After a year’s break, admirably filled by the very clever and exciting classico-jazz program “Des airs de fête” by OM, the Radio-Canada television cameras once again witnessed a musical tale concocted by Fred Pellerin, Kent Nagano and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra. Polichignon’s secretrepeated four times until Sunday and broadcast on ICI Télé on December 23 at 8 p.m., draws the best from previous experiences in a relaxed and zany atmosphere.
Certainly, we are no longer walking on eggshells on the OSM Christmas story stage, even though Méo Bellemare, the Saint-Elie-de-Caxton barber, hero of this Polichignon’s secret would use it to make his shampoos.
After The navel foam toque (2011), The Symphonic Hunchback (2013), The Divine is Born at Last! (2015), the “fourth part of a trilogy”, Les jours de la sole (2018), had raised fundamental questions, asked in our report: “Is Fred Pellerin a partner or a stooge of the orchestra? » or “How could there not have been more in-depth work on the story-music interweaving in the fourth edition?” “. For example, we ended up with 10-minute musical extracts that broke up the story.
New era
This problem of narration-music interaction, certainly raised in 2018, but widely present in 2013 and 2015 as well, was brilliantly resolved in 2021 in La poste du paradis, a show which we hoped would inaugurate a new era. So it’s done. Because Polichignon’s secret brings this success to fruition and shows that the time has come to reap the ripe fruits of an experience that has finally been well established.
The star is now clearly Fred Pellerin and we are faced with a musically illustrated tale. The OSM’s interventions now fit very well into the story and the symphonic movements are cut so as not to break the rhythm. Additional originality of this edition: interstitial pieces (sometimes very brief) specially commissioned from Maxime Goulet. Better yet, the tale comes to play with musical extracts, Fred Pellerin sweeping away, to describe Méo’s bees, the Flight of the bumblebee to introduce the “mixed gas bees” better illustrated by the Motorbike Concerto by Sandström.
We had tender tales, philosophical tales (Paradise Post). This one is really on the extravagant and unusual side. After an introduction on what there can be before the beginning and the light that belongs to all, Fred Pellerin changes gear by going into long-winded digressions on the “oldest profession in the world” (not that of Maestro, but that of a barber according to him) and draws a colorful portrait of Méo Bellemare, the best (and only) barber in the village. For him, the profession of barber is the opposite of a psychologist. The barber can talk about what people tell him and do his “rumour-mongering” while remaining silent on any hair-related issue, which distinguishes him from a shrink, who can say whatever he wants. hair of his patients but is reduced to silence about their confidences.
The astonishing character will fall platonically in love with a nun, his “religious lover”. We laugh wholeheartedly at this tale whose moral which is settled at Christmas is, “there are neither people nor places sacred, but there are sacred moments”.
The visual layout of the show, with its well-established rhythm and good-natured tone, resembles that of previous opuses, with even greater refinement of the lighting and projections on the large central ball.