Contest’s applicants reach for the high notes
Of 159 Montreal International Musical Competition entries, 80 are from sopranos
SATB: The universal division of voices into these categories implies equal strength, at least in principle. In practice, sopranos are overwhelmingly dominant, if the entry pool for the 2012 edition of the Montreal International Musical Competition is any measure.
Of the 159 applications under consideration, 80 – a shade more than half – are from sopranos. Following them in numbers are 25 tenors, 20 mezzo-sopranos, 16 baritones, 13 bass-baritones, three counter-tenors and two basses.
Imagine: More countertenors than basses. And more basses than contraltos. That voice type is represented by precisely zero applicants.
Of course, the official voice designations might not be entirely trustworthy. Possibly a few of those mezzo-sopranos have the low-end gravitas to qualify as contraltos. Others might be sopranos of dimmer colour. Still, all the subvarieties amount to only 20 – not a big number.
The virtual extinction of basses is even harder to explain. It could be that basses (and some baritones) prefer to take cover in the hybrid class of bassbaritone, where they are insulated against criticism for weakness in either the low or high range (or, indeed, both ends of the spectrum).
You say I sound gassy on the bottom and squally on top? Hey, what do you want? I’m a bass-baritone!
Joseph Rouleau, MIMC co-founder, perennial jury member and one of the true (not to mention truly great) basses of the last 60 years, is skeptical of the ballooning of the bassbaritone category. Many of those bass-baritones, he says, are nothing more than “lazy baritones” who would rather not work on their high Gs and As. Some, of course, are the real thing. Rouleau mentions Bryn Terfel as the personification of the type.
Whatever they call themselves, the 159 applicants will be whittled down to 32 participants by homegrown juries. If I rightly interpret Rouleau’s facial expression and body language – as communicative in close quarters as on the operatic stage – we can be almost certain that those two poor, lonely basses will not make the cut.
The other lopsided showing, already reported on in this column, is national: 41 South Koreans, second only to Canadians at 48. Jury president André Bourbeau has an alternative (or supplement) to my socio-religious explanation for this phenomenon (that millions of South Koreans are Christians who learn to appreciate good choral music in church): The one-two finish in 2007 of violinists Jinjoo Cho and Ye-eun Choi gave the MIMC a high profile in the Asian country.
So will the 2012 MIMC, running from May 28 to June 8, be a hard-fought battle among 32 South Korean sopranos? Probably the judges will find some way of broadening the field. But we should not be surprised to find an SKS or two among the laureates. And who will win the $30,000 first prize? Probably not a lazy baritone. Denizens of N.D.G. and Westmount have an unusual local option Tuesday at the Crowley Arts Centre, 5325 Crowley Ave.: a concert by the 45-piece Orchestre 21 featuring the world premiere of an orchestration of Debussy’s sketches for Le diable dans le beffroi, a one-act opera based on a tale of Edgar Allan Poe.
The completion by the British scholar Robert Orledge, who is in town for a Debussy symposium at the Université de Montréal, includes four principal singers as well as orchestra. Orledge is a noted authority on Debussy’s stage music, much of which the composer left incomplete.
Debussy is further represented in this concert by the Piano Rhapsody (Jimmy Brière, soloist). You will also hear the premiere of a work by François-hugues Leclair and get a sample of the muchfêted Ana Sokolovic in the form of her three-movement Concerto for Orchestra. Tickets range from $12 to $30; the starting time is 8 p.m. Call 514-656-5672.
There is more un- finished Debussy on offer Friday at 7:30 p.m. at Salle Claude Champagne, some with Orchestre 21 and some with piano fourhands. Keep in mind also the U de M production of Pelléas et Mélisande opening Thursday at 7:30 p.m. at Salle Claude Champagne, with a repeat on March 3 at the same time. Jean-françois Rivest conducts. For more details: musique.umontreal.ca OSM CEO Madeleine Careau counsels us all to take a deep breath before celebrating the sellout crowds that have greeted the orchestra’s concerts this season in the Maison symphonique. That euphoria could taper off.
“Let’s wait for next season,” she said the other day. “Let’s be pragmatic. Better to grow than to stretch.” Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic won a Grammy award two weeks ago for best orches- tral performance. A good reason, one might suppose, to pick up a copy from one of the few CD retailers still in business.
No dice. The recording exists as an itunes purchase only. Go to www.deutschegrammophon.com and you can follow an itunes link to download it in either MP3 (bad) or FLAC (not so bad) format.
The online-only classical recording is a remarkable development. First to adopt the CD in the early-1980s, classical types are expected to be the last to abandon it. They value sound quality more than most consumers, and like their booklet documentation.
Downloading has some advantages. You can buy individual movements of the Dudamel recordings of Brahms’s Fourth for a lesser price. This is presumably because itunes treats all individual tracks as “songs.”