“Welcome to the biggest mass of hypersensitive people in Quebec!” Alexandra Stréliski told the tens of thousands of fans gathered on the Plains of Abraham last night to hear her perform selected pieces from her three albums, accompanied by members of the Orchestre symphonique de Québec. Also aided by a scenography with carefully crafted cinematographic sequences, the composer and pianist made some of her “rock dreams” come true by offering a program of original pop-classical music on the largest stage the Festival d’été de Québec has to offer.
Stréliski is not only the only female headliner on the plains of this edition of the FEQ, but she had also invited Beyries and Elisapie to share this moment. When we arrived on the site bathed in the last rays of sunshine around 8 p.m., Elisapie was serving Heart of Glass by Blondie, one of the Innu language covers on her album Inuktitutpublished last fall.
This concert had barely begun and was already shaping up to be epic: all the way to the hills to the east, the festival-goers had gathered, giving the musician the image, now engraved in her memory, of her biggest crowd in her career. It was beautiful to see, and touching to experience for Elisapie, moved by the welcome and “this sky, incredible”, blue, gray, pink and diffuse because of the heat and humidity of this perfect summer evening.
His program included covers ofInuktitut and the most beautiful of her previous albums, Elisapie singing accompanied by an orchestra of international caliber, directed by the guitarist-multi-instrumentalist Joe Grass. Ravishing sound, grooves sophisticated, muscular by the two percussionists, adorned by the expert guitars of his collaborators.
The musician took care to present her songs to us, weaving links between them and the members of her family, living or deceased, celebrating life through Dreams by Fleetwood Mac (Sunnatuumait in its translation) and women on the epic Scamwhich opens the album The Ballad of the Runaway Girl (2018). When, from the same album, she launched into Wolves Don’t Live by the Rulesthe orchestra gave him an exquisite groove folk rock; Elisapie, last night, played like a big girl in the big league, the Plains of Abraham. Famous concert.
At 9:30 p.m., the orchestra of two dozen musicians opened the recital with a long introduction rich in violins, before Alexandra Stréliski appeared on stage, in her ample pink suit, to join the upright piano set up on the stage right to perform the Preludetaken from Pianoscope (2010). As she walked back down to the grand piano set at center stage, the camera was trained on her face; one could decode the astonishment that gripped her upon seeing the crowd when she uttered three words in English that one usually reads on the lips of hockey players when they are awarded an unjustified penalty.
She could well have been just as astounded: has anyone ever seen such a musical offering on the plains, in the middle of the Quebec Summer Festival? Classical music, between two rock concerts (The Offspring the day before, Karkwa on Tuesday, the other Quebec headliner)? The most wonderful thing about all this was the quality of the festival-goers’ listening: from where we were attending the concert, an immense respect for the music offered coming from attentive spectators.
The orchestrations helped to give depth and wings to Stréliski’s simple but melodiously seductive compositions, an essential contribution to the success of this evening, which was nevertheless uneven in terms of sound. Which was quite a challenge, a small microphone having been grafted to each violin, each flute, each brass instrument; at the beginning of the concert, Stréliski played Lights And The First Kiss when the string section intervened so strongly that it buried the piano. Fortunately, the right balance between the playing of the pianist and her orchestra emerged over the course of the evening.
As much as the orchestrations carried Alexandra’s songs, the staging energized the evening’s proceedings. Set designer Marcella Grimaux took advantage of the new giant “panoramic” screens – so giant, in fact, that they were wider than the stage itself! These imagined sets evoking living nature or the grandeur of a starry sky added a lot of context to the music. In addition, the intervention of rappers Loud, first, and Sarahmée, especially, deepened the proposition. Dressed in black, Sarahmée recited a short but poignant text in memory of her brother Karim Ouellet: “Where has the sly fox gone, his guitar around his neck?”
At the end of the concert, Stréliski allowed himself a walkabout to reach an island in the center of the stalls, where there was a third piano. The opportunity to realize two “rock dreams”: the first was to play a piece while admiring the little stars created by the spectators’ cell phones. The second was to return to the big stage while doing bodysurfing !
Her last great dream, to make a crowd sing, will not be realized by her wordless music, she conceded. She has instead chosen to perform a piano-and-brass version of Shooting Stars by Cowboys Fringants, hummed by thousands of spectators.