Rafael Payare wishes to extend and develop the experience of “La musique aux enfants” imagined by Kent Nagano in Montreal-North and lead to the creation of a real orchestra of young musicians in Montreal. He surreptitiously slipped the information Tuesday in New York at the end of a working session with the orchestra of young people from the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, which works in the mixed neighborhood of Hell’s Kitchen in New York.
The culture of social integration through learning and musical practice is obviously very close to the heart of the child of El Sistema in Venezuela, who, on the eve of the OSM concert at Carnegie Hall on Wednesday, was conducting during one hour fifteen young children from 11 to 17 years old. To their questions he replied that he had learned the horn at the age of fourteen and that he still played it on occasion, notably to play Pierre’s wolf and Prokofiev’s wolf at the request of his six-year-old daughter.
Sing in the shower
Watching Rafael Payare work with a group of children is a privileged moment that allows you to decode aspects of the personality of the man and the musician. The experience of working sessions is always very instructive. At our request, Yannick Nézet-Séguin opened the doors to one of his rehearsals, while Kent Nagano always refused.
Rafael Payare could have been offended that the “raw material” was so modest. We expected the only “official” youth orchestra of a New York institution to play a little more in tune. He could therefore have spent his time working on accuracy. Instead, the head of the OSM subtly slipped in a river metaphor: “When we see a river, there may be plastic floating on the surface but there is life teeming at the bottom. interior”. Instead, he spent that hour revealing that life.
To animate it, the chef makes the children sing. Not like in front of an audience, but “like in the shower”: “there is no shame; let go, remove all your inhibitions! Sing. And the song he obtains, he then seeks to reproduce on the instruments.
For the phrasing, the metaphor is all found: “Music is like speech”. No need to accentuate the last note if you don’t do it while speaking.
Everywhere the conductor, who marks all the beats with a heavy breath that makes a maracas sound, encourages the fluidity of the music and asks the young people if they feel the difference. “Now we speak! he rejoices. “Show that you enjoy it…”
These words are not anecdotal or vain. They express the roots of a system of values which is transposed into the way of making music in general, including with posh orchestras.
If Rafael Payare wants an orchestra of young people, whose contours should be drawn more precisely, we feel that it will not be for a question of image; it will be to do something with it and, above all, because it nourishes and stimulates him as a musician.
Christophe Huss is in New York at the invitation of the OSM.