SYMPHONIC ASPIRATIONS
Bruckner piece in OM’s plans
Yannick Nézet- Séguin will start the 2017-18 Orchestre Métropolitain season with a grand finale by performing and recording Bruckner’s Symphony No. 5, thus concluding a cycle of the Austrian composer’s numbered symphonies for the Montreal-based ATMA label.
“It’s quite moving to think that we started so many years ago by recording just one,” Nézet-Séguin said Wednesday a few minutes before a rehearsal in Place des Arts. “I think it is a huge accomplishment in the history of the Métropolitain and also in the history of recorded music in Canada.”
Bruckner’s Fifth, a work notable for its difficult fugal finale, will be given Sept. 7 in the Maison symphonique as well as the evening before in Verdun and the evening after in Pointe-Claire, in keeping with the OM’s three-decade policy of touring the island with the co-operation of the Conseil des arts de Montréal. The first two of these three concerts include Richard Strauss’s Burleske as performed by the Canadian pianist Angela Cheng.
The Montreal maestro — who will have his hands full as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra and music director designate of the Metropolitan Opera — then leads a “French Touch” program in November highlighted by Debussy’s La Mer and including Quebec contralto Marie-Nicole Lemieux, French pianist Alexandre Tharaud and Montreal-born French cellist Jean- Guihen Queyras in, respectively, Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’été, Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand and Saint-Saëns’s Cello Concerto No. 1.
Tickets will surely be tight for the conductor’s performance of Handel’s Messiah on Dec. 23 in the Maison symphonique — a first for the OM and its chorus.
“Of course, when the OSM was doing it every year, it was out of the question,” Nézet-Séguin said of the beloved oratorio. “It is very exciting.”
In March 2018 Nézet-Séguin makes a rare foray into non-standard repertoire with the season’s Montreal-based soloist-in-residence, Serhiy Salov, by presenting Nikolai Medtner’s next-to-unknown Piano Concerto No. 1 of 1918. This Russian program includes Tchaikovsky’s more familiar Symphony No. 4.
The official OM season ends on May 5, 2018, with a concert comprising Respighi’s Pines of Rome, Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel and a program of arias as sung by Nézet-Séguin’s fellow Deutsche Grammophon artist, tenor Rolando Villazón.
Guest conductors are Alain Trudel of the Laval Symphony Orchestra (a Spanish program in October featuring a new Marimba Concerto by José Évangélista with Julien Bélanger as soloist); Christoph Campestrini (a light seasonal program in December); Tania Miller (Nielsen’s Fifth and Beethoven’s Seventh with Stéphane Tétreault in Barber’s Cello Concerto in late January and February); Daniele Callegari (a Mozart tribute in later February); Cristian Măcelaru (Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite among other 20th-century works in March 2018); Nicholas Carter and the Molinari Quartet (Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition in the Ravel orchestration and a new Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra by Samy Mousa in April 2018).
“We try to balance the known with the less known, the discoveries with the standards, the national with the international,” Nézet-Séguin said.
“It is true that my own programs are not necessarily the most adventurous ones. On the other hand they are sometimes quite uncompromising.”
This comment might well apply to an OM concert this Sunday in the Maison symphonique, which features Shostakovich’s Fourth, by some reckonings the most massively scored symphony in the repertoire.
The 2017-18 OM season also includes special concerts with multimedia content, notably the Montreal Video Game Symphony, a celebration of Assassin’s Creed and other games of Montreal genesis led by Dina Gilbert on Sept. 29 in Salle Wilfrid Pelletier of Place des Arts. Nicolas Ellis conducts a centennial tribute to Holst’s The Planets on April 29, 2018, in the Maison symphonique, also with a video element.
“We are trying to stretch our boundaries,” Nézet-Séguin said. There will be a chamber concert quarterbacked by Salov and a concert focusing on the OM chorus, both in May 2018.
All this is in addition to the European tour with YNS in November and December and pit duties for the Opéra de Montréal. The OM will also perform the score of the film La La Land under its composer, Justin Hurwitz, for the Montreal International Jazz Festival on July 2, 2017.
Nézet-Séguin remains the artistic director and principal conductor of the OM, to which he has been attached since 2000. Is this a lifetime appointment?
“I would love to think it is,” the Montreal native and resident said. “There might be a time where we have to reconfigure my role.
“What is a lifetime thing? We can never say exactly. But the way we consider it is that my bond with the OM will never stop.
“We will have to reassess, after 2021, in which form, in which capacity this will continue. Maybe as artistic director and principal conductor. Maybe in another title.
“But the bond itself? This is a lifetime appointment.”