Bourgie Hall was, on Wednesday evening, the scene of an event like no other; the posthumous creation of the complete collection Song for a distant Quebec, composed by Rachel Laurin on the poems of Madeleine Gagnon. But the evening had an additional surprise in store for us, since at the end of the concert, Marc Boucher took the floor to announce that this was his final recital.
Song for a distant Quebec, commissioned by Daniel Turp who is also the dedicatee, is a collection of fourteen melodies in three cycles, bearing the opus numbers 57, 70 and 71 respectively, composed between 2010 and 2014 by Rachel Laurin. From the outset, the composer had in mind Marc Boucher and Olivier Godin, who have been working together in the field of French melody since 2005.
These two performers had created the 5 Melodies of the’Opus 50 in 2012 at the historic Chapel of the Good Shepherd. But it was the first time, Wednesday, that the entire collection, of a duration equivalent to Winterreise by Schubert, approximately 75 minutes, was presented.
Fatal disappearance
Rachel Laurin was to be in 2023/24 the first composer in residence at the Bourgie Hall under the new two-headed direction of Caroline Louis and Olivier Godin. Death took her on August 13 at the age of 62. This residency project, planned before Rachel Laurin’s illness, will shine a different light on this famous organist, student and then assistant of Raymond Daveluy at the Oratory organ. Rachel Laurin has composed more than a hundred works. Some will be played this season by the Cobalt Quartet or the Molinari Quartet.
Within this residence, Song for a distant Quebec must necessarily be of particular importance. As Olivier Godin writes in his presentation: “It’s a great musical fresco [dans] a very broad tonality encompassing both chromaticism and modality. Fourteen melodies, “[…] fourteen stanzas, as many enigmas”, carry and color the committed words of Madeleine Gagnon with lyricism, power and fantasy, telling us the memory and “souvenirs” of the history of Quebec: its beauties, its wounds, its dreams and his ideals. »
It is impossible to better summarize the journey, which, however, does not sound like a journey with the dramatic progression which marks The beautiful miller Or The winter trip by Schubert. It is rather a collection like The song of the Swan.
Before talking about the work, we must underline the composer’s luck in having had such lawyers to defend her. The complicity, the mutual listening of Boucher and Godin is the fact of large teams, and the “support” of Olivier Godin, is not one of them, especially in the present case: he is a driving force which camps and precedes all atmospheres. Even the term “collaborating pianist” is insufficient.
French culture
And while we’re talking about piano, what a contrast with Tuesday’s school evening, where Isata Kanneh Mason delivered her Rose Method applied to Haydn, Schumann and Chopin! Twenty-four hours later, with Godin, we had sentences, nuances, atmospheres, shadows, lights, arches; in short, music.
Concerning singing, Marc Boucher, who admitted to having worked two months on this single evening, left the discipline of the recital through the front door: mastery of the voice and the material (something so difficult for a world premiere) and, above all, , diction and style perfectly adapted.
Rachel Laurin’s musical language allows any music lover a little familiar with French melody to enjoy their evening. The composer’s musical culture allows her to navigate well-known waters, heirs of Debussy, Fauré and Poulenc (primesautier In dreams the almond tree of the 1st cycle).
There are several characteristics, the most obvious of which is the richness and beauty of the piano part. For several melodies (Time flows blurred, 9th melody, and the majority of the 3rd cycle) we sometimes have the impression of an extraordinarily inspired piano work, with words “stuck on top”. Sometimes, the “boxing” of these words in this framework is done strangely (“en shares the earth / (caesura) / entire to lovers”, Mélodie XIII). If Rachel Laurin were still alive, the first thing we would beg her to do would be to extract a sort of “song without words” and draw out one or two cycles of autonomous piano pieces, a bit like Mirrors by Ravel, the pianistic material is so rich.
We are therefore dealing with poems illuminated by instrumental music and we say to ourselves that Rachel Laurin could have multiplied the subterfuges (tweaking the text, repeating them) to illuminate them even more. Because when she uses it, it works well, like with the sweet popular refrain of To say I am a woman of this beloved people (VII) or the way of emphasizing the end of a text with a powerful musical theme (end of V or XII).
The melody Like a way of the cross our memorieswhich opens the 2nd cycle attracts attention because the small opening motif recalls the beginning of the 1st Quartet “Kreutzer Sonata” by Janáček. When the sun appears, at the end of the poem, this theme is modulated into something happier. The composer definitely has the art of attracting attention, since Do you know the route to the Americas?which opens the 3rd cycle, is our favorite melody among the fourteen.
Rachel Laurin also magnificently completed her work with a distancing effect on the last symbolic phrase: “Song of Quebec near and far”. We will recall that Madeleine Gagnon’s collection won the Governor General’s Award in 1991 and we are surprised that the subject did not attract more people at such an event.