The Orchester Métropolitain and Yannick Nézet-Séguin presented the Symphony “Leningrad” by Shostakovich, as well as an unknown concerto by Johan Halvorsen. This discovery was a great moment.
It’s crazy how many stupid things you can do with fire. In history, fire, sometimes that of war, has destroyed many compositions. But some composers have put their effort into it. This is the case of the Norwegian Johan Halvorsen (1864-1935), who followed Grieg by a generation and burned works that he did not like. This was considered to be the case of a Violin Concerto composed in 1908.
This Opus 28 by Halvorsen, dedicated to the Canadian violinist Kathleen Parlow, originally from Calgary, which she played three times in 1909, resurfaced in 2016 at the University of Toronto library. The latter, recipient of the Parlow fund, had, it seems, forgotten to catalog this treasure. The handwritten score, of moving beauty and clarity, is now accessible to everyone on the Internet.
Radiant soloist
In the staging around the presentation of the work to the Orchester Métropolitain, which will serve as the culmination of a film,Opus 28by Sofia Bohdanowicz, we almost had the impression of being invited to the momentum of a resurrection. Actually, THE Concerto was “recreated” and recorded (for Naxos) from 2017 by Henning Kraggerud and Bjarte Engeset. It is nevertheless happy that María Dueñas and Yannick Nézet-Séguin join the list of defenders of this work and that its story is told in a film.
In an atmosphere mixing Bruch, Grieg, Paganini and Wieniawski, Halvorsen, who was himself a virtuoso violinist, demands a lot from the soloist, especially as he gives him almost no respite. 1er part is extremely virtuoso, while the finale is folkloric in expression with references to Hardanger fiddle music and a dance called halling. From this point of view, its coupling to the disk with both Violin concertos by Geirr Tveitt will, we hope, end up winning.
It was not, contrary to what Yannick Nézet-Séguin said, the first presence on stage of María Dueñas in Montreal. In 2019, the jury of the Concours musical international de Montréal managed to eliminate in the preliminary round (!) of the competition the woman who became, two or three years later, a Deutsche Grammophon star. The said test and source of this incomprehensible decision is accessible on YouTube.
Obviously defying the Areopagus (Pierre Amoyal, Kim Kashkashian, Boris Kuschnir, Cho-Liang Lin, Mihaela Martin, Barry Shiffman, Dmitry Sitkovetsky and Pavel Vernikov) who had made this affront to her here, the Spanish violinist was impeccable with ease , accuracy, brightness and treble radiation. María Dueñas, who also has more bite than the other young violinist DG Daniel Lozakovich, played an encore with the orchestra The girl sings, by Halvorsen.
Cameras on the chef
The 2e part was devoted to the Symphony “Leningrad” by Shostakovich, the issues of which we presented to you on Saturday. It was a united Metropolitan Orchestra which relayed the powerful and very nuanced vision of the conductor, who, in the final measures, underlines the latent threats more than Mariss Jansons at the same place in 2016.
We have nothing more to say about it. Indeed, Yannick Nézet-Séguin had asked the public to be silent and respectful for a recording. The public complied. But instead of tasting the pianissimoswe could instead hear, at the back of the floor, the instructions of a video film crew.
So when, instead of thinking about Gaza, Mariupol, Stepanakert, the women of Tehran or Afghanistan, the Rohingyas and the Uighurs, we spent our time in the anguish of the occurrence on a triple piano the next hiss of a walkie-talkie or palaver from the control room, like “Roger, we can go to camera 5!” “, the heart to immerse oneself in the work was no longer really there, as it must not have been either at the front-center left of the floor, who was struggling with a cameraman under a veil who periodically made bat movements throughout the symphony.