During a funeral ceremony, a commemoration, a tribute paid to the resilience of a people as to the sharing of their pain, music, dance, poetry and dramatic art are guests of honor. . Their songs, their chords, their gestures, their voices of proximity accompany in its slightest nuances the collective mourning.
The most poignant requiems are not always the saddest, however. In New Orleans, musicians are seen following funeral processions with jazz and brass bands. And their noisy convoys more often revive happy memories than they unleash tears. Thus, Ginette Reno sang with her powerful voice The essential at Guy Lafleur’s funeral with affection that erased the barriers between the living and the dead. Flowers and art assist the rituals of departures in religious services of all denominations as well as in secular ceremonies. What would we do without them?
Last week, the Orchester Classique de Montréal, an orphan conductor, and the Ensemble Caprice, under the direction of Matthias Maute, celebrated at the Salle Pierre-Mercure the legacy of Maestro Boris Brott, who died tragically in Hamilton a months in a hit-and-run car accident. A trained violinist, Boris Brott comes from an illustrious line of musicians. A work by his father, Alexander Brott, invited his heritage to this evening, the program of which, devoted mainly to Handel, had been devised during the conductor’s lifetime. The shadow of his cellist mother, Lotte Brott, who would have turned 100 this year, hung like an angel by his side.
I enjoyed savoring the touches of humor and emotion thrown into this concert suddenly colored by the departure of the maestro: birdsong, a dialogue between the soprano Karina Gauvin and the trumpet, more haunting prowess of the cellist Chloé Dominguez, moments of silence or stopping to let the great man’s breath pass or to signify the brutality of his departure. Handel from beyond the grave shared in the affection that his friends and admirers had for the deceased, welcoming the whimsical contributions of chef Matthias Maute, who made the evening light. And in a boosted minuet, I found complicity with the Ad Memoriam Louisiana people closed on a dance and joyful songs.
Farewell ceremonies and tribute evenings are cultural and memorial events. They weigh on low or high notes the weight of the living and the dead, sometimes sacrificing humor in favor of impotence and rage. The flowers wither under the onslaught of the bombs and certain too bloody, current and collective commemorations do not invite appeasement.
Tuesday night, I went to the Centaur Theater in Old Montreal to listen Ukrainian lyrics, a show orchestrated by Michel Marc Bouchard, Eda Holmes and Leslie Baker. Texts by Ukrainian artists, playwrights or poets of yesterday, especially today, read by actors from here, bore witness to fear, horror, broken motherhoods and torn loves, but also fierce challenges in the face of barbarian invasions.
Ukrainians are fueled by the love of their culture which sustains them in battle. The polyphony of the admirable female voices of the DakhaBrakha group heard in the background launched the ball for this tribute evening. Hosted by François Arnaud and Charles Bender, it doubled as a fundraiser for the children and artists of this afflicted area. Later, Katherine Palyga, violinist at the OSM, came to play a melancholy then dramatic Ukrainian work, reflecting the country. The sense of tragedy is never transmitted so well as through the embrace of the bow on the strings of a violin.
As for the texts of the Ukrainian authors, they were woven of deaths and regrets born of the wars. Chernobyl sounded its atrocious blues in the shadow of its muffled power station. Elsewhere, the litany of the country’s invaders, from the Tatars to the Russians, via the Germans, resounded like a song of eternal resilience. Signed Iryna Garets, the story of a grandmother planting new apple seeds in her orchard while evoking the loss of her family flew past and future in turn.
But no performer expressed as much anger at the Russian invasion as Quebec actor and director Gregory Hlady, born in Ukraine, whose relatives are still in the country. His cries from the heart reminded us that it is difficult to grasp, even when bombarded with bloody television images, all the pain of a people without feeling it in their flesh, without identifying with it as much as they do. Some tribute evenings invite us to share art, pain and revolt by putting on red shoes.