AN APPEAL TO THE SOLITUDES
Concerts blend pop and classical
The season started, orchestrally, with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Orchestre Métropolitain in Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony and Kent Nagano and the OSM in Mahler’s Eighth (Symphony of a Thousand). Good strong ale. Nothing for the classical fan to complain about.
In the coming week? Half Moon Run as backed up by the OSM and the Montreal Video Game Symphony as performed by the OM under the direction of Dina Gilbert. One presumes the latter concert, on Sept. 29, which includes screen projections in Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, is the first OM presentation to come with a parental advisory.
It should be recognized that the OM show has a higher ceremonial purpose: it is given under the aegis of the 375th anniversary of Montreal and is intended to pay tribute to the contribution of the city to the video-game industry.
Not that interest in video-game music is a local phenomenon. The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra has made The Legend of Zelda a regular December event, like Handel’s Messiah. In conservatories and music departments across the continent, you will find a substantial cohort of composition students who have in mind a career in video games rather than concert music, opera or film.
As for pop concerts — as opposed to the traditional amalgam of light classics and Broadway known as “pops” — they have long been with us and can even be thought of as an OSM specialty. There were a few crossover feints in the 1990s, but Gino Vannelli started the OSM Pop trend in earnest with a well-received collaboration on Dec. 8, 2000.
Often the arranger and conductor of OSM Pop is Simon Leclerc.
Supervisory duties in the Half Moon Run shows ( both of which, on Sept. 26 and 27, are sold out) are divided between arranger Blair Thomson and OSM assistant conductor Adam Johnson.
Rather unusually, the members of this highly regarded indie band will be playing their instruments as well as singing in seven of 15 numbers, a situation that complicates the act of symphonic integration.
Many classical types simply skip over pop events when scanning the season brochure for evenings of interest. Which is not
to say that they resent them in the slightest.
Pop concerts fill the schedule of contracted services while making the OSM relevant to Montrealers who might otherwise view it coolly from a distance. Even the musicians are OK with pop concerts.
A night of easygoing syncopation is not unwelcome after a Mahler marathon.
Traditional marketing wisdom regards pop and classical people as separate species and denies the possibility of migration from one type of concert to the other.
The Boston Symphony recognizes (and perhaps encourages) this division by operating another orchestra, the Boston Pops, staffed by mostly the same musicians.
Sometimes there are attempts to appeal simultaneously to the solitudes. The McGill Chamber Orchestra under Boris Brott on Sept. 27 brings together Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony (i.e. the nightmarish String Quartet No. 8 in Rudolf Barshai’s transcription) with Frank Zappa’s Zomby Woof as arranged by Walter Boudreau.
The real headline-grabber in this event, however, is the Cape Breton artist Ashley MacIsaac (who self-identifies as a fiddler rather than a violinist) in a pastiche by François Vallières based on the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. This album, of course, is already acclaimed for making creative use of symphonic instruments. The concert in Bourgie Hall is titled Revolution and is intended to complement the so-named exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
Another common audience-expanding strategy is to screen movies with live orchestral accompaniment. Even the mighty New York Philharmonic started its 2017-18 season with the launch of a Star Wars series (“tickets are still available for Return of the Jedi and The Force Awakens,” advised the NYP website at the time of this writing) before giving its “gala” opening concert on Sept. 19 featuring Jaap van Zweden leading Mahler’s Fifth Symphony (Mahler being the patron saint of season kickoffs).
Symphonic cinema is tricky in Montreal because blockbusters tend to be in English and subscribers tend to speak French. The lone OSM Hollywood foray this season (not counting a screening with organ of the 1931 version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) is the 1982 film E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, presented on May 22 in English with French subtitles. Music, as in the Star Wars movies shown by the NYP, is by John Williams.
E.T. with orchestra? Hmm. I am looking a little more closely at the Beethoven cycle that starts the following week. Some habits die hard.
One might suppose organists, who
are transfixed by the music of Buxtehude and Reger, to be relatively immune from pop-itis. Not so. The Canadian International Organ Competition (CIOC) opens on Oct. 6 in the Maison symphonique with a concert featuring the pop/folksinger Leif Vollebekk, who furnishes a new composition for organ as well as performing vocal selections with Jean-Willy Kunz and Christian Lane on, um, keyboards. “Wellknown pieces for the organ” are also promised. For further information on CIOC programming, visit ciocm.org.
Violinist Marc Djokic has won
the 2017-18 Prix Goyer for a collaborative emerging artist. Assessed at $125,000, the prize — named after Jean-Pierre Goyer, the late federal cabinet minister and president of the Orchestre Métropolitain — includes cash from donors, video production and marketing from the Concerts Noncerto organization and management advice from an anonymous donor. The Halifax native, who studied with his father, Philippe Djokic, can be heard in standard concertos but often involves himself in other projects, notably with two guitarists as part of Trio Tangere.