The Montreal Symphony Orchestra and Rafael Payare recorded their third CD in concert this week. Dedicated to Schoenberg, it will couple The transfigured night And Pelléas and Mélisande. The concert was also a precious opportunity to see pianist Maria-João Pires in Montreal, a few months shy of her 80th birthday.e birthday.
This concert, without meaning to, was a bit like our Stanley Cup. A lifetime of waiting for these five minutes: the 2e movement of 4e Concerto of Beethoven exactly as it is written, composed, thought; as is evident in the score and as everyone strives not to play it. Oh, this is no exception: the Cello Concerto by Dvořák it’s the same, and many masterpieces too.
There are obviously performers who have done everything to respect the spirit. Among the elders, it was Wilhelm Backhaus (with Schmidt-Isserstedt at Decca) who had been the most faithful, while his time was to cast down Beethoven in a Brahmsian tone. The Kovacevich-Davis version is superb. Closer to us, Bronfman-Zinman are right, but not necessarily subtle, while Jos van Immerseel, on a pianoforte (with Tafelmusik) has understood everything in his Sony recording, but, as always, he seeks to demonstrate that ‘he understood. It dehumanizes the subject.
Orpheus sings
The translation of this movement, in which commentators saw Orpheus and his lyre, was simply perfect on Thursday evening. Perfection, here, implies that each response of the piano or the orchestra falls dramatically almost to the millisecond. That each note that comes together on the piano adds something compared to the previous one; a quest, a despondency, a fullness. This 2e movement is the story of a game that the piano ends up winning and each intensity of each note counts. With Maria João Pires and Rafael Payare, everything was right, absolutely right, as was the pianist’s way of “vocalizing” Beethoven, of singing on the piano. A more liquid song when she dialogues with the orchestra, more combative when she is presented solo or in cadenzas.
As for the central movement, the most important moment of our favorite concerto, we’ve been waiting to experience this for decades. And the attitude of the pianist at the piano, curled up on the keyboard, almost “broken”, we have seen it once at this point before; in the years 1977 or 1978 with Rudolf Serkin in… the 4e Concerto by Beethoven! What a coincidence…
So, certainly, the Final was not digitally impeccable. Everything didn’t fall perfectly, and the orchestra itself got into it with a woodwind shift in the clarinet-bassoon-horn passage before the coda, but the musical aspects were so positive that that’s what we holds back.
On disk
Another part of the concert: Schoenberg. It’s one of Rafael Payare’s characteristics that he doesn’t really have a sense of proportion. We left at 10 p.m., after two and a half too busy hours, including an hour and 20 minutes of Schoenberg. It’s really a lot to ask of the audience, even if Rafael Payare makes it easier for the listener by conducting the Viennese composer in a very lively way, much more expressionist and chromatic than voluptuous and decadent post-romantic.
We found the ardent life of the Transfigured night which had sparked the romantic clash between the orchestra and the conductor and between the public and the conductor during his first test concert in 2018. In Pelléas and Mélisande, Payare calls upon all the desks of the orchestra, in an explosive reading, which it will be fascinating to compare with the reference signed John Barbirolli, in the same obedience, when the disc is released. There are other very beautiful visions, but with other more fundamental aesthetic biases (for example Karajan).
The gag, in relation to the record, was the intervention at the microphone before the concert asking not to applaud before the end. For once such a (clever) thing happens, it concerns two works in one block in which there is no room to applaud before the end! Less funny, our big concern with the record is the sort of hissing growls that the conductor emits when he is caught up in the musical action. There were quite a few yesterday. And if we heard them at the back of the floor, we didn’t envy the sound technicians, especially in The transfigured night.
And as long as we are on extra-musical but crucial questions… We saw it again Thursday evening in such a complex program: democratization, inclusion in classical music is not to deprive oneself in a programming of high caliber violinists like Vilde Frang or Leonidas Kavakos in the concertos of Britten, Szymanowski or Prokofiev, for the benefit of the latest African-American “star” opportunistically appearing ex-nihilo and called to the rescue to instill Florence Price and make- like everyone. Democratization and inclusion in classical music (we have already mentioned this for the Alpine Symphony), it starts by improving the concert experience of present and current customers, facilitating their listening and elevating their spirit, when, for example, there are symphonic poems, by projecting behind the orchestra the words, the section titles or scenes that the orchestra is playing or illustrating.