SINGING THE PRAISES OF RUSSIAN INFLUENCE
Studio de musique ancienne de Montréal program complements Chagall exhibition
No joke: The Studio de musique ancienne de Montréal added a performance on April 1 in Bourgie Hall because the original concert of April 2 sold out so quickly.
Then again, what do you expect when the program includes music by Nikolay Diletsky (1630-1680), Vasily Titov (1650-1715) and Maxim Berezovsky (1745-1777), those noted masters of eliciting blank stares from even the most experienced concertgoers?
Let it be noted that the strictly a cappella program includes music by Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky, all known commodities, even if seldom embraced by this early music choir.
The theme, Eternal Russia, is meant to complement the Chagall: Colour and Music exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. The choir will number 24. Incoming SMAM artistic director Andrew McAnerney believes listeners will hear clear links between the early court composers of Orthodox liturgical music and their later admirers. They might notice also the Italian accents of Giuseppe Sarti, who wrote in Russian for the court, and his student Dmytro Bortniansky.
“Titov and Diletsky definitely sound Slavic,” McAnerney said, “not least because of the distinctive sound of singing in Church Slavonic.”
Those accustomed to the complexity of Palestrina, Lasso and the other European masters will encounter simpler textures in keeping with the Orthodox tradition.
Not that polyphony is absent: Berezovsky lets rips with a fugue to end a motet titled “Do not reject me in my old age.” The plea is rendered more poignant by the possibility that this Ukrainian composer took his own life at 32.
The program is chronological, although some later selections will sound early enough.
“Tchaikovsky was deliberately trying to recapture the music of Titov, Diletsy and their predecessors,” McAnerney said about an excerpt from the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, “which to him represented a more honest style than later pieces written with an overt Italian influence.”
Rachmaninoff uses chant as the basis of his evocative Vespers (as the All-Night Vigil is generally known). One selection is heard. Stravinsky is in a remarkably lyrical mood in his 1926 setting of the Lord’s Prayer.
Alexander Gretchaninov (18641956), Georgy Sviridov (19151998) and Vladimir Martynov, 71, complete this unusual program, assembled by McAnerney at the suggestion of veteran SMAM bass (and Russian-language coach) Yves Saint-Amant. Expect minimalism from Martynov, a composer whose output of sacred music expanded after the fall of the Soviet Union.
Contemporary repertoire is not entirely alien to SMAM. The late Christopher Jackson once mixed in the same concert the easily confounded English composers John Taverner (1490-1545) and John Tavener (1944-2013).
“It is a tremendous pleasure to make music with the musicians of SMAM,” said McAnerney, named last season to succeed Jackson. “I am looking forward to continuing Christopher’s legacy of sharing a wide range of the most interesting early music with the wonderful Montreal public.”
Eternal Russia is performed by SMAM at Bourgie Hall on April 1 at 7:30 p.m. and April 2 at 2 p.m. (sold out). Go to smamontreal.ca.
Almost three years after publishing Notes, Claude Gingras, the former music critic of La Presse, has issued an entertaining followup volume Auditions based on his conversations with various greats (including some non-classical acts) over the decades.
Vignettes are crisp even when the artist being interviewed seems not especially co-operative. Miles Davis, barely conscious of the questions he is asked, finally says “Sit down, man, enjoy yourself” — even though Gingras is already seated. Jerry Lewis finds his interrogator too aggressive before concluding that he is great fun.
Liberace could pass for a man on the street without his furs and jewels. This performer was also capable of speaking seriously about Franz Liszt, whom he would introduce as “Schlitz” as part of his shtick on stage.
Among the interesting revelations: The 1992 performance of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony under Erich Leinsdorf (which I contrived to miss) came with cuts in the finale. Apparently, this Austrian-born disciplinarian regarded the outer movements of this notoriously difficult score as not up to the composer’s usual standard. “I help Mahler,” Leinsdorf explains. “Mahler did as much with Mozart.”
No conductor today would make such a presumption. On the other hand, the perfectly active baroque keyboardist and conductor Ton Koopman is candid (or stupid) enough to declare all music after early Beethoven to be of no interest (and to find even Beethoven somewhat suspect).
We learn that more than 4,000 turned out in 1974 at St. Joseph’s Oratory to hear Virgil Fox (broadly, the Liberace of the organ) play both the famous von Beckerath instrument and his own Rodgers Touring Organ. The interview takes place while the showman was donning one of his costumes.
Although there is no entry on Glenn Gould, both Maurizio Pollini and Ivo Pogorelich (neither an easy interview) pay credit to this pianist. The venerable Hungarian Lili Kraus says of Gould’s first version of Goldberg Variations that he seemed “to invent a new instrument for playing Bach.”
Conductors, it is clear, are human. Josef Krips was conscious of his reception in the press and would not brook any neglect. “I cannot find the reffiou of my kontsert!” he complains in accented English when Gingras phones him for a comment on the recently deceased Arthur Honegger.
French conductor Pierre Monteux confirms that the riot that broke out in the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in 1913 had to do with the choreography of The Rite of Spring, not Stravinsky’s music. Popsmeister Arthur Fiedler reveals that his label, RCA, would not let him conduct more serious fare.
Montreal-born contralto Maureen Forrester, who moved to Toronto, is treated harshly as is the austere U.S. soprano Jessye Norman. Birgit Nilsson is more loquacious. It probably helped that the nighthawk Gingras, having missed a morning group interview, sent the Swedish soprano a bouquet of flowers.
Other tidbits: Charles Dutoit was so convinced that the 1996 OSM recording of Berlioz’s Les Troyens would not win a Grammy (which it did) that he spent the night of the broadcast at the movies. Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet, whose catalogue Dutoit and the OSM would substantially re-record for Decca in digital sound, voiced suspicions at Expo 67 about an earlier audio innovation: stereo.
Interviewing Kent Nagano proves to be a difficult task. Yannick Nézet-Séguin places Brahms at the head of his list of preferred composers (which, in my view, explains why his discography does not yet include a Brahms symphony). Happily, there is a full entry on the late conductor Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos and his rapid departure from Montreal in 1976, in which Gingras played a crucial role.
Chapters are snappy and the French is admirably lucid. Auditions is published by La Presse.
I am looking forward to continuing Christopher’s legacy of sharing a wide range of the most interesting early music with the wonderful Montreal public.