Rafael Payare conducted his first fantastic symphony of Berlioz with the OSM. The concert, which will be given again on Saturday and Sunday, also featured Barbara Hannigan who, despite the suggestive photo of a conductor in the season brochure, has stuck to the role of singer for the time being. Despite this pleasant visit, it is ultimately the symphony that we remember from the evening.
This is the concert of a new era. For so many years we have expressed in vain in these columns our expectation of finally seeing a conductor in Montreal conduct the version with solo cornet of the “Bal” of the fantastic symphony. Francis Choinière was the first to do it a few months ago, but what happened on Wednesday evening is important, because now the OSM’s new music director himself endorses this version.
Joy ! Because this choice seems so obvious to us. To say that it is “better” or “more beautiful” because of the trumpet countermelody is a matter of taste. On the other hand, the option “makes sense”. This whole symphony describes Berlioz’s solitude in relation to the world which does not understand him, in relation to love without return. And having in “Le bal” a solo instrument that seems to be spinning against the current is so telling, in the same way as the Final of the 4th Symphony by Tchaikovsky opposes the solitary to the farandole which excludes him.
While this 2nd movement seemed “tinkered” with Francis Choinière and his trumpet player, Rafael Payare and Paul Merkelo delivered one of the most beautiful reproductions, one of the best balanced that I have ever been given. ‘To hear.
The best is yet to come
For the rest, the fantastic symphony with Rafael Payare is already excellent and will become exciting. It’s going to be a great job in his tenure and we’re going to be very happy to see her regularly as a thermometer to see how the orchestra is acclimating to him.
In the dynamics of things, we begin to decode the OSM-Payare tandem. It is obviously impossible to change everything at once. In the Fantasticit is illusory to pass from “clean in effective order”, followed by “weighed analytical”, to the unbridled infernal.
We will therefore note the already substantial number of beautiful changes: a fluid and almost impatient 1st part, “Le bal” with cornet, a 3rd movement where the response of the beloved to the plaintive English horn takes place on the opposite side of the room in height but not offstage, a work on the very drawn dryness of the percussion, including at the end of the 3rd movement (response from hell to the same call from the English horn) where a French tradition favors a more muffled sound with less dry drumsticks (see on YouTube the video of Myung-Whun Chung around 37’45).
What will evolve in the future to bring the OSM even more towards Payare is the sardonism of the 5th part, clearly insufficient. It would take all the energy here that we felt in the 2nd Symphony of Mahler in favor of caricatural sounds and not, for example, the comfortably gentrified pizzicatos of cellos, under the theme of Dies Irae. This is what will come in the future and will be irresistible. This is what we heard in the two great concerts of our lives, conducted by Stéphane Denève with the London Symphony and by Claus Peter Flor, where, certainly, in both cases, we were in hell and in full madness.
In the first part we had a sample of “concept program” by Barbara Hannigan, that is to say a succession of Nono-Sibelius-Vivier without pause and without applause interrupting the impressive ritual. Impressive by the innate accuracy of the singer (nono Sibelius connection, au iota close, while Nono is only tightrope walking a cappella without landmarks!) but also his way, in Vivier, of embracing the orchestral sonic swirls very well contained by the conductor.
For Barbara Hannigan, all of this “is her thing”. We knew it. It must have moved her to sing Vivier (which she defends so well) at home. Us, it did us good to hear LonelyChild with a singer with a vocal line and a real voice allowing millimetric inflections.
The whole thing was about twenty minutes of vocal performance. You had to go through it to have the right to see Madame Hannigan lead next season. Hopefully these little coaxing processes will be worth it.