The Philharmonic Orchestra and Choeur des Mélomanes, conducted by Francis Choinière, will offer for the end of its season the world premiere of Requiem by François Dompierre. The concert on Saturday June 8, coupling this creation with the Requiem de Fauré, sold out, this one was duplicated on Friday June 7. Music lovers from Quebec will be able to attend the concert on Sunday, June 9 at the Palais Montcalm. There too, the meeting will be sold out.
“Secular work, religious work? It will be up to you to judge. Sincere work? Without a doubt,” writes François Dompierre at the end of the introduction to the score of his Requiem.
With Giuseppe Verdi, the dilemma was “operatic work, religious work? “. Verdi, a Requiem which François Dompierre says he tamed rather late: “I am not a big fan of Verdi’s music. In opera, I prefer Puccini, for me the great composer of romantic opera. » François Dompierre admits to Duty “love” it very much Requiem by Verdi. “It may be massive, but I like it, whereas I find Berlioz’s grandiose,” tells us the composer, who, with Mozart, Fauré and Verdi, establishes his top trio of requiem composers, while admitting an attachment particular for the War Requiem by Benjamin Britten.
Cathedrals
François Dompierre defines the project, created on Friday June 7 at the Maison symphonique under the direction of Francis Choinière, as a “beautiful coincidence”. “I have wanted to write such a work for around fifty years. I am an organist by training, I must have sung 200 requiem masses in my life, in addition to having participated as a chorister in those of Mozart and Fauré. I knew the text well and each time I visited a cathedral in Europe, it gave me the desire to write something, a somewhat gratuitous work which would pay homage to that and that text. »
Three years ago, the young conductor Francis Choinière said to François Dompierre: “Why don’t you write me a requiem? » The composer remembers the scene well: “It was a kind of synchronicity: he held out his hand to me, I held out my hand to him and said: ‘Yes.’ It was that simple. »
Francis Choinière is an admirer of Dompierre’s music. The founder of the FilmHarmonique Orchestra conducted the Sherbrooke Symphony Orchestra and the Sherbrooke Women’s Choir in October 2022, during the film concert Augustine’s passiona film for which François Dompierre composed the music.
In his creative process, François Dompierre began with the French translation of the Latin text: “I was faced with translations that did not suit me. I retranslated the text and made an interpretation of it. The more I progressed, the more I realized that the twelve pieces – the four common to the mass and the eight specific to funerals – corresponded to a scenario which reminded me a little of a cinematographic scenario. They highlight human feelings: pity, sorrow, memory, forgiveness, even joy in “In Paradisum”. » From this final movement, which contributes to the fame of the requiems of Fauré and Duruflé, François Dompierre “made a song; a happy ending, affectionate music.”
Classic rap
We could expect from François Dompierre a fidelity to his melodic ease, and the gentle swaying of this “In Paradisum” for soprano and choir (the extract from the work which leaked before its creation) evokes from afar the Misa Criolla by Ariel Ramirez and is in line with the chef’s ambitions when he says: “Our ambition is for this work to reach a wide audience. »
But the composer also claims to have composed a work of our time: “There are allusions to my style, certainly, but also to the music of today. There are certain places, notably in the “Kyrie”, which are two-tone, more austere. » Dompierre explains these musical mechanisms in the preamble to his score. Thus, on the first moments of the work: “The music of the Introit begins with an explosion of sound: four distant calling notes of an augmented fourth (or tritone), the once forbidden interval, symbol of the devil. It puts into perspective the drama that will play out. » Interestingly enough, the newt is one of the springs of War Requiem by Britten that Dompierre loves so much.
Obviously, we question the composer about his approach to “Dies Irae”, this evocation of the Last Judgment where we expect composers to be at the turning point after Mozart, Berlioz and Verdi. “It really is a very special piece and I treated it as if it were the devil speaking through the voices of men whispering. I did a kind of classic rap. The women sing the Latin text with an allusion to the original Gregorian melody. It’s a hybrid piece that begins with the double basses hitting their drums. It is a modern and surprising vision. I had a lot of fun doing this. I consider rap to be a kind of sermon that comes from beyond the grave. This is why the choirs whisper like a threat over a rap rhythm. » Here too, interesting thing: Britten uses the whispered voice in the “Dies Irae”, as if to evoke an army of ghosts.
The music, the numbers, the colors result from the work done on the text. “I composed the music on the original Latin, but following my adaptation from Latin to French,” François Dompierre tells us. Thus, for the “Kyrie”, its free translation is: “Have mercy on the one who laments, Lord God; Have pity on me who cries to you, oh Christ; Have mercy on me, my God. » By virtue of this reading, “the first “Kyrie” is a kind of lamentation”, while “the “Christe” is a cry from the heart, an imploration”.
Workforce
These emotional interpretations of the text will color the orchestration or the use of numbers: “The men of the choir sing alone in “Confutatis” and the women’s choir sings alone in “Lux Aeterna”,” Dompierre tells us, who promises, in “ Lux Aeterna” to graft cheerfulness to angelism.
He who started with a quartet of soloists will merge soprano and mezzo into one voice, that of Myriam Leblanc. “I knew I wanted the “Tuba Mirum” by the bass-baritone [Geoffroy Salvas]“Recordare” by the tenor [Andrew Haji], “Hostias” by the soprano with the trio of soloists in the “Benedictus””. The “Hostias” is based on a particularly original orchestration with harp and marimba.
For the orchestration, Francis Choinière asked the composer for an orchestral device close to the Requiem by Fauré, also on the program. François Dompierre left aside the organ and bassoons, but took care of the horn and percussion parts.
The composition of Requiem by François Dompierre is presented by the Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir of Musicians as a “rare musical feat”, certainly, and also as a “first in Canada since the 18the century”, which is still quite hazardous and difficult to verify, if only because not everyone benefits from the warbling, plumage, and media coverage of the prolific and brilliant composer François Dompierre.
Thus, there was a sort of social and media “all-Montreal” crowding together to sing its praises or “buzzify” the company last March, out of all news, three months before the work was not created! We can doubt, unfortunately, whether we will find such an Areopagus to be interested in the great Serge Arcuri, who composed his Requiem in the shadows and disinterest.
For the result, we will see on Friday. For Arcuri, musicians from here and elsewhere, on the faith of the “Lux aeterna” which filtered through, cry out for a masterpiece and demand the sequel. As for posterity, future generations will say; one does not prevent the other.