Tuesday at 7:30 p.m., the Bourgie Hall of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts will pay tribute to two musicians, conductors and educators who have had a major influence on our musical life: Agnes Grossmann and Raffi Armenian.
It is Olivier Godin, artistic director of the Bourgie Hall, who deserves the credit for having thought of this salutary tribute. Married since 1984, Agnes Grossmann and Raffi Armenian have both left their mark on Quebec musical life through positions held within or at the head of Quebec and Canadian musical institutions, but also through the influence exerted on many musicians from here. The conductor Jean-Marie Zeitouni, the sopranos Kimy McLaren and Aline Kutan, the pianists Michael McMahon, André Laplante and Olivier Godin, the violinist Van Armenian, a quartet from the Orchester Métropolitain and an ensemble from the Conservatoire de musique de Montreal will perform Tuesday evening.
Legacy
“I have been thinking about this evening for a long time, because Agnes and Raffi were important in my life as in that of many musicians,” confides Olivier Godin to Duty. “At the Conservatory, when I was a student, Raffi was the conductor, and I often played under his direction. Agnes was at Orford when I started my career. It was with her that I took my first steps at opera and with singers. But this is not a personal tribute; it is in the name of all the musicians of my generation who benefited from their advice and from this contribution of a tradition which came from Europe. »
Agnes Grossmann’s career is impressive. The one who was from 1986 to 1995 the artistic director of the Orchester Métropolitain, whose choir she founded in 1987, arrived in Canada in 1981 as a guest professor at the University of Ottawa, where she directed the choir and the ‘orchestra. She was then also artistic director of the Wiener Singakademie (1983-1986), a position evoking the legacy of her father Ferdinand Grossmann (1887-1970), Weingartner’s student, singing teacher and luminary among choir conductors. Ferdinand Grossmann made the Little Singers of Vienna an internationally recognized institution. Agnes Grossmann will also be artistic director of the Petits Chanteurs de Vienne between 1996 and 1998. For his part, Ferdinand Grossmann as a teacher had a notable influence on the school of singing in Quebec, because he trained Marie Daveluy, famous teacher of numerous singers, including Marie-Nicole Lemieux and Karina Gauvin.
Agnes Grossmann, who will turn 80 in a month, studied piano with Bruno Seidlhofer in Vienna and Pierre Sancan in Paris. Following an injury, she turned to conducting and studied extensively at the Vienna Conservatory. In addition to her influence in the development of the Orchester Métropolitain (she was one of the first important female artistic directors in an almost exclusively male profession at the time), Agnes Grossmann notably directed the Orford Arts Center from 1989 to 1995 and from 1999 to 2004. “It’s not a bad thing today to look back and see that we were lucky in Montreal to have a first female conductor with a position of director artistic. We were pioneers,” notes Olivier Godin.
The chief of chiefs
Raffi Armenian, born in Egypt in 1942, was trained in Vienna notably by Bruno Seidlhofer, Hans Swarowsky and Ferdinand Grossmann. Prudent, he interrupted his musical studies to obtain diplomas in metallurgy in London, but did not need to put them to good use. His musical career quickly led him to settle in Halifax (1969) as assistant conductor of the Atlantic Symphony Orchestra. He became musical director of the Kitchener-Waterloo Orchestra, a position held from 1971 to 1992. In opera, he was musical director of the Stratford Festival from 1973 to 1976 and of the Atelier lyrique de l’Opéra de Montréal, from 1985 to 1988.
After his departure from the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Orchestra, Raffi Armenian focused in particular on teaching. From 1981 to 2013, he was the emblematic professor of conducting at the Montreal Conservatory of Music and as such, professor of Jacques Lacombe, Jean-Marie Zeitouni and Stéphane Laforest, for example.
“The training of Agnes Grossmann and Raffi Armenian with Hans Swarowsky and Karl Österreicher, which itself stemmed from Richard Strauss and Arnold Schoenberg, is this relationship with music, this way of making music, from which we were able to benefit,” summarizes Olivier Godin. “There is a whole baggage that revolves around them and which has had an extraordinary influence on the musicians here. »
In a room which does not allow the presentation of orchestral repertoire, Olivier Godin first “chose musicians who worked closely with Raffi and Agnes; musicians from the Métropolitain, collaborators of the Conservatory, former students of Raffi, like Jean-Marie Zeitouni, but also André Laplante, who taught for years in Orford and in Toronto with Agnes, Michael McMahon, collaborator of singers with whom Agnes worked a lot, and Aline Kutan, a compatriot of Raffi.” The repertoire will be Germanic to “underline the legacy of Raffi and Agnes”.
All the musicians contacted said “yes” instantly, underlines the organizer of the tribute, who put together an evening enriched by entertainment and screenings. This Tuesday evening, Olivier Godin describes it as “sweet, to also show that Mozart, Strauss, Schubert, Berg is a repertoire which is in our hearts thanks to them”.