A large audience had come to greet the return of Kent Nagano, whose fame here has enabled the OSM to offer three times the Schubert-Mozart concert given on Tuesday, which we attended on Wednesday and which will therefore be repeated once again on Thursday. .
” Historically Informed Performance “, usual abbreviation HIP, or in French, “Interpretation historically informed”: such is the dominant interpretative current of the last forty years which, from early and baroque music, ended up winning the classical and romantic orchestral repertoire. A branch of this knowledge concerns timbres, the instrumental craftsmanship. The other, the style of execution, the supposed tempos, the articulation, the vibrato, etc.
Contagion
In the 80s and 90s this practice was the prerogative of specialized ensembles and conductors: Hogwood, Harnoncourt, Brüggen, Kuijken, Gardiner, Norrington, Goodman, Herreweghe, etc. Then the symphonic institutions, to be up to date, began to invite the conductors of this obedience who wished to indulge in a career as guest drumsticks. Very quickly the orchestras realized that there were about three who “knew how to conduct”: Nicholas McGegan, Bernard Labadie and Andrew Manze. Manze got caught up in the game and now only conducts standard repertoire, and Labadie and McGegan aren’t enough for a whole market.
So to combine technical expertise in conducting and pragmatism, given that the best interests of music seemed to be that everyone served the same salad, the “traditional” conductors began to take an interest in the HIP movement.
Thus the complete Beethoven of Chailly resembles that of Jansons, which resembles that of Nagano, which resembles that of Dausgaard, which resembles that of Vänskä, the latter being however the most abundant. It will be noted in passing that the HIP movement eventually leads to a kind of interpretative orthodoxy so starched that the listener knows practically in advance the interpretation he is going to hear.
Mozart more conclusive
This return of Kent Nagano to Montreal turned out to be the return of the perfect “HIPster”, so much did we hear a catalog of supposed “good practices”, quite in their place for the peremptory and solar majesty of the C major of the “Jupiter” Symphony by Mozart, subtly chiseled, but surprisingly brutal and not very vocal in the 3rd Symphony of Schubert, whose disagreements in mood were ironed out by dry rhetoric. This Third evolves in a post-Haydn universe. The opening Adagio maestoso has more weight. This also brings out phrases that can also be led with more charm and song. But precisely, isn’t one of the cute sins of the HIP movement to want to demonstrate precepts instead of feeling the music?
In the much more conclusive Mozart part of this concert in one block without intermission, Nova Scotian Jane Archibald sang with perfect confidence and beautiful highs theExultate, jubilate. At the age of 45, however, the voice is beginning to take shape and we prefer to hear, in this air composed by a 17-year-old Mozart, younger singers, for example Regula Mühlemann in her early thirties a few years ago at Sony. We would certainly have had three or four perfect Quebec women for the job…