The Orchester Métropolitain (OM) offered its young audience on Sunday The Cloud Shoveler, adapted by Simon Boulerice from his story published in 2018. Three musical creations by Marie-Claire Saindon, Stewart Goodyear and Denis Nassar Baptista dress up a narration in three sequences. The project shows the extreme difficulty and the immense challenge of addressing children in such a show.
Le Métropolitain had previously done flawlessly with its project Awesome ! twice bringing together science popularizer Martin Carli and conductor Nicolas Ellis, an original concept, rhythmic and gripping while making “great music” “absorb” by an adolescent or pre-adolescent audience, but which has come to an end .
With The Cloud Shoveler, we felt the desire to address a younger target, say 5-10 years old and even more particularly 5-8 years old, as shown by the profile of young spectators. Rather than something very stringy and dazzling, The Cloud Shoveler was like a “test balloon” allowing us to see what works well, and above all what does not work, in a niche that calls for strong development in the years to come. Some elements have appeared, alas! very roughly “off the mark”.
Literacy
Stewart Goodyear’s “Soups” segment demonstrates what works very well: a short-sentence narrative that involves a character’s moods, illustrated by eloquent sounds or phrases from the orchestra. This is when the children woke up and even laughed.
We furtively saw the other necessary ingredient: the story greatly benefits from being supported by the image. By image we mean the drawing, not the filming of the orchestra! The image is sometimes absolutely necessary. And OM did not notice it. When the father, a gardener, launches into a litany on the language of flowers, imagining that a 6-year-old child knows what we are talking about when we evoke a begonia, a petunia, a dahlia or whatever, is a fantasy psychedelic.
Here we touch upon the two problematic points of the Cloud Shoveler as presented. The first part with the gardener’s long monologues interspersed with nice music weighs down the project from the start (the children also quickly start chatting). Moreover, we raise eyebrows because of the language used when the mother’s discourse reveals that she is resting from “her work”. His work? At 5-8 years old? Has anyone, at OM or on the author-adaptor side, heard of literacy?
There is an Internet tool called scolarius.com, developed by the Quebec company Influence communication. It would be exciting to put the text heard on Sunday through a grinder, especially that of the first section. If the verdict, based on the length of the speeches and the floral monologue, was “college level, that wouldn’t even surprise us. Setting up a project for an institution also means knowing how to sometimes say “no”, even when the artistic partner is an icon like Simon Boulerice.
A toast to John Williams
From a musical point of view, Marie-Claire Saindon made the effort to compose simple music to make people forget the hard work of the plowman, Stewart Goodyear did a flawless job and Denis Nassar Baptista will take a drink to the health of John Williams. Mathilde Roy’s sets were very pretty. We appreciated the diction of Salomé Corbo and the exaltation of Adrien Belugou. The two young soloists, winners of the OMNI competition, saxophonist Heidi Robichaud and viola player Emad Zolfaghari, did admirably, the first in Milhaud, the second in Walton.
For 2024, OM will announce an alliance this Monday which will mark the sixth season of Master key on Tele-Quebec. In the spotlight: “A unique and original way of transmitting to children the love of music, its cognitive benefits for the brain and the joy of playing with it!” We will have to review the ins and outs of educational and youth projects and surround ourselves with very serious supervision in terms of “musical awakening”.