The Montreal Symphony Orchestra (OSM) announced Monday a major tour which will take place in Europe next November under the leadership of its musical director, Rafael Payare. It will encompass major musical centers including London, Paris, Amsterdam, Vienna and Berlin.
The OSM and Rafael Payare will be absent from Montreal in the second half of November. The tour will begin on November 19 in London, at the Barbican Center, and end on November 30 at the Konzerthaus in Vienna.
After a first visit to Europe, more modest (Zagreb, Budapest, Vienna, Brussels, London), completed in one week at a run in October 2022, this time it is really the “tour of the grand dukes” in the great venues, including the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, the Philharmonie de Paris, the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, the Berlin Philharmonie. The icing on the cake would have been the Musikverein in Vienna, the famous “golden hall”, instead of the Konzerthaus.
It will necessarily be interesting to see how the orchestra and its conductor will present themselves to the public of these cities, namely London, Luxembourg, Paris, Hamburg, Berlin, Amsterdam, Munich and Vienna. The two symphonies will be Fantastic of Berlioz and theAlpensymphony by Strauss, a conservative choice, but spectacular and safe, which does not expose the conductor in Debussy or Ravel, when it comes to French music, and which will ride on the hoped-for success of the second OSM-Payare record release, A hero’s life, by Richard Strauss, to be released on March 15 by Pentatone. In 2022, Payare and the OSM toured with the 10e Symphony by Shostakovich and the 5e by Mahler.
The soloist of the tour will be Daniil Trifonov, a crowd-drawing pianist, also chosen by Yannick Nézet-Séguin for his recent European tour with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Trifonov’s presence will be of particular interest here, because the repertoire is one in which he has rarely been heard: the 1er Concerto of Beethoven and the Piano concerto by Schumann. It will be recalled that Trifonov and Payare played an extraordinary Concerto for piano and strings of Schnittke in April 2022, this same soloist returning with his master Sergeï Babayan for the Concerto for 2 pianos by Bartók in May 2023.
For the opening of the concert, Rafael Payare chose a composition by the Iranian-Canadian Iman Habibi, Jeder Baum sprichtwhich means “every tree speaks”.