New music society kicks off 50th season
Forward-looking SMCQ kicks off its golden season with a look back
If not quite an epiphany, it was at least a confirmation that Walter Boudreau, artistic director of the Société de musique contemporaine du Québec, was doing something right.
“Between you and me, Serge Garant’s Quintet is a pretty dry piece of meat,” Boudreau, 68, said in his office adjacent to Salle Pierre-Mercure, where the SMCQ’s 50th anniversary season opens on Friday, Sept. 30 with a free program titled Broadway Boogie-Woogie.
“But the kids were screaming and applauding. They really, totally enjoyed it.”
The occasion, a few years ago, was an open rehearsal of the type the venerable new-music society now performs regularly in front of teenagers with the cooperation of local school boards. He is convinced that some of those budding Garantophiles will turn out to be SMCQ regulars.
“Look at the people coming to the concerts,” he said. “The white-hairs are slowly being replaced by younger people.”
There was much less stress on outreach when Boudreau took the reins of SMCQ in 1988, succeeding Gilles Tremblay, who followed Garant himself, one of the society’s co-founders, on his death in 1986.
SMCQ concerts were proudly intimate affairs at which new works, usually in an experimental and/or cerebral style, were performed for elite crowds made up substantially of composers. To call SMCQ in its first two decades (and somewhat beyond) a mutual admiration society would be unkind but not inaccurate.
Matters took a distinctly populist turn at the turn of the century with the Millennium Symphony, a massive indoor-outdoor event implicating 19 composers and 333 musicians at St. Joseph’s Oratory that attracted tens of thousands of spectators (but not universal praise) on June 3, 2000.
One of the notable undertakings of the 2016-17 SMCQ season is an indoor reduction by Boudreau of the Millennium Symphony for a regular large orchestra, organ, bells and electronics and a modest chorus of 24. It is expected to last 72 rather than 96 minutes at the oratory on the afternoon of Feb. 26.
Boudreau suggests a comparison with Stravinsky’s Firebird in its more popular suite form as opposed to the full ballet. Who knows? Millennium Lite might even travel in its new form to other cities for performances by other societies.
SMCQ has seen other changes during the Boudreau years. One is the Homage Series, which focuses on the work of a single Quebec composer (last year John Rea; Denis Gougeon two years prior to this; and Ana Sokolovic in 2011-12).
Part of the Homage rationale is to raise the profiles of these creative artists to compete with figures in the theatrical and dance scenes. Music has its own Michel Tremblays and Marie Chouinards.
The superstar approach also dovetails with the youth outreach effort. The Sokolovic homage came complete with a comic book version of the story of the composer’s life and work from its beginnings in Belgrade.
Another SMCQ undertaking with public flair is the Montreal/ New Music Festival, which alternates biennially with the Homage series. Back to the Future is the anniversary-inspired theme of the coming edition, which runs from Feb. 23 to March 4.
One joint exercise in novelty and nostalgia will be a pair of performances on Feb. 23 and 24 of Boudreau’s Berliner Momente I and II as revised by the composer and performed by the McGill Symphony Orchestra under his baton.
No slouch at securing funds for himself or his society, Boudreau recently received a $60,000 grant from the Canada Council to rework this long-running multipartite tribute to the German capital (and reflection on its dark side).
“The first one, in 1988, was written with a pencil,” Boudreau comments. “Can you imagine this?” Notation software is now the norm.
Another interesting act of reconstruction, in the opening Broadway Boogie-Woogie concert, will be Tétrachromie, a 1963 ballet score by Pierre Mercure — the great hope of Quebec composition before his death in an accident at age 38 — for clarinet, alto saxophone, bass clarinet, four percussionists and tape. Archives indicate that it was recorded but never performed. The innovative Radio-Canada producer Mario Gauthier has reconstructed the tape.
Another founding Quebec modernist, Jean Papineau-Couture (1916-2000), will be represented by Fantasque, a 1995 piece for solo cello (Caroline Milot, who will be required to play “arco,”
normally, and pizzicato simultaneously). There is a living composer on the program, the Dutchman Louis Andriessen, 77, whose De Materie of 1984-1988, or at least its jazzy third movement, De Stijl, promises to be the brashest item of the evening.
Boudreau led the North American première of this heterogeneous piece for sopranos, tenor, female narrator, chamber chorus and orchestra in 1999, also in Salle Pierre-Mercure. “He is a visionary, that man,” Boudreau says of Andriessen. “Broadway Boogie-Woogie” refers to the Piet Mondrian abstract canvas that Boudreau equates with the music.
Completing the program is Piece No. 2 for small orchestra by Conlon Nancarrow (1912-1997), an American-born Mexican composer best-known for his music for player piano. Expect serious tempo superimpositions, along with precisely gauged canons.
If the concert is substantially retrospective, this is in keeping with the ethos of a 50th anniversary. Since there are other new-music ensembles in town — the Nouvel Ensemble Moderne under Lorraine Vaillancourt was scheduled to perform a world première by Bruce Mather on Sept. 23 — Boudreau can afford to look back.
While looking forward. “After 28 years at the helm of SMCQ, rather than being a bunch of old farts, au contraire, I think we are the most dynamic society in the country,” Boudreau says. “We have never had so many people attending our concerts.”
And despite the proliferation of electronic dissemination of music on smartphones and the like, the conductor-composer remains a firm believer in music as a live experience.
“Cybersex will never be up to par with the real thing,” he says. “It’s impossible.
“You might get excited, but it is the real thing that is top-notch. It is the same with a concert.”