Czech Václav Luks opened on the 15the Montreal Bach Festival Sunday in a symphonic house very copiously filled with four cantatas from theChristmas Oratorio at the head of the choir and the orchestra of the Festival, an opportunity to recall that in terms of vocal works, the notoriety of the conductor is not everything.
As an event with international ambitions, the Bach Festival invites stars like Sergei Babayan or Martin Helmchen to Montreal this year, and enhances the prestige of local musicians by inviting them to share in the celebration. But the opening concert of a festival has a particular symbolic force, which sets the tone for the entire event. Was this the opening concert of an “international” Bach Festival? Not really.
In 2018, the Bach Festival took the great risk of launching both its festival and the initiative of creating a choir and an orchestra. ad hoc. In 2021, the situation is not the same: it is still too risky to make groups travel, Arion was taken by his series of Louis XIV concerts at the end week and Les Violons du Roy will be involved in The art of running away Thursday. Much progress has been made in terms of the orchestral (a solid and well-formed ensemble) and choral performance of this custom-made ensemble.
Other good points include the positioning in the center of the enlarged stage, strings on the left, winds on the right, while the musicians are allocated less than an hour (!) To find their place at the Maison symphonique, and the rather miraculous substitution of tenor Benedikt Kristjánsson in place of Daniel Johannsen. It is rare to come across a substitute of such quality, even if its intonation at the beginning of the Cantata 1 aroused some fears. Kristjánsson’s volume and color have earned us an elegiac narrative.
Hyperactivity at the podium
Václav Luks is a “case”. Bach makes him fidget as much as Leonard Bernstein leader Harold in Italy by Berlioz. This means that he has come to the point of jumping on his podium! He looks like a guy fascinated, as a child, by the advertisements of the Energizer bunny to the point of having made him his model. The question that will elicit subjective individual responses is: does this hyperactivity help access to music or is it distracting?
There is a noble purpose to Luks’ angular bustle: the eloquence and emphasis of the text. The positive point of his work is therefore the pronunciation of a choir which would have deserved one or two more dazzling sopranos. The eloquence is relayed by an excellent instrumental work, with the oboes and the trumpets, even if the latter have collapsed a little in the final chorus of the 6e Cantata.
The problem of the evening (besides the fact of wondering when we will be able to eat when we have to go to a concert starting at 6 pm and ending at 8:30 pm!) Was the choice of the soloists. Nothing to say about Tobias Berndt, excellent baritone-bass. But who put such a festival in the footsteps of soprano Teresa Wakim? Considering the result, did she ever think of asking for a refund for her singing lessons? Mme Wakim had obviously prepared (with the poor means at hand) his air of the 6e Cantata, but his recitatives here and there were frightening. It was indeed one of the worst voices to have performed in ten years at the Maison symphonique.
As for the countertenor Maarten Engeltjes, he impeccably placed his timbre enunciating a series of syllabic sounds. It is not in question, but among the happiest incongruities of a certain “baroque revolution”, we will one day catalog the use of large smiling bald people to sing in theChristmas Oratorio the maternal ode to infant lactation. In the old days, and even today when you have a little bit of savvy, it was distributed to a warm mezzo-soprano voice. And it was very good that way.
Continuation Tuesday evening at the Bourgie room with the return to Montreal of a beautiful hope of the piano: Albert Cano Smit.