Montreal Symphony Orchestra’s unanimous choice
Conductors are made, not born, and the manufacturing process remains something of a mystery.
Yes, there have been some famous teachers, from Ilya Musin in Saint Petersburg to Hans Swarowsky in Vienna to Hideo Saito in Tokyo.
But in recent years a seemingly unlikely candidate has joined them in Caracas, Venezuela: Jose Antonio Abreu.
For it was in Caracas that Abreu founded the now internationally famous music system known as El Sistema, which has schools across Europe and the Americas, including in Toronto.
A basic activity of the children enrolled in El Sistema is to play in a student orchestra. When I visited the Caracas school several years ago I heard no fewer than three of these ensembles, performing at a level worthy of many a so-called professional orchestra, all under Abreu-trained Venezuelan conductors.
The best known of these conductors was Gustavo Dudamel, now music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, whom Torontonians may remember conducting El Sistema’s Simon Bolivar Orchestra at the Four Seasons Centre in 2008.
Widely regarded as one of the foremost talents of his generation, Dudamel has brought the world’s attention to what may now be called the Venezuelan School of conducting.
So when the Montreal Symphony Orchestra set about to find a successor to the popular Kent Nagano, who retired last year after 14 years as music director, the search committee understandably looked south as well as east and west.
Their unanimous choice, Venezuela’s Rafael Payare, though virtually unknown in Canada, numbers five years as music director of the Ulster Orchestra in Belfast among his European credentials, and has guest-conducted such major ensembles as the Vienna Philharmonic and the London, Boston and Chicago symphony orchestras. He is slated to become a Montrealer in September 2022.
It apparently did not take long for his future colleagues to conclude from his guest appearances in 2018 and 2019 that he was a serious candidate.
As concertmaster Andrew Wan recalls, “From the very first moments of working with Maestro Payare in September 2018 we all felt a deep connection and tremendous chemistry with this exceptional artist. As a musician with the orchestra and as a member of the search committee I was thrilled to welcome him into our family here in Montreal.”
Conductors traditionally enjoy a honeymoon period with their new orchestras, something COVID-19 is making difficult for Payare as well as for his counterpart as new music director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Spain’s Gustavo Gimeno.
But if we can’t hear their orchestras live these days we can still hear them virtually from time to time. The Montreal Symphony Orchestra recorded a program under the direction of its maestro-to-be Jan. 18 in the audience-less Maison symphonique.
That program, available through Tuesday, opens with “Melodia en el Llano” (Noon on the Prairie) by Antonio Estevez, concludes with Dvorak’s “Seventh Symphony in D minor” and includes as its centrepiece Shostakovich’s “Second Cello Concerto” (a work introduced to North America by the TSO with its dedicatee, Mstislav Rostropovich, as soloist).
As a point of interest, the soloist in this performance is the noted American cellist Alisa Weilerstein, who married Payare in 2013.
Save for Rafael Fruhbeck de Burgos, who left abruptly after less than a full season, the Montreal Symphony usually manages to retain the loyalty of its music directors for a number of years, most notably in the case of Charles Dutoit, who presided at the podium from 1978 to 2014.
It was under Dutoit that the MSO became indisputably Canada’s best known symphony orchestra internationally, its reputation fuelled by a major record contract with Decca/ London.
That reputation survives though, in today’s high-cost orchestral world, recording and touring no longer carry the weight they once did.
Many years ago I interviewed the Italian conductor Riccardo Muti shortly after he succeeded Eugene Ormandy following Ormandy’s astonishing 42year tenure as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra.
“There will never be another Eugene Ormandy,” Muti insisted. And he was surely correct. The world has changed. Our attention spans are shorter. We routinely look for something new.
At the same time, in this world of change, orchestras are by no means alone in needing agents of continuity.
Here’s hoping the Montreal Symphony Orchestra has found one.