The Montreal Chamber Music Festival will present a concert by the Emerson Quartet at Bourgie Hall tonight at 7:30 p.m. This meeting like no other is part of the farewell tour of the legendary quartet.
It is a magnificent achievement for Denis Brott and his Festival to be the host of the Emerson’s farewell in Montreal. The Quartet will then perform once again in Quebec, on Friday, July 14, at Domaine Forget.
The duty had lingered on this final world tour of the Emersons in October 2022 on the occasion of the passage of American musicians at the Club musical de Québec. They had then played Mendelssohn, Brahms, Webern and Ravel.
Need for change
In Montreal, the Emersons will satisfy their thirst for variety in repertoire by accepting the organization of an evening of quintets. “The recipe that kept the flame alive can be found in the programs of the farewell tour. They vary from night to night. “It would have been easier to do less repertoire and go on tour with one or two programs. But we like challenges and also changing schedules from day to day. These challenges have fed us. I think that musicians often choose solutions that are too simple and too comfortable”, we wrote in October, while talking to violinist Philip Setzer, founding member of this quartet which marked musical life for 47 years.
The two musical configurations of the quintets will be very different. In the first, the instrument that will join the ensemble is a cello, Denis Brott of course, for the Quintet D.956, one of Schubert’s last works, famous for its poignant second movement. In the second part, the Quintet Op.81 by Antonin Dvořák is a work with piano, held by Jan Lisiecki. We find these two compositions in the discs recorded by the Emersons at Deutsche Grammophon, an eminent legacy grouped together in a box fairly recently. Schubert’s quintet was recorded in 1990 with Mstislav Rostropovitch and Dvořák’s quintet in 1994 with Menahem Pressler, the legendary pianist who died on May 6, shortly before his hundredth birthday.
Free gigs
If you plan to go to Charlevoix in mid-July, know that the Domaine Forget program includes the Quartet Op. 33 No. 5 of Haydn, the Quartet Op. 12 by Mendelssohn, Drink the Wild Ayre by Sarah Kirkland Snider and Ravel’s quartet. Mendelssohn and Ravel will therefore overlap with the program played last October in Quebec, which is quite unfortunate.
As for the Montreal Chamber Music Festival, launched on Sunday by a concert of cellists gathered around Stéphane Tétreault, it will be held until June 18. It stands out, for example, with three free concerts, on June 12, 14 and 17 at noon at Bourgie Hall, with, respectively, the laureates of the Canada Council for the Arts instrument bank, Giora Schmidt and the Quatuor Vatra, as well as cellist Noémie Raymond-Friset.
The Festival gives pride of place to the next generation, with a concert associating Kerson Leong, Bryan Cheng and Stewart Goodyear this Thursday, then the arrival of the Isidore Quartet, winner of the Banff Quartet Competition, on June 16 and 17, for a concert of noon and an evening concert. This double formula (midday then evening) was also proposed to the baroque cellist Elinor Frey, in concert on June 8 and 12.
It is with a great afternoon Tchaikovsky (Souvenir from Florence And Trio) at the Maison symphonique on June 18 that the 2023 edition of the Montreal Chamber Music Festival will end.