RARE CHORAL TREASURES ON OFFER
Easter is normally high season in Montreal for choral music, as the Requiems of Verdi and Mozart vie for your attention, along, perhaps, with one of the Passions of Bach. No sign of the usual suspects this year. Rather, we shall hear the less common offerings of Dvorak’s Stabat Mater and Berlioz’s Te Deum.
The Stabat Mater, to be performed Sunday afternoon in the Maison symphonique, appears to be almost officially a one-per-decade kind of thing, having been given 1992 by the St. Lawrence Choir under Iwan Edwards and in 2001 by the OSM under Charles Dutoit. This time the performers are Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Orchestre Métropolitain and the 130-voice OM chorus. They “invite you into Dvorak’s unsettling universe,” to quote the advertising copy.
Dvorak’s is seldom counted among music’s premier discombobulators, but this 90-minute piece, based on the traditional Latin text telling of Mary’s sorrow at the Crucifixion, has an unsettling genesis. The composer was 34 in 1875 when his two-day-old daughter died. This unhappiness got him started on the Stabat Mater. About eight months later, he turned to other projects.
Then, in 1877, Dvorak’s 11-month-old daughter and three-year-old son died within a month, the former after accidentally ingesting a phosphorous solution, the latter of smallpox. This appalling double tragedy emptied the nest and (understandably) put the composer back to work on the choral piece.
Grand and deeply felt, the Stabat Mater is written for full orchestra and four soloists who pour out grief in no uncertain terms, notably in the Quis est homo section. “Is there one who would not weep,” runs the traditional translation. The work was a success at its (belated) première on Dec. 23, 1880, in Prague, but really hit the charts in 1884 after a British performance in celebration of the 800th anniversary of Worcester Cathedral, under the baton of the composer and for an audience of about 4,000.
Nézet-Séguin has assembled a potent quartet of Layla Claire, Karen Cargill, Brandon Jovanovich and John Relyea. Scottish mezzo-soprano Cargill has sung Waltraute in Wagner’s Gotterdammerung at the Met. She produced “a bold, shimmering sound of real character” in the Orchestre Métropolitain’s Verdi Requiem of 2013, at least according to myself. Lanaudière Festival followers will recall Jovanovich as the stirring Lohengrin under YNS in a 2013 concert performance of this opera. “Truly a knight in shining armour” was the judgment.
Why is Dvorak’s Stabat Mater a relative rarity? First because of the Easter monopoly enjoyed by the pieces mentioned at the beginning of this column. Perhaps the emotive and repetitive quality of Dvorak’s style in this particular score requires a masterly touch to make its proper effect.
Even less common is the Te Deum of Berlioz, a work that has effectively exiled itself from the repertoire with its unhappy combination of short duration (less than 50 minutes) and enormous forces (about 950 voices at the 1855 première in the Church of St-Eustache in Paris, including 600 children). The Société Philharmonique will revive it on Friday as the first Grand concert du Vendredi Saint to be performed without its founding music director, Miklós Takács, who died on Feb. 13. The performance, under the baton of Pascal Côté, will of course be given in his honour.
The chorus comprises the 140 adults of the Choeur de l’UQÀM and 300 children (themselves split into two choirs) from the École Joseph-François-Perrault. Even if these numbers underbid those originally assembled by Berlioz, the sound in St-Jean Baptiste Church should be substantial. Éric Thériault is the tenor in the one and only solo number.
Note that this church has a riproaring organ at the rear, creating an acoustical configuration similar to that of St-Eustache. The Te Deum that opened at the Lanaudière Festival in 2007 with the combined Quebec Symphony Orchestra and Orchestre Métropolitain and an array of choruses under the baton of Yoav Talmi was impressive enough, but it lacked the critical element of a real organ.
Big as it is, the Te Deum does not quite constitute a concert. There are two interesting makeweights, also of French origin: the Pie Jesu and Psaume XXIV of Lili Boulanger, a composer of exceptional promise but fragile health who died in 1918 at age 24 (but was survived by her elder sister, Nadia, one of the most successful teachers of composition of the 20th century).
The Stabat Mater concert starts at 3 on Sunday. Go to www. orchestremetropolitain.com. The Te Deum concert starts on Good Friday at 8. Go to www.philharmontreal.com.
The St. Lawrence Choir on April 11 will perform the world première of another choral work of clearly tragic dimensions, also in St-Jean Baptiste Church: the Requiem Mass “Sourp Patarag” by Petros Shoujounian, an Armenian-born Canadian composer and former student of Gilles Tremblay. Those words mean “Divine Liturgy” in Armenian and the work is a commemoration of the Armenian Genocide, this year marking its 100th anniversary.
Take note that the OSM concert on Sept. 20, led by Andrew Megill and featuring a guest appearance by Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki conducting one of his own choral pieces, is also an Armenian Genocide memorial. For information about the St. Lawrence Choir concert, led by music director Philippe Bourque, go to www.choeur.qc.ca.
Boris Brott writes that there will be performances this summer (not necessarily yet officially announced) of music by his late father, Alexander. Boris Brott himself is conducting From Sea to Sea with the National Academy Orchestra in Hamilton. Quebec-based double-bassist Joel Quarrington is playing Profundum Praedictum with the NACO in Ottawa in July. Bramwell Tovey will be conducting something TBA with the Vancouver Symphony.
Missing from my column two weeks ago was the important information that Alexis Hauser is conducting Spheres in Orbit with the McGill Symphony as part of a 40th-anniversary celebration of Pollack Hall on April 10. For more on Alexander Brott, 1915-2005, go to www.alexanderbrott.ca. akaptainis@sympatico.ca