Rafael Payare opened the 89th season of the Orchester symphonique de Montréal on Thursday, his first as musical director. This concert will be remembered as a major milestone in the history of the OSM.
Are there really words to describe what happened at the Maison symphonique on Thursday, September 15, 2022? To understand its scope, you have to have experienced the mandate of the previous musical director and the period of searching for the rare pearl to succeed him. But we also have to think about this pandemic, these 30 months. Two and a half years where the 2nd Symphony by Mahler was in a way the archetype of what one could not even imagine hearing any longer in a concert hall.
Turn your back on the pandemic
We have already written on the occasion of the 3rd Symphony by Mahler directed then by Nicolas Ellis that the subjective emotional feeling seems exacerbated when we now hear these monumental works which seemed to have to escape us.
This being said, the shock caused by the interpretation of the “Resurrection” Symphony by the OSM and Rafael Payare has nothing to do with scarcity or deprivation. It is easy, listening to a concert, to put the markers back in place and to judge a musical experience and an interpretation in relation to the history of the work in concert, on video and on disc. .
All of them, on Thursday, seemed to proclaim, to scream in music and with their guts that the pandemic period was a period of “non-normality” and that they had to be judged according to the criteria that they exposed to us there. The musicians and the conductor turned their backs on this pandemic period with rage, “slamming the door in his face” in a rite of passage embodied by an emblematic work of renewal (“ Sterben um zu leben — die to live).
A strategic issue
But in essence, there was much more. The musical gesture, the fervor, the flame, this burning metal were purely Dionysian. This was the heart of the strategic issue of the choice of the new leader. It was clearly about turning the page on an Apollonian period of polite distinction.
It is this carnal game, this hand-to-hand combat with the music, that Rafael Payare fully played and assumed. He proved the validity of the choice of those who elected him. He is there to change the musical approach, the relationship to music. And he did it explosively.
If it hasn’t always worked well so far, it was partly because Payare seems to need a compact orchestral arrangement and because, for the musicians, the upheaval is drastic: this freedom to play loudly, to let go, this encouragement to let go, even if it means overdoing it (the tempo going too far from the 3rd movement in relation to the indication ” ruhig —quiet) is a change of habits. But we hear astonishing things: an admirable and unrecognizable horn section, as we have already said, and trumpets which, yesterday, were phrasing.
There are even almost instantaneous improvements: the choir which sang in an impossible sabir the 9th Symphony by Beethoven in June suddenly began to pronounce Mahler’s text in impeccable German. We will also note with Rafael Payare an absolute art of the proportioning of the interventions of instrumental groups off stage. There ” bandaged at the back in the 5th movement was exceptional.
Drunkenness
The ardor led to a few small “sins”: lively top tempo of the 3rd part, as we have said (the material is basically a song from the cycle The child’s enchanted horn which possesses a kind of benevolent bonhomie) and in the first movement (m. 164) a return to the initial tempo which is done by a gradual acceleration over 15 bars. The prancing Payare returns to the tempo in 3 measures. It is not very licit, but it confers an additional electricity to its interpretation.
Excellent vocal performance by the choirs and soloists, with great accuracy (it’s rare). Some strange colors on some vowels from Karen Cargill, but nothing unacceptable.
In the end, the extraordinary intoxication provoked by this truly historical interpretation which revives for the first time, and much more than the 9th of Beethoven, with the very first concert of Rafael Payare in Montreal (Transfigured Night, Heroic Symphony) was due to this desire not to deprive oneself of anything; of no decibel (what an end!), of no acceleration. Music is that. The flesh, the guts. Some will never understand it.
One wonders why it was necessary to precede Mahler with this smug pensum of Thomas Larcher, who never finished not finishing while going nowhere. Oh, Larcher is a very brilliant orchestrator and his composition is very professional and quite pleasant. But, for once, if the author wanted his work to be part of the “listener’s perception of time”, we can tell him that it was long for not much.