BACKSTAGE WITH… Conductor Rafael Payare
You and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra are coming to London on 28 October. Is it part of a tour of Europe?
Yes! It will be our final stop. We are also doing concerts in Zagreb, Budapest, Vienna and Brussels.
You are going to be joined in London by the pianist Víkingur Ólafsson. Have you worked closely together before?
Víkingur and I go back to around 2014 – that was when we first met and clicked, at a concert in Turku, Finland. From there, we really got along together, and I brought him to play concerts in Belfast, San Diego and elsewhere. Making music with him is always just wonderful.
This tour comes close to the beginning of your tenure as the Montreal SO’S music director. What particularly appeals to you about them as a conductor?
Everything! They are wonderful. They have this finesse in their sound, which everyone knows from their recordings with my predecessors Charles Dutoit and Kent Nagano over the years, and, like all great orchestras, they always aim for the highest level of performance, whether in concert or rehearsal. Plus, they are very flexible and we make music very spontaneously – it’s like having a dance partner with whom you don’t have to do the same steps every time, but you can improvise and that partner will instinctively understand. There’s a creative synergy which is fantastic. I first worked with them as a guest conductor in September 2018, then I came back in 2019 and then again in 2021, this time as music director designate.
In London, you will be playing R Murray Schafer’s Scorpius, a work not that well known in the UK…
R Murray Schafer is one of the amazing composers from Canada who we have been trying to broadcast, so it is wonderful that we can perform this work here. And Scorpius is a fantastic piece that not only showcases the composer but also the orchestra itself, as it creates all sorts of different colours and rhythms.
And then we have Ravel and Shostakovich. Why did you choose to programme them together?
There’s this strangely unique relationship between French and Russian music – they just make sense together. It’s like, say, with food, when you take a blini and put caviar on top. It doesn’t matter why, but they just work.