MATHIEU’S MOMENT IS LIKE SOMETHING OUT OF A MOVIE
We are dealing with a rare Canadian work that might enter the broader repertoire
André Mathieu’s greatest hit? For decades, the simple answer to this seldom-asked question was the Concerto de Québec. Now we have an alternative response: the Piano Concerto No. 3 Op. 25 of 1943, on which the Concerto de Québec was based.
Alain Lefèvre, Mathieu’s longtime champion, has made a recording on Analekta of this earlier version in an orchestration by the Abitibi-Témiscamingue conductor and arranger Jacques Marchand. Meanwhile, a new recording of the original — if that is the word — has popped up on Atma featuring a rival Mathieu enthusiast, Jean-Philippe Sylvestre, at the piano.
The scores differ enough to occasion a debate. They are also fetching enough in either form to reward an afternoon of listening.
Before wading in further, a few reminders. Mathieu (192968) was a Montreal pianist and composer of unusual promise, and indeed achievement, before his career unravelled more or less in inverse proportion to his increasing reliance on alcohol.
His success was not strictly local. Mathieu had moments of teenage glory in Paris and New York, winning a 1942 competition for young composers in the latter metropolis with his Concertino No. 2. A French writer called him “the Canadian Mozart,” although his principal models, to judge by his surviving works, were Rachmaninoff and Gershwin.
As Mathieu’s biographer Georges Nicholson tells it, Wilfrid Pelletier, then a regular in the pit of the Metropolitan Opera, was sufficiently taken by his next effort, the Piano Concerto No. 3 — finished in two-piano form on June 20, 1943, when Mathieu was only 14 — to organize a live CBS radio broadcast of an orchestration and abridgement of the slow movement with André Kostelanetz conducting and the composer at the piano. Even Leonard Bernstein got into the act, writing Mathieu on behalf of Artur Rodzinski, music director of the New York Philharmonic, who had heard about the budding genius.
And there matters rested until 1946, when a fledgling Quebec film company hired the Russian director Fedor Ozep to make the noir thriller La Forteresse, which was shot at the same time in English and released as Whispering City.
Whispering City is available on YouTube. The plot revolves around Michel Lacoste, a struggling pianist and composer caught in a web of murder and intrigue. He has composed a piano concerto, which his shrewish wife predicts will bring him no riches. “I know it won’t make any money,” he responds, “but it’s worth doing.” Good philosophy.
Of course, a real concerto was needed for the film, and the made-in-Canada Piano Concerto No. 3 offered ideal fodder. The performance of the Quebec Concerto, as it is identified in the credits of the English version, is part of the denouement, although there are also earlier rehearsal scenes.
Jean Deslauriers, a busy CBC conductor, leads an orchestra of Montrealers. Neil Chotem, another stalwart of the Montreal music scene, looks imperturbable at the piano and plays well. Mathieu, who would have been the obvious choice of soloist, was in Paris and not available.
Whatever else this film did, it provided an excellent platform for the Concerto de Québec. One source attributes the orchestration to Deslauriers. The booklet notes credit the Italianborn Montrealer Giuseppe Agostini with the film arrangement and the concert version that Mathieu himself recorded in 1947. Mathieu had no training in orchestration.
The Concerto de Québec next resurfaced in a significant way when Philippe Entremont made a recording in Salle Claude Champagne with the visiting Orchestre du Capitole de Toulouse in 1978. Marc Bélanger rearranged the Agostini arrangement. Then Lefèvre in 2003 added his two cents to the score and recorded it with the Orchestre symphonique de Québec under Yoav Talmi, thus embarking on his mission to restore Mathieu’s good name.
This might have marked the end of the saga had Nicholson not discovered Mathieu’s 1943 two-piano manuscript in Ottawa. Lefèvre felt a new orchestration and a new recording of the much mangled score were justified. For the latter, the pianist found willing collaborators, oddly enough, in the Buffalo Philharmonic and its music director JoAnn Falletta. The Concerto No. 3 (Jacques Marchand orchestration) received its première in the Kleinhans Music Hall last February. This concert was broadcast on NPR.
If only I could now report that the resulting live recording settles the matter. Certainly it is a committed performance, with Lefèvre in muscular mode. Marchand has made the music lusher and earthier, weaving the orchestra into the opening solo sequence as Rachmaninoff might have done.
He has also added a cadenza to create a proper recapitulation, thereby stretching a sevenminute potpourri of hummable themes into a respectable first movement of more than 11 minutes. It is a choice with esthetic merit but obviously compromises any claim this version has to being a restoration of Mathieu’s 1943 autograph.
There are differences in the second movement, notably at the beginning, where the lyrical principal theme is tossed around the orchestra four times (with bridging material) before the piano enters. Agostini’s decision to bring in the piano directly after a horn solo might be more conventional, but is not less effective.
Where Agostini clearly erred (again, assuming he was indeed the culprit) was in trimming a beat off the bumptious main theme of the finale in the interest of making the phrasing more symmetrical. Marchand quite rightly restores the missing beat.
Performance plays a role in the comparison: I find Lefèvre’s 2003 performance of the Concerto de Québec with Talmi fresher in inspiration and more lucidly recorded. With Falletta and the Buffalonians (who fill the new CD with a sprightly version of Gershwin’s An American in Paris), Lefèvre seems to be striving selfconsciously in the first movement for a big sound. Because this is a live recording, technical matters are less than immaculate.
As for Sylvestre, his Atma outing (also live, from St-Constant) with the Orchestre Métropolitain under Alain Trudel ratchets up the tempo in the finale (not to mention the first movement of Rachmaninoff ’s Piano Concerto No. 2), but the flinty quality of the piano sound makes this recording less competitive.
Do we need yet another version? Since we are dealing with a rare case of a Canadian work that might enter the repertoire, patience is not misplaced.
“Mathieu is new music, but user-friendly,” Lefèvre told at a recent press gathering. “I believe that in the U.S., more and more Mathieu will be played.”
When an orchestra asks for something romantic and offbrand, Mathieu is a viable alternative. “As a Canadian boy, it is natural for me to defend Canadian music,” Lefèvre adds. All the same, the pianist concedes that after decades of Mathieu advocacy, he is happy to see others take up the cause.
Likewise. Now I want to hear the two-piano original of the Piano Concerto No. 3. Any takers?