Jan. 15 marked a confusing evening of firsts for the OSM
Accounts vary as to why conductor decided to restart complex piece
Was this an OSM first? The evening of Jan. 15 marked, of course, the world première of Walter Boudreau’s Concerto de l’asile, with Alain Lefèvre at the piano and Ludovic Morlot, a guest conductor, on the podium. But was this the first time a performance by the OSM came suddenly to a halt and needed to be started again?
Probably not, although no such incident can be traced in my memory banks and no one has written in with a recollection (or, to draw from the middle-20th century, a recollection of a recollection). A few members of the orchestra have, however, disputed the composer’s account of what happened and why.
Boudreau’s explanation (emailed to me the day after) was that the first violins missed an entry and the conductor failed to respond quickly to the emergency:
“The first violins messed up their entry at bar 62, and the conductor, rather than holding on tight, in keeping with the appropriate succession of bars, made the terrible mistake of following them in their wandering. Alain came in as planned in bar 66, but it was too late for the conductor to readjust.”
Shortly after I published a condensed version of this account, an anonymous letter from a player (my guess is a member of the first violin section) arrived with a sharply different report:
“The orchestra and conductor stopped because the soloist — even with the score in front of him and a page turner — got lost and was trying to improvise while he found his place. He never did.
“It had absolutely nothing to do with a section of the orchestra or with the conductor.
“How the composer did not recognize that the soloist was improvising is incomprehensible.”
I spoke to another musician (who declined to be identified) with a similar take: Lefèvre, even with the music in front of him, got lost.
“I don’t think Walter was right about this. It was Alain who skipped a major portion of the music, and the conductor couldn’t find him. He stopped conducting — there was no motion whatsoever — because he couldn’t follow what was going on.
“When you’re following a complex piano part and it doesn’t relate to anything that you have on the page, then you don’t know what to conduct.
“I think it’s silly to put this on the first violins missing an entrance. I don’t think it’s true. And anyway, things don’t collapse because one section does not come in.”
One theory has it that Lefèvre’s page-turner flipped two pages instead of one. This seems unlikely simply because such a mistake would be obvious to both the pageturner and the pianist and rectified instantly.
My unidentified source attributed the problem more generally to “the fog of war.” Things happen when notes proliferate and the time to prepare them remains static.
“It’s a very complex piece. I don’t think we ever did a straight runthrough (in rehearsal) that was without incident.”
Another week-after question worth posing is whether a new work as long (more than 40 minutes) and demanding as the Concerto de l’asile should have been framed by the complex and grandiose Prelude to Die Meistersinger of Wagner and the free-form and multicoloured Images of Debussy. This program was not fair to the participants and not fair to the audience.
There was another incident during the concert of Jan. 15. When the general systems failure occurred, the conductor Morlot turned to the audience in the Maison symphonique and improvised an announcement to the effect that the performance would be restarted from the beginning. He spoke entirely in English.
Since Morlot is a Frenchman and rehearsals were in French, his choice of language was an odd one, and not exactly overlooked in the French press. How to explain it? Le brouillard de guerre.
Boudreau has assembled some
positive notices (in French) to balance the skeptical comments of the daily scribblers. One comes from veteran composer and McGill professor John Rea:
“A real Concerto fantastique, in the manner of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, with an idée fixe that was omnipresent in both the musical and psychiatric senses. Sincerely, Walter, you touched many nerves (cordes sensibles). You acted as a stage director, and your characters appeared one after another to tell a sad story.
“First movement: disturbing. Second: bewitching. Third: transcendent.”
The Concerto de l’asile was broadcast this week by Radio-Canada and should be available as a podcast. Go to www.espace.mu and follow the photo links.
Last week I mistakenly reported
that the Mozart operas as recorded by Yannick Nézet-Séguin would be his only video releases for Deutsche Grammophon. In fact, even these are audio only.
The only commercially available video of this famously telegenic conductor, according to his executive assistant, are the Metropolitan Opera performance of Bizet’s Carmen and the Salzburg Festival performance of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette. Obviously, the bulk of the images in these DG releases are from the stage and not the pit.