The Montreal Baroque festival, on the theme “Parallel Universes”, opened Thursday evening at the Notre-Dame-de-Bon-Secours Chapel, with a concert entitled amazing Grace. These are largely the spirituals, sung with interiority and subtlety by Frédérika Petit-Homme and two sisters, who will be remembered from the evening, along with the charming and relevant South African soprano Lynelle Kenned.
You now have to be a sleuth to guess what we’re going to be served at certain classical music festivals. Some people pride themselves on setting up a sort of “parallel opera house” to, in fact, put on confidential concerts where people sing lyrical works without flinching behind a lectern. In others, we will discover the baroque as it is played in South Africa, a beautiful and original surprise. But we are sticking our fingers in the eye, because we had read it wrong. It was worded like an insurance contract!
The peeled
When a press release writes: “Among the headliners of the 2024 edition, let us mention the musicians of the Cape Town Baroque Orchestra (South Africa)” (“Cape Town Baroque Orchestra” in bold in the text) it is now a question to put aside his naivety. It’s all in the formula “the musicians of…” which should be translated as “the two pelés – friends of Matthias, as Vincent Lauzer explained to us in an interview – who are going to come to Montreal”.
We therefore find ourselves at the church to hear the 2024 guests of honor, a South African baroque orchestra, during the opening concert, realizing, on the leaflet given, that there is no South African orchestra, but a violinist and a harpsichordist (plus a soprano, Lynelle Kenned). The evening orchestra is Caprice, with musicians of diverse diversity, a nice idea which, moreover, will derail the patrons and blow up the thing-things quotients, through which said patrons now judge whether a organization is culturally relevant, efficient and effective. The race for the thing quotient (which modulates subsidies upwards) gives us concerts like the one on Thursday evening.
Rather than describing it, “yaka” transcribes its description: “A concert in the colors of Africa with musicians from Cape Town and gospel songs rooted in the African-American tradition. The musicians will join forces to perform works by the greatest masters of the baroque, concertos and arias which will offer the luminous soprano Lynelle Kenned a first opportunity to shine in Montreal. Led by harpsichordist Erik Dippenaar and conductor Frédéricka Petit-Homme, amazing Grace also highlights the Festival Choir for a most grandiose opening concert! »
Disjointed
The mission, if you accept it, is to understand the link between spirituals (or gospel in the description), the Concerto for recorder and transverse flute in E minor by Telemann, the very decorative tune Sweet Bird by Handel and The storm of the pond by Vivaldi. If it involves replacing the spirituals in a classical setting a soprano can give us a recital of melodies and integrate them and, above all, someone could finally program us A Child of our Time by Tippett. In addition, the times are right for it. But hey, as we said: the important thing is the description. It will serve the eyes who will find it fantastic.
The result ? A concert of odds and ends where we retain the refinement of the 2 spirituals of Frédéricka Petit-Homme and her 2 colleagues while two others, with a singing crowd gathered in the church (suddenly the unfounded fear of Marc Boucher for the opening concert of Classica – the risk of having so many people in in the hall than on stage – this was true in Baroque Montreal) were more sluggish. A concert where we will also remember the excellent soprano Lynelle Kenned whom we had never heard of: this singer has a very well-placed voice, radiates a lot of musical charm through real dejection.
A concert, finally, where Matthias Maute and his wife played Telemann with verve and efficiency, unlike the lady violinist who traveled from South Africa to multiply the effects in order to try to create an illusion in a very trying Vivaldi with his approximations. The (modest) won over and delirious crowd made almost no apparent distinction between the extreme musical refinement of Madame Petit-Homme and her friends in Swing low, sweet cart, the impeccable vocal performance of Lynelle Kenned in Händel and the musical calembredaines of Madame Macheva in Vivaldi. This propensity for blissful unanimity must be very frustrating for truly good artists.