Just after the Toronto Symphony Orchestra returns from their upcoming European tour, the orchestra will release their latest album, The Miraculous Mandarin. The album will be the Orchestra’s third release on the Harmonia Mundi label, available worldwide on February 13, 2026.
As the title suggests, the album will spotlight the music of Hungarian composer Béla Bartók, and was recorded live at Roy Thomson Hall from November 21 to 23, 2024. The track list includes Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra along with the complete score for The Miraculous Mandarin, featuring the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir.
Along with the Bartók works, the album featured a TSO commission by Canadian Emilie LeBel titled the sediments. LeBel is the Orchestra’s Composer Advisor.
“I was excited to select Bartók for our third collaboration with Harmonia Mundi because, like our first two recordings — of Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie and Stravinsky’ Pulcinella — his Miraculous Mandarin epitomizes 20th-century classical music, which has become a specialty of the TSO,” said Toronto Symphony Orchestra Music Director Gustavo Gimeno in a statement.
“In preparing for and recording this album, I found it extraordinary to witness the incredible motivation and focus demonstrated by the musicians. Their concentration mixed with adrenaline generated a palpable energy — one I certainly felt from the podium, our audience felt in the concert hall, and I hope listeners will feel as well.”
The TSO’s 2024/25 season included seven concerti for orchestra, part of the orchestra’s stated overall theme of “unified plurality”. Of the seven, Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra is probably the most famous piece written in that form. Composed in 1943 in a Classical five-movement structure, the Concerto is virtuosic in nature, and incorporates the composer’s penchant for adding the influence of folk music and enigmatic harmonies. It’s a popular piece that is routinely programmed across the globe.
The Miraculous Mandarin Op. 19, Sz. 73 (BB 82) is a lesser known work by the Hungarian composer. Bartók initially composed the work in a short form between 1918 and 1919 during the difficult period following the end of WWI. The Austro-Hungarian empire had been defeated, and conditions in his village were hard, with little fuel or food. The composer set the score aside for several years until orchestrating it in 1924, when he could arrange for its premiere in Köln (Cologne), Germany.
It’s based on a story published in 1916 by Jewish Hungarian writer Melchior Lengyel. Lengyel himself dubbed the work “a pantomime grotesque”, and Bartók was inspired to create his one-act pantomime ballet around it.
The work sparked a scandal on its premiere in 1926 in Germany on moral grounds, although it was better received later on in Prague. During the composer’s lifetime, it was most often performed as an orchestral suite, and not a ballet production, and didn’t see a Budapest premiere until 1945, after his death.
The controversy comes from the story, infused with sexuality and violence. Three tramps are in an apartment, forcing a young woman to try to lure passersby so they can rob them. The first two victims of their scam, an old man and a much younger man, have no money, so the tramps throw them back out into the street.
The third mark of their scheme, however, is the Mandarin. He frightens the girl, but the tramps force her to dance for him too. The Mandarin is overcome with a violent passion, and chases the hapless girl. He catches her, but the tramps rob him and drag him to a bed, where they believe they’ve suffocated him with a pillow. The Mandarin, however, doesn’t die, and stares at the girl with an uncontrollable desire. The tramps then try to kill him with a rusty old sword, but the Mandarin rises again, throwing himself at the girl.
The three tramps overpower him, tie him up, and then hang him from the light in their shabby apartment. The Mandarin glows in a disturbing green-blue light. The girl asks the tramps to free him, and when they do, she lets him embrace her. Satisfied, he dies.
Hungarian Eugen Szenkár conducted the Köln premiere, and he wrote about the performance in his memoirs.
“At the end of the performance there was a concert of whistling and catcalls! Bartók was present, sitting in the auditorium as he had at all the rehearsals. The uproar was so deafening and lengthy that the fire curtain had to be brought down. Nevertheless, we endured it and weren’t afraid to appear in front of the curtain, at which point the whistles resumed with a vengeance. It could have been that there were isolated ‘Bravos’, but everything was lost beneath the tumult! And then the next day came the reviews. What was there, especially in the Volkszeitung (People’s Newspaper), the paper of the Catholic Centre Party, can hardly be repeated…”
Despite the passion and intensity of the music, the full score is still rarely presented. The version recorded by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra restores the final third of the score, which includes a short choral part.
Gimeno selected Emilie LeBel’s 2021 piece the sediments, inspired by the writings of marine biologist and conservationist Rachel Carson, to accompany Bartók’s works. Slow and meditative in nature, while echoing the textures of Bartók’s work, it represents a tonal contrast. The piece was commissioned by the TSO while LeBel served as RBC Affiliate Composer (2018–2022). She was named as the TSO Composer Advisor in 2023.
The album adds to the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s legacy of more than 150 recordings since the first release back in 1952. The organization’s first recording with Harmonia Mundi, Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie, received the 2025 JUNO Award for Classical Album of the Year (Large Ensemble). It’s just the latest of many awards and accolades, which include a JUNO Award and GRAMMY nomination for TSO’s 2019 recording of works by Vaughan Williams, under TSO Conductor Emeritus Peter Oundjian, and another JUNO back in 2019 for their 2021 recording of Massenet’s Thaïs, under late TSO Conductor Laureate Sir Andrew Davis, among others.
The next release on the Harmonia Mundi label will be Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, which was recorded live in November 2025, and will be released in 2027.
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