The Orchester de la Francophonie gave its first of three Montreal concerts yesterday at the Maison symphonique. This deserved all the more attention because it presented a symphonic synthesis of Tristan and Isolda by Richard Wagner, a sumptuous rarity that would have deserved context.
There are, in the musical universe, useful initiatives and artists, who serve the common good rather than their purposes. Fortunately, we had an example of this on Friday evening on the stage of the Maison symphonique.
Jean-Philippe Tremblay has been bringing together young French-speaking musicians every summer in Quebec for over twenty years. They are 71 in number this year, aged 18 to 30, from 11 countries. The major fact of the concert, already observed in the pre-COVID years, is the art with which Tremblay manages to transform in no time these constantly changing groups into real “sound organisms” (Klangkörper, in German) endowed with cohesion, listening, emulation, respect.
Wagner without getting lost
Even if cellos and woodwinds scared us a little in the first moments of Tristan and Isolda, Jean-Philippe Tremblay quickly brought everyone together. For this he has his own method: to print a permanent tension and not to bother too much with subtleties. To slow down and refine would be to risk getting lost. Tremblay knows very well that his phalanx is not the orchestra of the Concertgebouw or the Bavarian Radio. So aiming for dynamic microdosing in the transitions wouldn’t make too much sense, where imposing a form of steamroller can just as well have an emotional effect on the listener, other but intense.
All these springs, these tricks, show that before programming Tristan and Isolde, an orchestral passion, arrangement by Henk de Vlieger based on themes from Wagner’s opera, you need to have the basics to successfully carry out this huge continuous fresco and build a great arch inhabited by ebb and flow. Jean-Philippe Tremblay was served by a committed orchestra without major flaws, with an English horn which enabled him to succeed in the sumptuous episode entitled ” Vorspiel und Reigen “.
Henk de Vlieger leaned on Parsifal, Tristan and the Ring in the 1990s for Dutch Radio. His syntheses having been recorded at the time by Edo de Waart (the covers of the original RCA CDs are part of the legend of the history of the disc). He also worked on the Mastersingers of Nuremberg (CD Neeme Jarvi, Chandos).
The synthesis of Tristan comprises seven parts but three poles: the Prelude, the heart entitled “Song of the night”, based on the love duet of Act II, and the Death of Isolde. Around is woven a tangle of expectation, desire and death.
Necessary mediation
This is where the shoe pinched and we thought back to the interview with Mathieu Lussier on the questions of mediation facilitating the approach of demanding concerts. The note being insufficiently descriptive, it was either for the conductor to explain to us the passages retained by de Vlieger and the various episodes, or (better still) to project above the orchestra the description of the table heard. Most of the listeners were lost and a few (fortunately rare) left running, the synthesis lasting all the same an hour.
In the first part, the orchestra did highly justice to the excellent O Weltengeist by Simon Bertrand, apparently in a revised version, where a brilliant 1er trombone. After Of a spring morning by Lili Boulanger, Giovanni Andrea Zanon came to play the Violin Concerto in E minor by Mendelssohn. There, the results are more mixed even if he does it very well.
Zanon’s biography makes us understand that he was a child prodigy and that he won more than 30 competitions. So much the better. Is he for all that, in adulthood, a decisive international soloist? We highly doubt it. Zanon plays fair (more within 2e and 3e movements, that in the 1er), but he plays above all “elegiac”, where Tremblay and the orchestra grasp the concerto.
This gives a very nice 2e movement, but within 1er and 3e movements, we are between the mezzo-forte and the strong and it often seems to miss a “notch” of dynamics, as if the soloist or his instrument lacked sonic range (end of 1er movement). In a way, Zanon decorated the concerto with his sonic presence instead of marking it with impact. In popular parlance “it does the job”, but it does not lead very far and is hardly memorable.