director and players has apparently lasted these seven years.
And audiences respond to Mr. Oundjian’s festivals (Mozart as well as contemporary music) and to his onstage commentary and explications. They have also turned out for the concerts of different lengths at unconventional starting times that Mr. Shaw has devised to suit varied lifestyles. His dream, he said, is to have one-hour concerts at any time of the day.
Given this sea of good will, it seems unkind to point out that common wisdom nowadays holds that a music directorship almost inevitably turns stale after 10 years.
Mr. Oundjian, who was principal guest conductor of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra from 2006 to 2010, and who recently accepted the additional post of music director of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in Glasgow as of next year, expresses no desire to leave his hometown.
“I don’t think about my career that much,” Mr. Oundjian said. “It’s much more important for me to have an impact on the community. I will know when it’s time to move away.”
In the meantime everyone seems to be enjoying artistic prosperity, without taking anything for granted. “We can’t figure out what we’re doing right,” said the Canadian composer Gary Kulesha, who works closely with Mr. Oundjian in planning the New Creations festival. “If we could bottle it, we’d be rich.”
But with New Creations as with their many other innovations, Mr. Oundjian and Mr. Shaw seem to know precisely what they are doing. And given what they have already accomplished, who could be surprised if they found a way to bottle it?
Ryan Hughes for The New York Times 
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