OM season opens with 1913 focus
Orchestre Métropolitain heavy on the German classics
The Orchestre Métropolitain will open the podium to three guest conductors in 2013-14, but is not letting go of its matchlessly busy music director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin.
“Such a long relationship is irreplaceable,” the 38-year-old Montrealer said Thursday in the concourse of Place des Arts. “I hope that what I’ve lived here I can bring elsewhere, and what I experience there (with other orchestras) I can bring back here.”
Julian Kuerti, the son of the Toronto pianist Anton Kuerti, is principal guest conductor for the season, leading two of the nine programs in the Maison symphonique. The other imports are Christian Vásquez, a product of the Venezuelan El Sistema program, and Tateo Nakajima, who is known hereabouts for overseeing the acoustics of the hall the OM (among other ensembles) calls home.
But it is Nézet-Séguin who opens the season on Oct. 18 under the rubric of “1913,” this being the year that gave us Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (which YNS recently recorded with the Philadelphia Orchestra), Debussy’s shape-shifting ballet Jeux and Prokofiev’s heavy-metal Piano Concerto No. 2. Beatrice Rana, winner of the 2011 Montreal International Musical Competition, takes on the thunderous solo part.
Other Nézet-Séguin concerts are dominated by the music of Germanspeaking heavyweights.
Contralto Marie-Nicole Lemieux is the guest in a program combining Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder and Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder. Another brings together Beethoven’s Symphony No. 3 Eroica with Strauss’s Metamorphosen and Horn Concerto No. 2 (OM co-principal Louis-Philippe Marsolais is soloist).
Bach’s St. Matthew Passion makes an Easter weekend appearance. The last program of the season, given on June 12 and 13, 2014, balances Bruckner’s Symphony No. 3 in the customary 1889 edition with Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1. Hélène Grimaud, Yannick’s fellow Deutsche Grammophon artist, is soloist.
The program under Nakajima, dedicated to Vienna, comprises Haydn’s Symphony No. 73, Mozart’s Oboe Concerto (principal Lise Beauchamp, soloist), a pair of Johann Strauss favourites and Schoenberg’s decidedly more complicated Chamber Symphony No. 2.
Kuerti’s first appearance couples Beethoven’s Violin Concerto (with his fellow Canadian Martin Beaver as soloist) and Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra. The second includes Rachmaninoff ’sSymphonic Dances and the premiere of Éric Champagne’s Symphony No. 1. Vásquez leads a “Latin Impressions” program highlighted by Ginastera’s Piano Concerto No. 2 (Maxim Bernard, soloist).
Five of the programs can be heard in the suburbs as part of the Conseil des arts de Montréal touring series. YNS also leads a children’s concert in the Théâtre Outremont featuring the prodigy Daniel Clarke Bouchard.