NAGANO ‘FULL OF SURPRISES’
Aims to keep us guessing as OSM season begins
Ockeghem. At last.
Judging by the OSM archives, the music of this Flemish master of the 15th century has never been performed under the auspices of the orchestra, possibly for the good reason that it is entirely vocal.
Yet Kent Nagano — surely the brainiest of OSM music directors — proudly mentioned Ockeghem when asked about the composers we might expect to hear in his valedictory year as music director.
That would be 2019-20, the season after the one that starts on Thursday in the Maison symphonique with a program including Ravel’s (as opposed to Ockeghem’s) Bolero.
“A new edition of Chigi codex will be appearing in about a year’s time,” the conductor explained, referring to the illuminated manuscript residing in the Vatican that constitutes the principal source of Ockeghem’s music. “The masses were impractical to perform because a modern edition did not exist.”
Well, thank heaven this disgraceful situation, worthy of a presiden-
tial tweet, will soon be set aright.
Of course, the OSM Chorus, as opposed to the orchestra, will be delivering the Ockeghem goods.
“It’s been such a remarkable addition to our concert life to have the OSM Chorus working together with the OSM,” Nagano said. “There will be some new repertoire explorations on both sides.”
This was an allusion to the fact that Nagano entirely reconstituted the chorus around the beginning of the decade and hired (after trying out many candidates) Andrew Megill as its director.
It is not the only innovation for which the Nagano years will be remembered. Without the unpredictable passions of this 66-yearold Californian, the OSM would not be the lone orchestra in the world to possess an octobass, a towering acoustic subwoofer that resembles a double bass made for the mighty Thor.
Nor would the OSM have enjoyed the signal honour this summer of opening the fabled Salzburg Festival with a performance of Krzysztof Penderecki’s St. Luke Passion in the presence of the 84-year-old Polish composer.
“Many people have said that one of the signatures of Kent Nagano’s collaboration with the OSM is that it is full of surprises,” the music director said when I asked whether his home stretch in Montreal would be marked by change or more of the same. “So the answer is yes and yes.”
It is hard to think of a major conductor who shares Nagano’s broad interests. Arriving in 2006 with a reputation as an advocate of 20th-century music — notably by his mentor Olivier Messiaen and fellow Californian John Adams — Nagano proceeded to program Bach in period style and record a lean-and-clean cycle of Beethoven Symphonies.
Last week he was speaking from his pied-à-terre in Paris between performances in Salzburg of The Bassarids, a 1966 opera based on a play of Euripides by the late German modernist Hans Werner Henze. Music does not get much more esoteric than that.
Yet on Saturday, as part of the OSM’s annual Classical Spree, Nagano is on the podium for Tchaikovsky’s thrice-familiar Piano Concerto No. 1 (with Alexei Volodin as soloist).
The Spree follows the annual free-for-all at Olympic Park, which on Wednesday brought Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade to the multitudes with visual elaboration by Cirque Éloize. No Ockeghem on that program, let alone Henze.
If Nagano’s range of repertoire complicates the task of defining him as a conductor, there are some idiosyncrasies that can fairly be called Kentish. One is a consciousness of how profoundly Montrealers love their city and how seriously Quebecers take their culture.
Thus came about such projects as Les Glorieux, the 2009 celebration of the Canadiens at the Bell Centre; a musical tribute in 2016 to the 50-year-old métro system; and, last year, the Symphonie Montréalaise observance of Montreal’s 375th anniversary (featuring Concordia, a multimedia collaboration involving visuals by Moment Factory and an evocative score by Montreal-born Samy Moussa, who might fairly be called a Nagano discovery).
Not all celebrations have been urban. Nagano was ahead of the First Nations curve in 2008 when he led a squad of seven players on a threestop tour of northern Quebec with Stravinsky’s L’histoire du soldat (with narration in Inuktitut) and a suite by Toronto-based Alexina Louie with parts for throat singers.
Next week’s season-opening concerts match Bolero and Stravinsky ’s The Rite of Spring (both OSM standards) with Chaakapesh, The Trickster’s Quest, a chamber opera based on a Cree legend with music by Matthew Ricketts and words by Tomson Highway. Commissioned with funds from the Canada Council’s New Chapter initiative, this opera will be seen in six communities in northern Quebec from Sept. 9 to 19.
There will be another tour in the spring, of Düsseldorf, Hamburg (where Nagano is well known as music director of the Hamburg State Opera), Essen, Vienna, Paris, Brussels, Munich (where he was music director of the Bavarian State Opera), Regensburg and Berlin (where he was principal conductor of the Deutsches SymphonieOrchester Berlin). No one could accuse the conductor of having squandered the international cachet so assiduously cultivated by his predecessor on the OSM podium, Charles Dutoit.
