This week’s OSM concert was preceded by many uproars. It had initially been titled “Russian concertos and French symphonic poems”: some representatives of the Ukrainian community saw it as an affront and demanded rescheduling or a postponement. It was not the case. Fortunately, as musical experience has proven.
This time, the OSM rejected the requests emanating notably from the Ukrainian Congress in Quebec. No question of touching the content of the concert like the last time, where the exclusion of the young pianist Malofeev had earned the Montreal institution a unanimous volley of green wood from the international media.
However, the Orchestra has been attentive to requests. Since the title was shocking, it became “Piano concertos and symphonic poems” and the Prayer for Ukraine by Valentin Silvestrov was added at the start of the program. Daniil Trifonov and Rafael Payare directly chained the Concerto for piano and strings of Schnittke and it had the best effect. Programming Director Marianne Perron skillfully presented the program and its meaning before the concert in respectful silence.
Polite manifestation
Before the concert, on rue Saint-Urbain, about thirty demonstrators stood silently in front of the entrance with signs. The same was true for a dozen more on the esplanade overlooking the foyer. They held up through the windows signs with pictures of the dead telling onlookers that these victims of the butchery organized by Russia in Ukraine could no longer hear music. Certainly.
The sanctions framework in Canada has been defined by the Department of Canadian Heritage and the Canada Council for the Arts. This includes organizations and artists supported by the Russian state or representing the Russian state. Russian individuals and works are excluded. The greatest living Ukrainian composer, Valentin Silvestrov, declared on March 16 to Deutsche Welle, after his exfiltration from Kyiv: “To boycott the Russian repertoire would be to bring water to Putin’s mill. He could thus say: “Look how the whole world terrorizes us! What a misfortune for us!” It would only help him brainwash his own people. When it comes to organizations or individuals who personally support Putin, that’s another matter. »
The whole planet agrees on this line. Except a few, apparently.
Unlike poor Malofeev, pianist Daniil Trifonov was not targeted by Ukrainian activists in Montreal. In interview with The duty, last April 13 Gregory Bedik, member of the Ukrainian Congress in Quebec said: “I don’t want to take away Mr. Trifonov’s livelihood: He’s a young man and it doesn’t matter what he thinks. He was weak on his Facebook account saying, “I don’t like war”. He wasn’t direct. Just like Pavel Kolesnikov, another Russian, who was performing 10 days ago in Montreal, which no one seems to have noticed (unless the OSM gives more visibility to the outbursts than the Ladies’ Morning Musical Club ), Trifonov lives in the West but his parents live in Russia. He has reason to fear that his writings and words are under close surveillance.
The distortion of the world
However, he did several things on Wednesday evening. First, he played music, because the OSM, by holding on, allowed him to play music. He was therefore able, for example to play as an encore, theElegy by the Ukrainian Mykola Lyssenko, totally insignificant music, but a very noble gesture, not to say very courageous. Then he gave a great interpretation of Prokofiev’s 1st Concerto, all quicksilver, biting and lively, almost impossible for the orchestra to follow in the coda of the 3rd movement.
Finally, he did much more. He showed, in Schnittke’s Concerto for Piano and Strings, that there are various ways to feel the scars of war when you don’t see them on the ground in your flesh. There are many ways to show compassion or be in thought with those who are suffering. We can demonstrate with signs to try to make those who go to the concert feel guilty. You can also be at this concert and listen to an artist (Daniil Trifonov) play a concerto by a composer persecuted by a totalitarian regime (Schnittke in the Soviet Union) and feel in your flesh the current suffering of a people collectively victim of a similar totalitarianism. Because music can embody and transmit all the tears and all the distortion of the world.
In his current physical appearance, Daniil Trifonov sports a Christlike look: long hair and beard. He bends down and breaks on his keyboard as if in pain. All that’s missing is the crown of thorns. But Schnittke’s Concerto, in sections, is a state of calm broken by distortions, violence, racing, an infernal waltz. These contrasts, Trifonov gives the impression of increasing them tenfold in an incredible ritual. Faced with this, Bronfman and Welser-Möst’s version looks like a joke. Much more moving than the frozen and lunar ones of Postnikova-Rojdestvenski, Trifonov and Payare join and surpass Ghindin-Spivakov (Capriccio) in the Allegro which evokes Prokofiev and in the destructive aggressiveness of the waltz. It was at this moment of staggering quasi-nuclear destruction that it would have been almost believable to see this unleashed Christ squirting blood from the piano.
In these moments music replaces and surpasses all words. It acts as a catharsis. Everyone can see what they want there. Trifonov may not have thought of the war, but everyone was free to think about it and few works could evoke it so starkly. In this score thus played, Schnittke appears as the nihilistic antithesis of Peteris Vasks. Vasks longs for love, Schnittke seems obsessed with the abyss.
The two French works on the program were taken head-on by Rafael Payare. In The Peri of Dukas, the conductor has paid particular attention to the sound paste and the movement, the coherence of the gradations too.
In The sea, it is the 3rd component that suits him best. There too, the tempos are judiciously ranging. What is lacking in parts I and II is the audacity to go to the end of the dynamic bellows. But the respect of these nuances gives a depth of breathing which animates the musical flow.