With four performances at the end of the week, the Orchester Métropolitain (OM) was full of parents, “poussinots” and “poussinettes” thanks to the project Symphonic Pass-Partout, which will be broadcast on Télé-Québec starting December 9. The musical awakening project is right on target and represents a foundation on which OM can intelligently build.
Symphonic Pass-Partout is a new collaboration between the Orchester Métropolitain and Simon Boulerice as artistic director. Boulerice had previously designed The cloud shovelerpresented in April 2023, a partial success.
In the relationship that OM maintains with young audiences, The shoveler followed two very successful and more adolescent programs derived from Awesome ! with Martin Carli. With The cloud shoveler, we were in an audience 5-10 years old (more precisely 5-8 years old), with an imperfect product, sometimes off the mark, both in terms of literacy and musically. With Symphonic Pass-Partout, the ambitions cited were to design “A unique and original way of transmitting to children the love of music, its cognitive benefits for the brain and the joy of playing with it! »
The balance
We didn’t really believe it afterwards The shoveler. Well, experience has proven us wrong: this Symphonic Pass-Partout is a pure gem, fine, perfect, rhythmic and well balanced. The balance, in this case, is knowing the audience and gauging their ambitions. The audience was obviously 3-5 year olds or 3-6 year olds. He was attracted (at least parents and grandparents accompanied) by the proposal, and this proposal was right.
The challenge was to naturally bring the little ones to the Maison symphonique (let’s remember the obstacle mentioned by Allison Migeon of the Obiora ensemble saying that the place was scary), to make the orchestral experience pleasant and natural, not aggressive. It was necessary to play this orchestral tool both “symphonically” and use it to create atmospheres (this dimension could be explored even further). It was necessary to use the tool to embellish well-known tunes transmitted by charismatic figures during a rhythmic show of the right duration. It was done. The three characters are perfectly suited for this, the well-known songs (The beautiful vegetables, Bedon bedondaine, Three of us, we have…, Brush, brush, brush, etc.) were impeccably “set” by the arrangements of François Vallières.
Another remarkable tip: the presence of the Petits Chanteurs du Mont-Royal offered the children a mirror showing that at a slightly older age, we can sing on the other side of the stage. All this was inhabited by the three actors of the television show, supported by an orchestra happy to be there, conducted by Mélanie Léonard, also all smiles.
Symphonic Pass-Partout, which will be broadcast on Télé-Québec on Saturday, December 9 at 8 p.m. (great idea! Wasn’t the 10 p.m. slot free?) and, fortunately, at 5 p.m. on December 10 and at 11 a.m. on December 15 , therefore deserves to be the basis of a beautiful awakening-education project of OM ranging from early childhood to adolescence. It is better to leave it to expert hands: the question of awareness and the tools implemented is a heavy responsibility, which deserves to be considered other than as a marketing product, a niche or a business, as could be seen.