Lanaudière Festival | The Fairy Queen: Fifty Shades of Freedom

For its second weekend, the Lanaudière Festival took an exciting dive into English, German and Italian baroque with two top-flight ensembles. The Press was there Saturday and Sunday.

After proposing The Allegro, the Thoughtful and the Moderate And Partenope Handel’s in 2022 and 2023, William Christie and his Arts Florissants return for the final of three years of collaboration, this time with semi-opera (includes spoken theatre and/or dance) The Fairy Queen of Purcell.

Anyone who would have been disappointed to look for headliners among the eight soloists lined up Saturday night by Christie on the stage of the Fernand-Lindsay Amphitheatre, virtually unknown to the battalion. This is because the American conductor adopted by France favors the artists of his Jardin des voix, a baroque singing academy for young emerging singers. Emerging, but already in full possession of their means.

We can well imagine that we will hear more about at least half of them. Notably the soprano Paulina Francisco, moving in the “Complaint” of the fifth act, or the tenor Ilja Aksionov, refined and moving in his intervention in the second act.

None of the others (mezzo-sopranos Georgia Burashko, Rebecca Leggett and Juliette Mey, delicate tenor Rodrigo Carreto, baritone Hugo Herman-Wilson and bass-baritone Benjamin Schilperoort) disappoint.

The quality and consistency of the entire proposal are impressive. It must be said that the show, which has just been given at La Scala in Milan and at the Royal Opera of Versailles, is eminently well-rehearsed.

So much so that William Christie, placed at the back of the stage with his orchestra, perhaps only conducts a quarter of the evening, serenely admiring the rest of the time the beauty of the spectacle in which he is immersed.

Because there is something to be amazed about, especially with the staging and choreography of the Frenchman Mourad Merzouki. The six dancers accompanying the vocal cast put on a great show (almost too much sometimes!), inhabiting the entire space without the need for elaborate sets or lighting being felt at any time.

The stylistic quality of the musical interpretation is equally impressive. The singers, only a minority of whom are English speakers, easily cope with the language of Shakespeare, which is not one of the easiest to sing with its many diphthongs and triphthongs. It is less surprising when we learn that it is the excellent British singer Sophie Daneman who is behind the coaching linguistic.

Musically speaking, everything breathes, everything is flexible, the singers as much as the musicians freeing themselves from the bar line, the quarter notes and eighth notes becoming units of life intensely lived more than mathematical symbols.

Vivaldi and Bach

This total freedom was not always present in the Brandenburg Concertos of the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, given in two concerts, Friday evening and Sunday afternoon. This last performance, which we attended, was still well worth it.

In particular for the three short scores by Vivaldi (concertos RV 156 and 577 and SymphonyRV 192) who rubbed shoulders with the Brandenburg Concertos n^bone 1, 2 And 6the latter having been interchanged with the not^o 5played on Friday for logistical reasons (some musicians arrived in Quebec a day late).

Is it because its conductor and concertmaster Cecilia Bernardini is partly Italian that the German orchestra, which last appeared at the Festival 15 years ago, seems more at ease with Vivaldi than with Bach? However, the famous “Air” (called “on the G string”) of theOverture for orchestra n^o 3BWV 1068, of the latter, given as an encore, flourishes in the purest ease.

There is, however, a major difference between this piece of very simple texture and the fortifying Brandenburger. It is perhaps to better frame this profusion that Bernardini and his troops remain more cautious than in Vivaldi, a composer whose counterpoint is generally less dense than that of the Cantor of Leipzig.

The satisfactions are no less numerous in this afternoon concert. The joy, in particular, of hearing a virtuoso orchestra on period instruments. Ah! those swollen with a solar plenitude in Vivaldi!

While the conductor shines in each of her violin solos, we also notice the fleshy sound of the principal oboe Thomas Meraner and the agility of the recorder player Isabelle Lehmann. The trumpeter Jaroslav Rouček also did honourably in his impossible part of the Brandenburg Concerto No.^o 2 in F majorBWV 1047.

William Christie and his band will be back this Monday at 8 p.m. at the Saint-Ambroise-de-Kildare church in sacred works by Purcell and some of his contemporaries.

The hosting costs for this report were paid by the Festival de Lanaudière, which exercised no control over the content of this article.