Franco-Belgian cellist Camille Thomas made her Montreal debut at Bourgie Hall on Thursday night. The evening leaves a curious and mixed impression, so much one wonders if one really heard chamber music, Chopin and Rachmaninoff.
Had someone warned pianist Roman Rabinovich that he wasn’t supposed to make so much noise but that he was accompanying cellist Camille Thomas and that 100% of the audience had come to see her? It is sometimes difficult to concentrate and to make a musical selection in this thunderous flow where the cellist tried to impose herself, in particular in the 1st movement of the Sonata of Chopin.
A mash of decibels, against a mash of vibrato. Summarized in one sentence, it could be a very vulgar criticism of a superficial and window dressing, fundamentally vulgar too.
Organic breathing
Powder in the eyes this can be dissected or rationalized when, basically, the listener is allowed to realize that the “gestures” heard lead nowhere, because they are not structuring, they are not expressive in the organic sense , that is to say of the musical breathing of the sentences which participates in the construction. Where is the gradation when everything is intense (Rachmaninoff’s 4th movement)?
For those interested in understanding the shortcomings of this concert, a useful exercise will bear fruit: listening to the Sonata of Rachmaninoff by Heinrich Schiff and Elisabeth Leonskaïa (Philips). No whining vibrato or procrastination to feign emotion in the Andante. It is enough to live the said emotion with simplicity and to observe the nuances (“piano espressivo” for the entry of the keyboard!). And what about the 2nd movement: Allegro scherzando, where the adjective “scherzando” means “fun” and not “school”.
So why invite Camille Thomas after Jean-Guihen Queyras, Edgar Moreau and Victor Julien-Laferrière? Trying to explain: you don’t know anything about classic 2.0. Camille Thomas has 68.2k Instagram followers and the Bourgie Hall photo is already now in the middle of the artist’s multiple selfies. In marketing and image, it’s a “win-win” situation
However, there is something a little shocking in his promotion of the young artist. Her website biography states that in “2017, she signed an exclusive international artist contract with Deutsche Grammophon, becoming the first female cellist to sign for the prestigious record company. It should be remembered that just before Rostropovitch in the mid-1960s DG signed the great Anja Thauer who, alas, killed herself for heartache at the age of 28 in 1973, leaving only three records to posterity. including a large Concerto by Dvorak led by Zdenek Macal at the head of the Czech Philharmonic, far superior to the posh Rostropovitch-Karajan version which eclipsed him by the grace of marketing.
But marketing, as we can still see today, is a devastating force.