Overview of events to watch this summer for all classical music lovers.
A majestic season opener in Lanaudière
The opening of the Festival de Lanaudière, on July 7, will not take place this year to the sound of Mahler, as in the last three editions, but rather of Beethoven, with his inescapable Ninth Symphony. As usual, the Orchester symphonique de Montréal will occupy the large outdoor stage of the Fernand-Lindsay amphitheater, with its conductor Rafael Payare on the podium, who conducted this symphonic-choral monument at the Maison symphonique there one year old. We stay not too far to hear the same protagonists the next afternoon in the dazzling concerto for orchestra by Bartok, The Moldau of Smetana and the Piano concerto no.oh 2 by Rachmaninov, played by the Russian soloist Denis Kojoukhine, of which this will be the Quebec debut.
The last Quebec farewells of the Emerson Quartet
PHOTO JÜRGEN FRANK, PROVIDED BY THE EMERSON QUARTET
The Emerson Quartet: Eugene Drucker, Philip Setzer, Larry Dutton and Paul Watkins
Since the announcement of its dissolution, the Emerson Quartet, the best string quartet in activity, has multiplied the farewell concerts in Quebec, which is obviously not to displease. After the Club musical de Québec last October, the ensemble, formed in 1976 by students from the Juilliard School, will be a guest at the Montreal Chamber Music Festival on June 6 in a “quintet” format. To hear Emerson “pure juice” one last time, it’s at Domaine Forget in Charlevoix that you’ll have to go on July 14th. The four musicians will give an excellent overview of their repertoire by drawing on the side of Haydn, Mendelssohn and Ravel.
Touch the divine with Orford Music
PHOTO FROM THE MONTREAL OLD MUSIC STUDIO FACEBOOK PAGE
The Montreal Early Music Studio
A week after the sacred opening weekend in Lanaudière, it is in Estrie that it will be necessary to go for a sacred weekend. The Orford Music Festival invites you first to hear the excellent Old Music Society of Montreal (SMAM) in the legendary acoustics of the abbey church of Saint-Benoît-du-Lac on Saturday, July 15 in the afternoon in a choral music program a cappella rebirth. The next afternoon, at the Orford Center, the Montreal company Ballet Opéra Pantomime (BOP) offers another image of the sacred with its new creation, La Nave: ritual for four pianoswhich combines Messiaen’s music with dance and creations by two young local composers.
Joliette, Monteverde’s capital for the summer of 2023
PHOTO MARIANA FLORES, FROM THE CONDUCTOR’S FACEBOOK PAGE
Argentinian chef Leonardo Garcíá Alarcón
This is probably the event of the classical musical summer in Quebec: the arrival of Argentinian conductor Leonardo Garcíá Alarcón at the Festival de Lanaudière on July 22 and 24. We have heard him at the OSM and at Les Violons du Roy, as much in Bach as in Piazzolla and Stravinsky, but it is this time around Monteverdi that he will take us on a journey, what is more for the first time here with its Cappella Mediterranea and the renowned Chamber Choir of Namur. They will offer us on the one hand theOrfeothe first great opera in history (July 22), then the immense Vespers of the Virgin by the Italian composer (July 24), two works of which they have made now essential recordings.
The Quebec Opera Festival continues its Gounodmania!
PHOTO JÉRÉMY TORRES, FROM THE ARTIST’S FACEBOOK PAGE
Soprano Hélène Carpentier
After Faust by Gounod last summer, it is another flagship opera of the French Romantic repertoire that the Festival d’Opéra de Québec will present from July 28 to 1er august. Romeo and Juliet, by the same composer, will bring together an entirely French-speaking cast, including, in the two title roles, the young French soprano Hélène Carpentier, winner of numerous competitions, and her compatriot Thomas Bettinger, who dazzled us last year in Faust. It is the director Pierre-Emmanuel Rousseau, active on several major European stages, who will bring this immortal drama to life.
The Metropolitan has fun outdoors
PHOTO SARAH MONGEAU-BIRKETT, THE PRESS
The Orchester Métropolitain in concert at the foot of Mount Royal last year
Good traditions are made to stay, and that could no longer be the case for the open-air concert of the Orchester Métropolitain, which brought together some 50,000 people last summer. This year, on August 2, the Montreal population is invited, at the foot of Mount Royal, to hear the band under the direction of its conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin. On the menu: the invigorating Symphony noh 7 by Dvorak, works by Mexican Arturo Márquez and Canadian Jean Coulthard, and the moving Rhapsody for piano and orchestra by André Mathieu (soloist: Alain Lefèvre), who can be heard in particular in the film The child prodigy.