NAGANO’S LAST OSM SEASON TOUCHES ALL THE BASES
The reign began with Beethoven’s Ninth in 2006. Kent Nagano’s last regular season as the music director of Orchestre symphonique de Montréal (OSM) will end in June 2020, with what might fairly be described as the world’s second-most-popular ceremonial symphony: Mahler’s Second. The American conductor begins the 2019-20 lineup rather less predictably on Sept. 17 with Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 13, a substantially vocal work nicknamed “Babi Yar” after the Yevgeny Yevtushenko poem that forms the basis of the first movement. The tough subject is a Nazi massacre. All the same, in its careful balance of the classical, the contemporary, the known and the novel, Nagano’s final lap has the look of a typically well-thought-out sequence of concerts designed to appeal to a range of Montrealers. There are no operas and not many eye-catching outreach efforts apart from a collaboration with Montreal fashionista Marie Saint Pierre in an “Éclaté” concert involving dancers and models. Traditionalists can look forward to a Schubert festival in January. A cycle of symphonies (not all which have been performed by the orchestra) will be integrated into a series including the composer’s chamber music and lieder as well as works by Joseph Lanner, Mozart, Rossini and Johann Strauss Jr. “This approach faithfully reflects the fashion and popular esthetics of Schubert’s time,” Nagano says in the brochure message to subscribers. Many OSM fans will pore over the 2019-20 schedule looking for possible successors, even if it now seems close to certain that the following season will be an interregnum featuring guest conductors. Vasily Petrenko, 42, who told the Gazette in 2017 that there was “a certain interest,” is back, with Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet ballet music. Curiously, this well-known Russian is described as “a rising star” in the brochure. There are Frenchmen with the requisite linguistic skills, including the jobless but young (32) Lionel Bringuier (Florent Schmitt’s La tragédie de Salomé). Louis Langrée (Brahms’s Tragic Overture and Schoenberg’s Pelleas und Melisande) is music director of the Cincinnati Symphony through 2021-22. He is 58. François-Xavier Roth, 47, whose visit last October was acclaimed internally by the OSM musicians, is principal guest conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra and Generalmusikdirektor in Cologne. He leads Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben. Harpsichordist Jérémie Rhorer, 45, gives us Stravinsky (Firebird Suite) and Strauss (Also Sprach Zarathustra) but remains bestknown as a man of early music. As a Romanian, Cristian Măcelaru ( joining Anne-Sophie Mutter in Beethoven’s Violin Concerto) probably speaks just about everything, but he starts in September as chief conductor of the WDR Sinfonieorchester, also in Cologne. Juanjo Mena, a frequent OSM guest, appears to have a clear schedule. He returns in April 2020 to lead a three-concert Spanish festival. Edward Gardner, an Englishman tied to the Bergen Philharmonic until 2021, comes with Rachmaninoff ’s Symphonic Dances. Hannu Lintu (Lutoslawski’s Fourth Symphony and Janacek’s Sinfonietta) is attached to the Finnish Radio Symphony, also until 2021. The German composer-conductor Matthias Pintscher, based in New York, arrives with Debussy’s La Mer — the score Charles Dutoit led on his first visit to Montreal in 1977. Lorenzo Viotti, a 28-year-old Swiss (Zemlinsky’s Die Seejungfrau), has just started at the Gulbenkian Orchestra of Lisbon. Though not plausible as a candidate, the best-known guest conductor will be Valery Gergiev, in charge of Bruckner’s Ninth. The season includes another Bruckner symphony, the Fourth as conducted by Nagano, in a program notable also for a new work for violin and orchestra by acclaimed Montreal native Samy Moussa. The soloist is OSM concertmaster Andrew Wan. The season doubles down on Mahler as well. Nagano leads the Fifth Symphony to end the opening week. New music is not overlooked. Katia Makdissi-Warren, a Canadian, contributes a work involving the qanun, a Middle-Eastern zither. French modernist Pascal Dusapin supplies a Symphony for Organ and Orchestra, co-commissioned by the OSM with various European partners. Olivier Latry is at the Grand Orgue Pierre-Béique. Nagano leads the North American première. Nagano-led presentations with the OSM Chorus as prepared by Andrew Megill include Bach’s Christmas Oratorio and Fauré’s Requiem, the latter grouped with works by one of Nagano’s spiritual mentors, Olivier Messiaen. Among the notable guest soloists in 2019-20 are pianists Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Emanuel Ax, Yefim Bronfman, Marc-André Hamelin, Jan Lisiecki and András Schiff; and violinists Augustin Hadelich, Leonidas Kavakos and Gil Shaham. There are film nights, organ events, chamber concerts, choral concerts and star recitals (pianists Rudolf Buchbinder, Denis Matsuev, Daniil Trifonov and baritone Gerald Finley with pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet). The orientation of the Pop series (tributes to Félix Leclerc and Luc Plamondon and a collaboration with the rap group IAM) is entirely francophone. Mahler 