With their “Nordic Epic” concert, Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Orchester Métropolitain continued, with the 4th Symphony, their complete Sibelius recorded by ATMA. This work, very singular, will certainly not be the summit of this journey.
Wait for the light at the end of the tunnel. There is a great work from the symphonic repertoire not to be associated with such hope: the 4th Symphony by Sibelius. She’s so devilishly desperate that you want to bang your head against the wall (or cry) after a few bars.
Why “diabolically”? Because the triton is omnipresent there. This interval has been called since the Middle Ages “Diabolus in musica” – an evil interval, with which, in 1911, Sibelius juggled, a composer in the grip of doubt and illness.
The check-in challenge
Have the chance to survive? Operated in 1908 for throat cancer, Sibelius then feared a recurrence. And compose what? Sibelius has just become acquainted with the music of Schoenberg and Stravinsky. The 4thfalsely erratic (especially in the Final), is also an expression of incomprehension about the future of music.
These existential questions are at the heart of the work. Imagine the color black and tell yourself that whatever you imagine is still too bright, not deep enough. Each attempt to access the light is systematically rolled. So what is π? Sibelius, a laconic character par excellence, to situate it, had once quoted Strindberg: “To be a man is pitiful”.
Save the 4th of Sibelius, what Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Orchester Métropolitain did on Friday evening was to face a few monuments: Herbert Kegel, Kurt Sanderling, Herbert von Karajan, Osmo Vänskä (twice), Segerstam (version Undine).
Before the concert we had great fears, because the 4th among other things, a solo cello and a section of imperial cellos, which is not the forte of the Métropolitain. Alas from the first phrase, timorous, and with the completely flattened nuances of the solo cello, the carrots were cooked. There were other problems later (solo from the beginning of the Final or passages of divided cellos indicated “à la pointe” by Sibelius in the 1st part, which gives a particular color that we did not perceive).
Overall, the Fourth by Yannick Nézet-Séguin is too “nice”, not harsh enough, certainly marked by very beautiful moments (tremolo passage in dpi from Final, 2nd movement as a whole, performance of the flutes, oboe and horns), but it does not breathe widely enough (ambitus of the dynamic bellows). Maybe the pickups will give some things a more intense presence and flesh. They probably won’t work miracles.
Hear Mathieu again
It was a good idea to resume the first work commissioned, in 2001, by Yannick Nézet-Séguin as musical director of the Métropolitain: Walk by Isabelle Panneton, a well-conceived and orchestrated score.
In the first part, Jean-Philippe Sylvestre played the Quebec Concerto by André Mathieu. We found his vein very different from that of the well-known promoter of the work, Alain Lefèvre. The latter pulls Mathieu towards Rachmaninoff while Sylvestre, rightly in our opinion, places him in a more Gershwin and film music line, with livelier tempos and a less grandiloquent tone.
Re-hearing Mathieu in concert makes it possible to note once again the structural strangeness of the work, conceived as a series of melodic sequences. If Yannick Nézet-Séguin had wanted to be Machiavellian, he could not have invented better than this program. Who will then dare to complain in the least in comparison with a structural defect of a work presented in the name of the new programmatic religion “equity, diversity, representativeness”. Even in his 1st SymphonyFlorence Price looks like Johannes Brahms (recognized as a master of form) next to Mathieu in the Quebec Concerto.
It would be very interesting to hear Jean-Michel Dubé, Mathieu’s other current promoter in Quebec, in this concerto because the sound produced by Sylvestre differs greatly from that of Alain Lefèvre by its much less physical and nourished aspect, very “forearms and wrists”. Wanting to show off by abseiling the Final of the 7th Sonata of Prokofiev, the excellent technician has highlighted this limit even more. Because there, for once, this Prokofiev was played here by Evgueni Sudbin, Lang Lang and Denis Matsuev and we remember well how it sounded.
norse epic
Matthew: Quebec Concerto. Panneton: Walk. Sibelius: Symphony No. 4. Jean-Philippe Sylvestre (piano), Metropolitan Orchestra, Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Maison symphonique, Friday, February 11, 2022. Live webcast, available for catch-up until February 13.