Yannick Nézet-Séguin was back at the head of the Orchester Métropolitain (OM) on Sunday afternoon for the end of the season for the ensemble in an original program which raises certain programmatic questions.
The lifelong OM leader, who was performing with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra as recently as last Thursday, had not led his Montreal ensemble for just over three months. He brought back with him one of his star soloists at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the remarkable Californian soprano Angel Blue, who was making her debut here.
The singer, who is known for having multiplied the prizes in beauty contests in the early 2000s, has everything going for her, first and foremost an impressive lyric soprano voice which is becoming stronger and stronger. Accustomed to Mimi (La bohème) and Violetta (La Traviata), will the almost 40-year-old follow in the footsteps of her idol Leontyne Price?
On Sunday, however, it was to sing Barber that she was at the Maison symphonique. The concert, entitled Symphonic Explorers, featured works written by or about women, a program of essentially American music.
Dressed in an azure blue dress, the soprano is installed, a rare occurrence, behind the first violins, on the courtyard side. Fortunately, we have lost none of his voice or his fine dramatic incarnation of the two plays, Knoxville: Summer of 1915, on a poem by the novelist and film critic James Agee, often heard in concert (notably at the Classical Spree the last summer), and the aria “Give me my robe, put on my crown” from the third act of the opera Antony and Cleopatra (on Shakespeare’s eponymous drama), an aria of overwhelming seduction in which the Egyptian sovereign gives death. If perfection is of this world, we glimpsed an example of it on Sunday.
One of the “symphonic explorers” was from here, the composer Keiko Devaux, winner of numerous awards in recent years. His work [INAUDIBLE] was created, inspired by the subtitles for the hearing impaired seen on the big screen. A title inspired by an equivocal indication pointing, according to the main interested party, to “the sound of something that we cannot hear”, involving an often fragmented memory.
Expertly written for the orchestra, the ten-minute score links together long chords stained with quivering, string glissandos and repetitive brass chords. A work that should ideally be heard again to grasp all its subtleties.
“Subtlety” is not the first word that comes to mind when hearing Florence Price’s Symphony No. 3 in C minor, which was nevertheless passionately defended by the conductor in the second part of the concert. We think more of “sincerity” or “generosity”.
The orchestration is often thick, in particular due to the massive use of brass instruments, which are more reminiscent of the brass band than the refinement of a Ravel or a Strauss, to name only two of the best orchestrators of the same period. Or simply a Barber, who was not the last to come to the field, as we saw in the first part.
Polyphonic complexity is also absent: the African-American strings melodies of a certain lyricism that often end up going in circles, with somewhat stereotypical harmonies. There are a few moments when you think, “Ah! there’s something going on,” but they’re rare and short.
It is far from inappropriate to devote recordings to Price, as Nézet-Séguin did in fact at Deutsche Grammophon. Because the disc allows – fortunately – to extend the repertoire almost infinitely. But the imperatives of a concert season are quite different.
After giving Symphony No. 1 in E minor in the fall of 2021, the conductor will return to play Symphony No. 4 in D minor next winter with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Can we afford to schedule a third-rate female composer each season (we have to call things by their proper name), while neglected but infinitely more inventive symphonists like Vaughan Williams, Bax, Koechlin, Martinu, Tournemire or Enescu are shunned by our musical institutions?
