The Boréades opened their 2022-2023 season with an original project, Transtaigadocumentary concert, where the story from Montreal to Kuujjuaq of an adventurer, Samuel Lalande-Markon, was presented in images, on stage and in music, the awakening to nature being accompanied by musical sensations.
Concert illustrated with images or documentary narrative dressed in music? Whatever the dominant angle — and we will come back to this — the stakes of a project like Transtaiga are many. Without the Boréades or the adventurer and author Samuel Lalande-Markon taking advantage of it, the noblest thing is to open up the possibility of bringing to classical music spectators or listeners who have come for something else. In this case, the story of an exploration.
A responsability
This is a rare and precious good: that of passive exposure to music. This was once done on school benches or at the sight of a cartoon. A person who does not come specifically to “fetch” the music “stumbles upon it” and suddenly can feel a shock, experience an encounter with art that can upset an existence.
It is no fad to pretend that. We know for example that the “Glenn Gould phenomenon” in France was triggered in the 1970s one evening of a television strike when all the channels broadcast a single program including a concert by the latter.
The responsibility that rests with those who hold the keys to the very few windows of “passive exposure” is immense, whether in the cinema (see our commentary on the film Tenor in The duty Saturday), on the radio or on television, or during multidisciplinary concerts.
In terms of concerts combining various art forms, Véronique Lacroix’s ECM+ was a pioneering and inventive organization. Today, Les Rugissants by Xavier Brossard Ménard, with projects combining architecture and music, explore these avenues. Among the established classic items, Transfiguration, of harpist Valérie Milot and cellist Stéphane Tétreault, established a level at which we can today measure projects such as Transtaiga.
Documentary above all
On a very different path from Transfiguration, Transtaiga reposes first on the story, fascinating, very informative, often funny, perfectly adapted from a book and nourished by a perfect complicity between Samuel Lalande-Markon and the actor Alexis Déziel. There is a real sense of rhythm and poetry there.
The narration is nourished first and foremost by very beautiful images by videographer Simon Jolicoeur-Côté. As for the musical part, as it is, it is the “soundtrack” of the story without identifying the pieces specifically. Who can link the name of Jean-Philippe Rameau to the most magical moment of the confluence of water and the most celestial sounds? Sortir du repertoire baroque opened at two great moments: a transcription of Bydlo (Pictures at an exhibition), in the canoe carrying sequence, and Brothers from Pärt, at the end of the expedition. Among a few unexpected marriages, the most striking was to feel the quiet force of the harpsichord in the slow movement of the italian concerto on the immensity of a fall. Too bad Olivier Brault didn’t have his best day in the Partita of Bach.
But what we remember Transtaiga, it is the force of nature and that of the inner journey: a power to dream and the chance, as the adventurer concludes, from a poem that inhabited him, to no longer “walk beside oneself- same “.
It is important that this project be accessible until Tuesday everywhere in Quebec, and elsewhere, by webcast. It would also be important for the Boréades to monitor how many of the new spectators who came on Sunday will return for a “regular” concert.