Les Violons du Roy and Jonathan Cohen put an end to the 2022/23 season at Bourgie Hall on Friday evening with Marc-André Hamelin with a particularly demanding concert for an audience that was admirable in every way: silence, respect and concentration.
Notice to young composers, find yourself a wacky title that brings together two well-known composers. That’s the hardest part. Because, afterwards, any hoax will get you programmed in the name of a few precepts that govern the musical universe. A great asset would be to adorn the thing with a ritual. The polystylistic master of the genre, Schnittke, has already, alas, preempted the best idea with Moz-Art at Haydn and, taking inspiration from the latter’s Symphony No. 45, brings everyone out in the dark.
Solar system
What Schnittke understood well in 1977 was the vanity (in many senses) of the business musical. If the earth revolves around the sun, the business music revolves around the conductor, whom organizations have starred to excess and at their expense, even as orchestras have become more and more competent.
In this galaxy of more or less despotic and more or less enlightened characters, there are those who stage themselves, like Julien Chauvin at Arion recently, and there are the “conceptuals”, a variety well known in Montreal (you remember you of Pérotin associated with Boulez?).
Moz-Art at Haydn, which it must be said one day that it is a vast joke, is food for “conceptuals”, offering multiple outlets to Schnittke who was inevitably programmed as the opening of Mozart and Haydn programs. Bingo! Bright, Solar, admirable! And such clever. The Enlightenment didn’t happen for nothing. That the thing was pure rubbish almost didn’t matter. The title is so beautiful.
All of that was reckoning without Jonathan Cohen. Because he, the real business, he knows how it works: it is a question of insisting, of giving back substance. So, in the middle, he hands us a ladle of Schnittke. But this time real, big, heavy: the piano concertothe one played by Trifonov in April 2022 at the OSM.
Heroes
Well, after two hours of concert (break included), there is still a whole Haydn symphony to play for some and to struggle with for others… And that’s when we say: congratulations to the public. Collecting so much material that requires such concentration, just because the concept “works well on paper”: hats off to you ladies and gentlemen, you are the real heroes of the evening. The director of the hall, Caroline Louis, was right to thank you warmly before the concert, just as the director, Olivier Godin, was right to show his solidarity with Simon Blanchet of the Chapelle historique du Bon-Pasteur.
The formidable Marc-André Hamelin resolved in the 17e Concerto of Mozart the problem of the potential piano-orchestra imbalance in this room. He didn’t abuse the pedal to give a slightly straighter sound. This Mozart cut with a scalpel was admirable and the cadence of the 2e impressive movement. Just as much as his dense and concentrated Schnittke concerto. The Quebec pianist’s performance on stage is more austere than that of Trifonov, but the musical result is just as dense and powerful. At 31 instrumentalists in this room volume, the orchestral corpus was more than enough.
Hats off also to the orchestra for having then played such a precise Haydn, especially in the humor of the 3e movement and the breaks in tone of the Final. The violinists Michelle Seto and Noëlla Bouchard were impeccable in the marketing amuse-bouche of Schnittke, fake clownery not funny, whose strings, 45 years later, are threadbare.