In the last ten or fifteen years, two exceptional artists have performed in Quebec, whose concerts have always had something really special about them: clarinettist Lorenzo Coppola with Arion and recorder player Maurice Steger with Violons du Roy. Steger is back this weekend and the enchantment continues.
Quebec City music lovers, don’t miss this. Maurice Steger and your Violons du Roy are coming to the Palais Montcalm, Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m.
Music with Steger is synonymous with joy. The flautist and conductor seems to reinvent Vivaldi in the moment. Sometimes he embroiders a dialogue with the violinist Pascale Giguère in “Il Gardellino”. “Il Gardellino” means “The Goldfinch”, and when Maurice Steger thinks he’s a bird, anything can happen.
Sharp and theatrical
And that is what is striking: as with the clarinettist Coppola, anything can happen; the imagination is fertile, but it serves music and works without distorting them.
Obviously, as he is a great musician, Maurice Steger does things with the utmost seriousness. We suspect it in the Concerto a cinq op. 10 No. 4 d’Albinoni in opening, articulated and energetic. We have the proof with a firm, sharp and theatrical version of a masterpiece by Vivaldi: the Concerto op. 3 no. 11 (RV 565). One notices there, for example, the intensity in the extinction of the movements.
In the famous Concerto “The Note” of Vivaldi, it is the central Largo which is astounding. The transition leading up to it is just brilliant, and Steger reproduces it almost as it is to create a bridge with Singing Garden in Venice by Toshio Hosokawa, composed mainly around reminiscences of this Largo. The simple sound of water flow connects the sections. This meditative work makes an interesting cut before “Il Gardellino”. For memo: Hosokawa is not the only one to have been interested in the sound of elements such as water. This is also a concern of Tan Dun (Water Concerto) and Sofia Goubaïdoulina.
The program was a good balance between Steger’s performance as conductor and as soloist, and the evening was exciting, with the musicians of Les Violons du Roy carried away by the charisma of this ball of energy.