The Orchester de la francophonie will launch this Wednesday its 21e season with a concert at Saint-Andrew and Saint-Paul church in Montreal. The presence in the program of septet of Beethoven or the Pastorale for wind quintet d’Amy Beach shows that not everything went as planned in the usual summer gathering of young French-speaking musicians.
A few weeks ago, the entourage of the Orchester de la Francophonie was busy finding the best place to host the final concert of summer 2022, the 9e Symphony by Beethoven. However, the programs of the four summer concerts offered to the public on July 13, 21, 25 and 29 in Montreal only include octets (Spohr, Mendelssohn), septets (Hummel, Beethoven), a Kammermusic by Hindemith, Siegfried-Idyll of Wagner in chamber music programs.
If this is so, it is because after the summer of 2020, that of reinvention and distance learning, then the summer of 2021, transformed into a firework of a hundred proposals in free lines, for the third year in a row, the unexpected interfered in the planning of the Orchester de la francophonie. In 2022, everything had to be turned upside down in extremis. The problem this time: the routing of trainees from the four corners of the planet.
Not just passports
“Of course, five or six musicians had, even if we help them financially, great difficulties with the price of plane tickets, exorbitant in certain countries this summer, but the big problem was the processing of visas, in particular for musicians from South America and Asia,” says the orchestra’s musical director, Jean-Philippe Tremblay.
Applications for the month of April had not even been examined one week before the start of the internships, at the end of June, he told us. “At one point, we had to decide and say: your visa will not be processed next week since nothing has happened for 14 weeks. Curiously, total randomness reigned, since comparable requests from the same country were sometimes processed, sometimes ignored. “And it was very complicated to talk to someone: the whole department [d’Immigration Canada] seemed very busy, perhaps taken with the passports, ”says Jean-Philippe Tremblay.
Additional problem, the leader absolutely did not manage the nature of these forced defections: “Even if we had wanted to keep a chamber orchestra we could not have. Everything was unbalanced: we lost a lot of violins when we had almost all the cellos and a good part of the winds. »
Jean-Philippe Tremblay therefore started from the available instruments to imagine expanded chamber music groups (septets, octets). “There again, there were holes, but the rule was not to disinvite anyone. So we called on a few Canadian violinists. »
Since 2009, the year when the orchestra opened up to musicians from all over the world, no one had missed out because they didn’t get a visa on time. Now, for the 2023 edition, Jean-Philippe Tremblay is considering moving the auditions forward from February to November in order to launch the invitations before the holidays.
The chef, however, takes a tender look at his improvised summer, which he took great pleasure in reconfiguring. He will conduct only one score, Siegfried-Idyll de Wagner, and will work as a coach for chamber music groups and as a violist in certain ensembles: “As we are also unbalanced in the violas, it will be my pleasure to join them! “, he laughs. “Of course I was disappointed at first, but starting to work this week and coaching the groups, I see that a great summer is in store even if it’s not at all what we had. planned, not something we’re going to want to redo. »