World’s finest French orchestra is in Canada
Canada’s finest symphony orchestra? Surely there are two.
Having listened to the Montreal Symphony Orchestra and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra for decades, the Toronto obviously more often, I can’t decide between them.
Player for player, they appear to be about equal. What changes is the person at the podium.
Sir Thomas Beecham used to say that there are no good or bad orchestras, only good or bad conductors, and to an extent he has a point.
I once went to Pittsburgh to hear its top tier orchestra on two successive nights, the first with the orchestra’s thenmusic director William Steinberg conducting, the second, a pension fund event, under the direction of Eugene Ormandy, then music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra.
It sounded very nearly like two different orchestras, the one lean and tightly focused, the other approximating the lushness associated with Ormandy’s Philadelphians. The maestro does matter.
During his 24-year tenure, Charles Dutoit turned the Montreal Symphony into what Edward Greenfield in the prestigious English record magazine Gramophone called the finest French orchestra in the world.
His evidence came primarily from recordings and, under Dutoit, the Montrealers made many more than their Toronto colleagues, becoming Canada’s best known orchestral enterprise internationally.
It still is, although orchestral recording worldwide has shrunk considerably during the years presided over by Dutoit’s successor, Kent Nagano.
If you will permit an anecdote, many years ago the Toronto Symphony decided to record Holst’s virtuoso orchestral showpiece, “The Planets,” and, because the yet-to-be-renovated Roy Thomson Hall had proven to be a less than ideal recording venue, the orchestra bused to Kitchener’s acoustically superior Centre in the Square.
Invited to accompany the orchestra, I reminded its thenmusic director, Andrew Davis, that the Montreal Symphony was about to record “The Planets” as well, under Dutoit. His response? “We’re not worried.”
Perhaps he should have been. Good as it was, the Toronto recording was surpassed interpretively and sonically by what the Montrealers achieved in the Church of St-Eustache.
The church, outside Montreal, became known as the Montreal Symphony Orchestra’s secret weapon. Having discovered it to be an exceptional venue for orchestral recording, the orchestra’s canny management went to the resident priest and signed a 10-year contract for exclusive recording access.
Invited to one of the recording sessions (Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring”), I remarked to Dutoit how impressed I was with the orchestra’s discipline during the session, only to be told the players had to learn how to become a recording orchestra, with the clock constantly ticking.
They learned exceptionally well. The catalogue of bestselling and award-winning albums on the Decca/London label laid the foundation of their international fame, enabling them to become a more saleable touring ensemble than their Canadian rivals.
These days, COVID-19 has effectively shut down all our orchestras, but thanks to its extensive discography we can still listen to the Montreal Symphony at home.
Consider some of its recent CD releases under Nagano, beginning with a two-disc Decca album devoted to the first complete recording of Arthur Honegger and Jacques Ibert’s “L’Aiglon,” an opera inspired by the life of Napoleon II, premiered in 1937 and subsequently almost forgotten.
Other Decca discs include an orchestral synthesis of the score of Bernstein’s opera “A Quiet Place,” a showpiece album titled “Danse Macabre” and an album of music by the contemporary American composer John Adams.
Then on Montreal’s Analekta label we find a pair of concerto albums, one featuring one of the orchestra’s two concertmasters, Andrew Wan, playing the three Saint-Saens violin concertos; the other featuring Charles Richard-Hamelin playing the two major Chopin piano concertos.
Having re-signed with Decca, the orchestra has effectively returned to high-profile recording. But since this has been Nagano’s final season as music director, and since record contracts typically accompany the conductor, the future seems in doubt.
Meanwhile, like many others, the orchestra is managing to keep before the public through our computers, this past week having been the eighth in its OSM (L’Orchestre symphonique de Montreal) in Your Living Room programs, which you can access from their website osm.ca.
That website also offers links to Facebook and Spotify, and glimpses of past concerts, even rare ones such as the opening concert of the Place des Arts in September 1963, conducted by Zubin Mehta, as well as a documentary on last year’s five-nation tour of the Americas.
Nevertheless, there is nothing quite like experiencing music live as it happens. Like its counterpart in Toronto, the Montreal Symphony is anxious to be, as the cowboy singer Gene Autry put it, “back in the saddle again.”
William Littler is a Toronto-based classical music writer and a freelance contributing columnist for the Star.