Review | Robert Charlebois delirious and… vulnerable

Deliciously lyrical, delirious, funny and very touching, the symphonic pop concert featuring Robert Charlebois and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra was rich and beautiful. A musical event that has everything to be the culmination of an artistic journey like no other.

Charlebois has been seen in all sorts of contexts over the years. In rock bands, mostly, with one or two drum kits, shuffling and reshuffling the arrangements of his songs to give them a certain veneer of novelty, even though he has been singing many of them for more than five decades.

We saw him more recently in “Charleboiscope”, that is to say in a large-scale show where the visual played an important role. Perhaps it is logical that after that, it is the music that takes over the stage. Which was the case, Thursday, during the first of three concerts of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra (OSM) of which Garou the first of the name was the guest.

To say that the red carpet was rolled out for him would be an understatement: in addition to the orchestra itself, Charlebois was accompanied at times by the OSM Choir and two opera singers: tenor Frédéric Antoun and contralto Rose Naggar-Tremblay. The latter played a key role in this concert entitled Charlebois symphonic – we will come back to this.

Hugo Bégin, who designed the arrangements for choir and orchestra, had plenty to enjoy: many of Robert Charlebois’ songs already rely, in rock versions, on generous orchestrations whose instrumentation is close to classical music. This is the advantage of collaborating with an iconoclast from the turn of the 1970s, a time when many musicians sought to enrich and magnify the language of rock.

The Spirit of Charlebois

The arranger did an extraordinary job, not content to simply underline the most lyrical passages with more strings here or to add tone with epic brass there: he entered into the spirit of Charlebois’ music, embracing its bursts of tenderness as well as its psychedelic delirium, managing to make the OSM take off and “shift”, so to speak. It was both subtle and imaginative, led moreover with contagious enthusiasm by conductor Jacques Lacombe.

Charlebois Symphonic was also an opportunity to get out of the obvious. The roadmap included songs that are not part of the singer’s usual concerts, such as Two golden women, The end of the world And Earth Lovein addition to evidence such as Fu Man Chu/Chu from inside (great with the contribution of the choir), April on Mars, Ordinary (particularly inhabited) and I will return to Montreal (grandiose).

And Charlebois, what was he like? Difficult to hear, at the beginning of the concert. His voice lacked so much amplification that it was difficult to understand the words of his songs and his interventions. He also made many mistakes in the text of Dying young. Incomplete pleasure, therefore, during the first four or five pieces. Once this important sound problem was resolved, we could see that he was in voice. A little “all naked”, as he would probably say, surrounded by violins instead of guitars, but just right, caressing our ears with his drawling singing, as inimitable as his melodies.

Delirium and sobs

What is more unusual is that Charlebois was particularly moving. We felt him more vulnerable from the first pieces, perhaps because of the unusual context in which he was performing. And if he was playful when Rose Naggar-Tremblay joined him to sing, in her contralto voice, the female part of Mrs. Bertrandwe also noticed how grateful he was to see singers and musicians of such high quality open their arms to him like that.

The singer reappeared on stage often throughout the concert, taking obvious pleasure in slipping into the songs of the old psychedelic rocker while maintaining her high standard of lyrical artist. Her seriousness, and that of the tenor Frédéric Antoun, gave weight to the anti-militarist charge that is Earth Love : their superb nature made fun of the patriotism already mocked by the words of Alfred Jarry.

At the first notes of Lindbergwe were already wondering if the singer was going to bite into the “crisse” like Louise Forestier once did. Not only did she do it, but she also offered a high-flying delirium that was both immensely funny and musically breathtaking at the end of the song. At her side, Charlebois seemed blissfully admiring.

The most unexpected thing, however, came at the very end. Robert Charlebois concluded with two songs that talk about death: Don’t cry if you love meon words taken from Saint Augustine, then And here it iswhere he addresses his sons quite directly. For an 80-year-old singer to address the question of his purpose on stage is already something. For him to do it so head-on, laying his soul bare like never before, was immensely moving.

“And you will continue to shine without me/That’s life, that’s how it is/Yes, you will live long after me/Children know that it’s often like that,” the song says. And here it iswhich Charlebois could not finish without swallowing sobs. He, so used to playing his own role, was no longer playing at all. He had never been seen like that. He was not the only one in the Maison symphonique to have the motton.

Charlebois Symphonic is still presented Friday and Saturday, 8 p.m., at the Maison symphonique.