OSM provides soundtrack for a fanciful rendition of its own history
Tuesday night saw the Maison symphonique transformed into a radio studio for a performance of the comic “history” of the OSM. Comedians and radio announcers sauntered in tremendous headgear and pushed a giant radio dial from 1934, the year of the orchestra’s founding, into the near future. The OSM was arrayed behind, looming and padded with extra musicians for a sprawling program of nine works. About half were played through. The rest were talked over, smothered in a fun evening that was not about the music.
This “unauthorized biography” radio play was presented as part of Fréquence OSM, in its second year, for broadcast on Espace Musique.
The comedians were Sylvie Moreau, Anne-Marie Cadieux, Pierre Verville and Alexis Martin, with Charles Tisseyre and Michel Keable joining in. They wittily introduced each decade over sounds from Sébastien Heppell’s onstage effects kit or the OSM, and then the lights went up and the orchestra played a full piece. These were rigorously black or white, which means they were well chosen for radio, I guess: limp stuff like Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique and the second-act overture from Wagner’s Siegfried, or brassy flagellation of the hall in the manner of the finale from Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony and the Montagues and Capulets dance from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet.
There were a few bright spots in a cloudy feeling that more rehearsal time would have helped. Soloist Paul Merkelo handily delivered Henri Tomasi’s romping Trumpet Concerto, and the orchestra was unrecognizably energetic — at least under Nagano — in an agonizingly thrilling Allegro from Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony.
Cries for an immediate encore were violently suppressed by a handbag whose owner wanted to hear Prokofiev.
Hearing the Shostakovich in the middle changed everything for me. All the bombast that followed seemed trivial, but at least the comedy was good.
The biography followed the orchestra from its beginnings in a potato cellar through storms of forbidden love and referendums on mandatory period instruments and reinstituting castration for high male voices. The care and feeding of young church organs was discussed, and history ended with an extraterrestrial collaboration and intergalactic tour, with Nagano still at the helm, in an instructive bit of fantasy.
It would be better to have experiments that are not so blue-chip — they would be cheaper, and we could have more of them — but there is always something that can be improved. It was very good to hear laughter in the hall. The next experiment is a concert with Adam Cohen and Coeur de pirate, with Simon Leclerc conducting, on Wednesday and Oct. 3. Details at osm.ca.