OSM REVEALS SUMMER SEASON
Symphonic suites and free concerts
Kent Nagano and the OSM will run off and join the circus, at least on Aug. 29, when the orchestra teams up with Cirque Éloize at Olympic Park for an audio-visual presentation of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, a richly orchestrated work evoking the Arabian Nights.
“We didn’t want talking,” Nagano said at the summer season launch in Place des Arts this week. “We didn’t want to give the story verbally. We wanted to hear the music and have it suggested through movement.”
Rimsky’s 45-minute symphonic suite will be fleshed out with instrumental elements from Ravel’s Shéhérazade, a lush song cycle on the same oriental subject.
The annual free show takes place later in the summer than usual, as does the ensuing indoor three-day Classical Spree, which begins on Aug. 31 in and around PdA. Nagano is involved in 11 Spree concerts, including a Viennese program combining Strauss’s Emperor Waltz with Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro Overture and Piano Concerto No. 27 (with Paul Lewis as soloist).
The music director also leads a pair of Verdi-Wagner choral blowouts and performances of Tchaikovsky’s inevitable Piano Concerto No. 1 (with the Russian Alexei Volodin) and Bartók’s Violin Concerto No. 1 (Moldovanborn Patricia Kopatchinskaja). Electric guitarist Steve Hill reprises John Anthony Lennon’s Electric Candlelight Concerto, which was last heard (if not seen) in February in the OSM’s socalled Concert in the Dark.
Rather surprisingly, Kopatchinskaja, who resides in Switzerland, will also perform the vocal part in Schoenberg ’s otherworldly 1912 melodrama Pierrot Lunaire. This is probably the Spree program with the strongest connoisseur appeal.
Other concerts, all brief and reasonably priced, involve Alexandru Sura on the cimbalom; a trio of players giving us Classical Music of the Middle East; and OSM tuba principal Austin Howle in a recital including Hindemith’s sonata for the instrument. Traditional tastes are attended to by the Fine Arts Quartet playing Gounod and Debussy; and Lewis (an Alfred Brendel disciple) in a recital of Haydn and Brahms.
There are free events in and around the concourse of Place des Arts. Complex eD es jardins will be the venue for a performance by the Classical Spree Symphony, a gathering of amateur musicians from across Quebec. You have until May 30 to apply with an recorded sample of your bona fides (fhosq.org/activites/projet-osm). OSM assistant conductor Adam Johnson is in charge of most of the concert, but Nagano will pinch-hit at the end.
Free park concerts happen on July 4 (Sorbonne Park in Brossard), July 10 (Jarry Park) and Sept. 2 (Tremblant). Johnson leads the first two, Nagano the last. Actor and comedian Emmanuel Bilodeau is the host of the outdoor events.
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The most compelling OSM music-making this summer is off-island. The orchestra opens the Lanaudière Festival’s Amphitheatre schedule on July 7 under the baton of Susanna Mälkki, a Paris-based Finn who might be given consideration as a successor to the OSM throne. Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique is the main event.
Nagano brings the orchestra back to Lanaudière on July 14 with Krzysztof Penderecki’s St. Luke Passion before taking this substantially atonal opus of 1966 on the road to Krakow in Poland (July 18) and the Salzburg Festival in Austria (July 20). Prestigious would be putting it mildly.
Less dazzling but also interesting is a benefit concert on Aug. 24 in the Church of St-Eustache, the site of so many OSM recording triumphs, which is undergoing renovations.
Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra are on an overseas tour that includes stops in Haifa, Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Anti-Israel activists in Philadelphia took note of the itinerary. Two managed to disrupt a concert performance of Puccini’s Tosca on May 19.
The Philadelphia Inquirer says YNS’s response was to “slam his baton on the podium and walk off the stage.” The music resumed after the “loudly booed” protesters were removed. The three engagements in Israel include a performance in the Charles R. B ron fm an Auditorium of the Lowy Concert Hall in Tel Aviv.
YNS and the Orchestre Métropolitain are giving a concert in memory of Jacqueline Desmarais on June 23 at Domaine Forget in Charlevoix. They play at the Lanaudière Amphitheatre on Aug. 4 and 5 (afternoon) and in St-Sauveur on Aug. 5 (evening).
The Concours musical international de Montréal begins Tuesday in Bourgie Hall with the first round of the Art Song division. Sixteen Lieder-ladies and gentlemen are heard in the afternoon and evening, followed Wednesday and Thursday by the 24 entrants in the Aria division devoted (as the name implies) mostly to opera.
Art Song semis follow on June 1 and the final son June 3. The Aria se mis( June 4 and 5) and finals (June 7) move the field of battle to the Maison symphonique, where the OSM is led by British conductor Graeme Jenkins.
This Art Song/Aria double format greatly widens the repertoire, but leaves Canadian music pretty much out of the running, there being no compulsory piece this year. The only Canadian number we are certain to hear is “O, let him kiss me” from Seven Tableaux from the Song of Songs by Srul Irving Glick (1934-2002). Suzanne Taffot, a Cameroonborn Canadian soprano who studied at the Université de Montréal, offers this as part of her first-round recital.
If Taffot makes it to the semis, she will sing “I am dark but lovely” from the same cycle. If mezzo-soprano Rihab Chaieb advances, she will give us The White Rose from Six Irish Poems for Maureen by Jean Coulthard (1908-2000). The Maureen of the title was Forrester.
Should mezzo-soprano Clara Osowski of Minnesota survive the first two rounds, she will sing three selections from Robert Fleming ’s The Confession Stone, a cycle of religious songs on African-American texts. A native of Prince Albert, Sask., Fleming (1921-76) worked in the 1960s as organist and choirmaster of St. George’s Anglican Church in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue. The Confession Stone was written for Forrester.
Chaieb has entered both the Art Song and Aria contests. As I noted in an earlier column, she has her Metropolitan Opera debut behind her. An Aria candidate who might be worth two bucks to show is Christina Nilsson of Sweden, who sang the title role of Verdi’s Aida at the Royal Swedish Opera in February.
While Nilsson is no relation to Birgit Nilsson, she has characterized the late Swedish super-soprano as her idol. Nilsson’s first-round Aria program comprises O Patria mia (Aida), Frühling (Strauss’s Four Last Songs) and Dich, teure Halle (Wagner’s Tannhäuser). Big rep. Maybe a voice to match.