Charles has classic strategy for Lanaudière
Artistic director’s classic strategy should bring a little extra heat to summer festival
“My wife comes from rural Manitoba,” Gregory Charles said over the phone in what would be a somewhat roundabout way of explaining why he was the right choice for artistic director of the annual summer Lanaudière Festival.
“So I want everyone to understand that I love country music. But country music doesn’t need Lanaudière’s help. What needs Lanaudière’s participation, innovation and dedication is classical music, symphonic music, lyrical music.”
It was an important point to make about a 49-year-old pianist, vocalist, conductor and entertainer whose resumé includes a breakout gospel album, multiple television appearances as an actor and game show host, tour work with Céline Dion, gala host spots for Just for Laughs and an English signature tune, I Think of You, that is about as classical as a pair of martinis downed with arms interlocked by Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr.
But there is another Gregory Charles — the boy steeped in sacred liturgy as a member of Les Petits Chanteurs de Montréal, the adolescent pianist who won classical competitions, the student at both the Lanaudière summer music camp (where he met festival founder Fernand Lindsay) and the Massachusetts temple of Tanglewood, the artistic director of the Mondial Choral festival in Laval, the affable host of OSM park concerts and the inspirational conductor of youth choirs including Les Petits Chanteurs de Laval, which Charles took as far afield as New York’s Carnegie Hall in 2002 to participate in an OSM performance of Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust.
More recent exploits include the television show Crescendo, a tasteful twist on the idol model based on competing school choirs, and the surprising acquisition in 2015 of the Radio classique station available in Montreal at 99.5 FM.
Charles likes to point out that while fears were rampant that this soft-focus classical station would swiftly morph into a pop outlet under his management, he in fact made it more classical.
“We couldn’t find a single piece by Stravinsky in the computer,” he recalled with disbelief.
The Lanaudière Festival is hardly that retrograde, but its reliance in recent seasons on standard repertoire and familiar faces might be reasonably equated with a certain complacency and a philosophical attitude to the high average age of the crowd at the Fernand Lindsay Amphitheatre outside Joliette. I was surely not the only concertgoer who shuddered a few summers ago when a chain of retirement homes negotiated a promotional arrangement that included an advertising pavilion on the site.
Many people reflexively blame the aging audience on the public education system, but the situation is both complicated and paradoxical. There is no shortage of young people studying classical music in Quebec and they come from various ethnic backgrounds. Audiences, however, are neither young nor diverse.
Charles sees repertoire renewal as part of the solution. He invokes the still-resonant example of Charles Dutoit, who revolutionized the sound and playlist of the OSM in the late 1970s and early 1980s, just when his own parents were taking him to concerts at Place des Arts.
“Kids today don’t just play Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto or Tchaikovsky or Sibelius,” Charles said. “They play Korngold, Barber and Corigliano. We need to adjust for that.
“In Quebec, by the same token, if you are on the French side, you don’t spend much time with (British composers) Elgar, Finzi, Bax and Vaughan Williams. That shouldn’t matter. It’s all beautiful music. We need to expand our horizons.”
Charles has no intention of losing touch with Kent Nagano and Yannick Nézet-Séguin, or abandoning the Quebec orchestras that have visited Lanaudière for decades. But his outreach plans include a new stress on the young talent with which he is already widely identified.
“We have half a million people tuning into television every
Friday night to hear a nine-yearold play a concerto,” Charles said, referring to the television show Virtuose. “Can you imagine in a summer setting how great that would be?”
No one should be surprised if future seasons (2017 is largely the work of his predecessor, Alex Benjamin) include an enhanced component of choral music, already a Lanaudière tradition.
“There is no way to separate choral music from me,” he said.
Nor is there any way of separating him from the act of explaining music to the masses. Charles will function as the microphonein-hand host of July 1’s opening program in the amphitheatre.
This concert by the OSM under Nagano includes a performance by Alain Lefèvre, the pianist and broadcaster whom some Lanaudière watchers expected to be named artistic director. Lefèvre recently announced he would no longer act as a spokesman for the festival — not too surprisingly, given Charles’s high profile and proven talent as a bilingual communicator.
Charles has no doubt of the potential of classical music to grow in Quebec and at its premier summer forum. The metaphor he summons is the vast expansion in the province during the last few decades of the market for wine, with no apparent decline in the sales of other kinds of potables.
While Charles cannot be specific about the 2018 schedule — the 2017 lineup was made public just this week — he promises a visit by an international top-20 orchestra and a non-standard presentation by the OSM.
“Next year, when you see Nagano on stage with the OSM, you will hear something you have never heard with the orchestra, and, I dare say, you have never heard in Quebec,” he said.
“Will people love it?” he asked rhetorically of this mystery project. “I think if I explain it well enough, they will.”
Dr. Yannick: McGill University and its Schulich School of Music will confer an honorary doctorate on Nézet-Séguin on May 14. The citation includes references to his “deep commitment to Quebec society (and) the way music brings people together.”
The conductor, who will be in town to conduct the Orchestre Métropolitain, already has honorary degrees from the Université du Québec à Montréal, the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and Westminster Choir College of Rider University.
YNS studied at the Montreal Conservatoire as a piano major. Take note that the future music director of the Metropolitan Opera starts a run of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman at the New York house on April 25.
Oh, my. Not so fast. This might be the first reaction of a wellmeaning amateur to the tempo adopted by Karin Kei Nagano in the first of Bach’s Two-Part Inventions, which the 21-year-old pianist has recorded complete for Analekta, along with their Three-Part counterparts (usually called Sinfonias).
Of course, pianists of professional calibre have options at their fingertips denied the students and patzers who have played these exquisite works since the 19th century, probably from an edition adorned with spurious slurs, staccato dots and tempo markings. Nagano (whose parents are Kent Nagano and Mari Kodama) can do what she pleases, and does it well.
For many Canadians of a certain generation, the recording to beat, at least on the piano, is the 1963-64 version by Glenn Gould. (Bernard Lagacé has recorded the Inventions and Sinfonias very atmospherically on the organ.) There are interesting cases of compare and contrast, such as in the Sinfonia in G Minor, over which Gould lavishes three minutes and 45 seconds. Nagano dispatches it with comparable sensitivity in two and a half minutes.
Gould gets to the waspish point of the Invention in B Minor in 52 seconds, while Nagano sounds too earnest at 10 seconds more than a minute. Of course, Gould was a famously plucky articulator. No one has sustained independent lines with such charisma. In some cases his idiosyncratic style carries the day, while in others, including the heavenly Sinfonia in F Minor, the natural legato of Nagano seems better attuned to expressive needs.
Where I must give the Nagano recording a demerit is its upward and downward march through the keys, Inventions followed by Sinfonias. The pianist explains the logic in a booklet note. It still sounds like shuffle play.
All the same, this is a captivating disc, and a great opportunity to hear these pedagogical works mined for their inner Bachian beauties — which is to say, performed by a pianist much better than yourself!