Yannick Nézet-Séguin led the Mass in B minor of Bach behind closed doors in December 2020, a testimony broadcast live on the internet. The Quebec conductor repeated the experience on Sunday afternoon with the Orchester Métropolitain, this time with a busy Maison symphonique. But disappointment was waiting around the bend.
From the very first agreement of the Kyrie initial, something is wrong. We can clearly see about forty singers – all professionals – opening their mouths, but the sound is so muffled that one would think they had been reduced to ten.
But there is worse. The accuracy is so approximate that at times you would think Bach replaced by Ligeti…
Someone – Nézet-Séguin or the choir director François A. Ouimet – obviously instructed the choristers to hold their voices back as much as possible in the softer passages, with a minimum of vibrato.
PHOTO OLIVIER JEAN, THE PRESS
Mass in B minor at the Maison symphonique de Montréal
But one piano requires as much energy – if not more – than a strong. Otherwise the sound fades. And the singer does not get along well enough to control his intonation.
The problem is even more obvious with the sopranos, whose treble lacks the space to flourish (in the Gloria, for instance).
Some entrances suffer from this vocal inhibition, especially when only one desk is placed under the projector. We think of the tenors in the sanctus to “pleni sunt caeli et terra”. One would think to hear two or three singers lost in the backstage whereas it is about a new reason which must be heard in a distinct way.
Supplicant
It seems, it is true, to have a desire, quite commendable moreover, to draw the text well, to make heard the rebound of the Latin language (or Greek, in the Kyrie). But this should not be done at the expense of the line. It is so in the second Kyriewhere the accent on each syllable “ky” – and the brief decrescendo that ensues – ends up unduly slicing the vocal line.
In the first Kyrie, the will to link ostentatiously by two certain notes to the voices (as in the orchestra) quickly becomes caricatural. Nézet-Séguin is probably trying to make the music as pleading as the text, but it’s us who soon want the torture to end… It’s really the affliction, but it feels like plowing a field of rocks, while baroque music remains above all a question of dance, of lightness, even in the slow pieces.
We will have to wait for the end of the sixth issue, the Gratias agimus tibi (and later the sanctus), to have the feeling of a real choral mass, and just, for once, because in a nuance strong. Even if the initial problem will return in the beginning of the Creed and theAnd incarnatus is…
Musically, what the conductor does is luckily generally interesting, especially the Crucifixuswhich he does quite lively, with imperious violins, or the Qui tollis peccata mundiwith its battering on the low strings.
PHOTO OLIVIER JEAN, THE PRESS
Mass in B minor at the Maison symphonique de Montréal
And the soloists are vocally much more satisfying than the choir. Yannick Nézet-Séguin did not go looking for baroque people who sing halfway. Saskatchewan bass Nathan Berg, first and foremost, with his Quoniam tu solus sanctus royalbut also the Russian-American light soprano Erika Baikoff, who plays with the difficulties of Laudamus you.
Heard on the same stage last September in the Symphony noh 2 by Mahler with the Orchester symphonique de Montréal and Rafael Payare, Scottish mezzo-soprano Karen Cargill delivered a moving Agnus Deiwith a climax almost Wagnerian.
The Bavarian tenor Werner Güra, for his part, did much better than in the Passion according to Saint Matthew of the OSM last April, which must have found him on a bad evening. The voice is finer, “longer”, although it has become in our opinion too wide for this kind of repertoire, even when its “owner” is in its best shape, like Sunday.
Tribute was paid, at the start of the concert, to Jean R. Dupré, CEO of Le Métropolitain leaving for a well-deserved retirement. He is succeeded by the French Fabienne Voisin.