Somehow Nagano has interwoven the tours, the events and the happenings with the redoubtable symphonic standards that no orchestra or subscriber base can do without. In February he conducts Brahms’s Four Symphonies in four days, with classic silent films and commissioned scores as complements.
“That whole technology, and using the light bulb in an artistic way, was developing during the mature years of Brahms’s life,” the maestro explained. “Spending a lot of time in Vienna, and knowing the heritage of cinema in Vienna, I can’t imagine that Brahms was not aware of this phenomenon, which was in its infancy but certainly due to rise.
“The idea is to tacitly show Brahms in his time, to broaden the concept that some people might have of Brahms, of being isolated from the innovation that he lived in.”
This is a characteristic example of how Nagano manages to make artistic statements without shuttering the box office. Screening films with live orchestral accompaniment has become a major source of symphonic revenue in North America. The Toronto Symphony Orchestra (on the lookout, like the OSM, for a new music director) is flogging a Star Wars cycle that will extend to May 2020.
Possibly influenced by the bilingualism of its audience, the OSM takes the cinematic high road this season by presenting Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights, Michel Hazanavicius’s The Artist and Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau’s Nosferatu (the last with improvised accompaniment by Thierry Escaich on the Grand Orgue Pierre-Béique).
Not all innovations of the Nagano years were winners. The summer festival in Knowlton is now a dim memory, as is the International Composition Prize. Lavish Wagner operas in concert are no longer heard, although presentations of the Honegger/Ibert collaboration L’Aiglon (2015) and Leonard Bernstein’s A Quiet Place (last summer) have helped restore the OSM’s storied relationship with the Decca label. (Not that there has been any divorce with Analekta, which will make a live recording in October of Chopin’s Piano Concertos with Nagano and soloist Charles RichardHamelin).
As complex as the artistic formula seems, it has kept the OSM out of economic trouble (with, it should be added, reliable doses of provincial government support).
Can we thank Nagano for the stability? He thought over the question, possibly aware that the OSM and its musicians would soon announce the signing of a five-year contract that will raise the minimum weekly paycheque step by step from $1,883 to $2,079 for a 46-week season.
“We live in a time when that word is loaded with connotation,” he said. “For me, it is part of being an effective music director. You can’t accomplish a vision or realize an ambition unless you have economic stability. The focus obviously will go toward other issues.”
Nagano’s widely acknowledged (if hard to analyze) charisma is inevitably part of the OSM balance sheet. It is probably this indefinable quality more than any conscious comparison of musical values that has kept the OSM comfortably in the No. 1 spot in town, despite a serious challenge from the Orchestre Métropolitain under that most international of Montreal commodities, Yannick Nézet-Séguin.
All this leads an OSM follower to wonder what will happen after Nagano leaves. His own future is secure, with a base in Hamburg (where he directs not only the opera but the affiliated Hamburg Philharmonic) and no shortage of guest gigs in places like Salzburg.
Among the most intriguing projects on Nagano’s calendar is a series of lectures, conferences, workshops, research efforts and (most relevantly) performances of Wagner’s Ring with Concerto Köln, an ensemble once equated with uptempo renditions of baroque repertoire.
Whether there will be a theatrical element to these historically conscious presentations in 202021 is not certain. “This process has caught the imagination of various media people,” Nagano said. “It looks very positive at the moment.”
But back to 2019-20 and Montreal. Nagano plans to address with renewed energy a major composer who has lingered in the shadows during his reign: Schubert.
“We’ll be placing quite an important emphasis — not that this repertoire is not active in my personal repertoire, and it’s not as if the repertoire isn’t active in the OSM repertoire,” Nagano said, adding the mandatory ifs, ands and buts. “But we’ve never made a focused and in-depth exploration of the Schubert Symphonies. We don’t have a record, actually, of some of the symphonies ever being played ( by the OSM).
“This is something important for the OSM to confront, to wrestle with, to really explore, especially with the orchestra at the level it is at today, with so many young colleagues coming in. A freshness, open-mindedness. I wouldn’t say re-evaluation, but the chance to have a fresh look at Schubert within the context of the new editions that are coming out.”
Schubert and Ockeghem. New editions. Only in Montreal.
We live in a time when that word (stability) is loaded with connotation. For me, it is part of being an effective music director. You can’t accomplish a vision or realize an ambition unless you have economic stability. KENT NAGANO