2 will not mark the end of the Nagano era. The conductor’s contract runs through the summer of 2020 and presumably includes appearances at the Lanaudière Festival and the Classical Spree. One wonders whether Beethoven, who turns 250 in this year, will be on the docket. There are, at any rate, some valedictory words from Nagano in the brochure: “What we as an orchestra and public can be most proud of is to have cultivated one of the youngest, diverse, sophisticated and most integrated audiences in all of North America, indeed internationally. We have nurtured the OSM’s artistic evolution and simultaneously nourished our financial health to the extent that we now stand as a solid, stable, exceptionally healthy, forward-looking arts organization.” plays the complex anti-hero of the title while his wife, the Australian soprano Nicole Car, is Tatiana. Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor is next with Albina Shagimuratova, an eminent Russian coloratura, in the title role and local hero Frédéric Antoun as the principal tenor, Edgardo. Then comes the mandatory modern work, the Canadian première of Written on Skin, a well-regarded 2012 opera by England’s George Benjamin based on a gruesome medieval story also told by Boccaccio in The Decameron. This is a new OdM production directed by Alain Gauthier and conducted by Nicole Paiement, a McGill alumna and former Montrealer who has built her career in the United States. The OSM is in the pit. Other productions in Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier feature the Orchestre Métropolitain. Ending the mainstage season will be The Magic Flute in a 2012 production from the Komicshe Oper in Berlin that reconfigures Mozart’s most popular opera as an artifact of the silent-film era. The main roles are played by import singers who know the ins and outs of what appears to be one of the Australian provocateur Barrie Kosky’s less off-putting creations. Spoken dialogue is confined to the screen, which will speed things up. All operas are given in their original languages, which means there is no mainstage production in French. However, there will be an Atelier lyrique production of Poulenc’s one-woman opera La voix humaine, with soprano France Bellmare as La Femme and Marie-Ève Scarfone at the piano; plus L’hiver attend beaucoup de moi, a feminist piece by Laurence Jobidon (music) and Pascale St- Onge (words) about a woman who seeks refuge in northern Quebec. There are five performances of this double bill at Espace Go. OdM general director Patrick Corrigan told a big crowd of subscribers on Monday in Place des Arts that the compact Saturday-to-Saturday schedule of four shows in eight days would be modified by displacing the last performance to Sunday afternoon. If this action (clearly following the lead of the Metropolitan Opera) is likely to find favour with operagoers of a certain age, young people are the probable target of the rock-bottom $99 packages, which attracted 450 new customers this season. Artistic director Michel Beaulac said the Eugene Onegin (Kansas City/Seattle) and Lucia di Lammermoor (Utah) would be set in their periods. He did not deny that 2019-20 was probably the first OdM season not to include a work by Verdi or Puccini. Go to operademontreal.com. Why live in Montreal? Good question at the beginning of March. One answer: Two orchestras in the same month — November — are performing Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony under internationally renowned conductors. Nagano leads the great romantic score on Nov. 27 and twice on Nov. 28. Yannick Nézet-Séguin does it with his Orchestre Métropolitain on Nov. 16 and 17 before embarking on an American tour. Something tells me the OSM and OM do not communicate. Star American mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato sings Mozart as part of the OM program. Happily, the OM and Opéra de Montréal have exchanged phone numbers. They are collaborating in one of the obvious highlights of the season, two concert performances in October of Beethoven’s Fidelio in the Maison symphonique featuring YNS leading an impressive cast including the Norwegian soprano Lise Davidsen as Leonora and Canadian tenor Michael Schade as Florestan. Nézet-Séguin is also in charge of a program highlighted by Berlioz’s Harold en Italie (opening the season on Sept. 29 with Marina Thibeault, viola); Mozart’s Mass in C Minor (coupled with Jacques Hétu’s valedictory Symphony No. 5); and Sibelius’s darkhorse Symphony No. 3 (along with Ravel’s La Valse, to end the season on May 23 and 24). Guest conductors are the Australian Nicholas Carter; Quebec’s own Nicolas Ellis (in Rachmaninoff’s seldom-heard Symphony No. 1); Hong Kong-born Elim Chan; Korean former cello prodigy Han-Na Chang; British Mozart authority Jane Glover; and the Mexican-American Alondra de la Parra. By my reckoning, this makes four female guest conductors versus two males. There are also chamber and choral concerts. The American Nicholas Angelich plays Rachmaninoff’s (familiar) Piano Concerto No. 2 and (rare) Piano Concerto No. 1. Many other soloists are drawn from the rank and file. As always, some OM programs are repeated (or previewed) in suburban settings. Go to orchestremetropolitain.com.