The new conductor of Montreal’s orchestra ‘looks like fun but sounds like business’
Payare, the energetic new music director of the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, is proving to be something however boring ({Photograph} by Yannis Guibinga)
The Orchestre symphonique de Montréal didn’t grow to be Canada’s most distinguished orchestra by preaching solely to the transformed. Legendary standing depends upon the help of the plenty. So in September, when Rafael Payare started his tenure as music director designate of the fabled orchestra—its chief conductor and guiding musical thinker for the years forward—the OSM made a grand populist gesture. Payare led the OSM in a free out of doors live performance for hundreds of curious Montrealers on the concrete esplanade in entrance of the town’s iconic Olympic Stadium.
The amplified acoustics had been horrible, however who cared? Payare, a willowy 41-year-old Venezuelan with a formidable shock of curly hair, led the orchestra in a set of crowd-pleasing highlights from Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky, Manuel de Falla and Alberto Ginastera. The group, seated close by in plastic chairs or standing farther afield, ate it up. At occasions Payare is a fastidious conductor who offers exact route with fast, tidy hand gestures. However in different passages he’s extra gestalt than particular, conveying solely the sweep of a beat and a sensation of urgency. He makes use of his toes greater than any conductor I’ve seen, kicking to emphasise an accent, launching himself a foot and a half into the air and touchdown spread-eagled to mark a climax. Briefly, he’s not boring. The applause was beneficiant from the beginning and grew hotter because the night went on.
A kind of alchemy was at work, one we’ve seen in Montreal earlier than. Earlier than Payare took the rostrum, there have been opening remarks from dignitaries. Maybe probably the most revealing ones got here from Michel Labrecque, a glad-handing former radio host and downtown metropolis councillor who’s now CEO of the Olympic precinct’s services. “You already know, one thing occurs between Montrealers and OSM music administrators,” Labrecque instructed the gang. “You don’t must be a giant music maven, however all of us appear to be in a temper to fall in love with them.”
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In lots of cities, orchestras matter to a skinny slice of the native culturati and never a lot to anybody else. However the OSM has lengthy labored arduous to make itself a part of Montreal’s broader cultural self-image. The orchestra has been round for the reason that Thirties, but it surely shot to international prominence after 1980, when an imperious younger Swiss conductor named Charles Dutoit rode the compact-disc recording increase and an unique contract with Decca to make the OSM probably the most recorded orchestra on the planet. Collectors across the globe wanted new digital recordings to switch their vinyl LPs. Dutoit favoured the fleet, flashy repertoire from international locations east, west and south of classical music’s German dwelling: Frenchmen like Ravel and Debussy, Russians like Stravinsky, Italians and Spaniards. In these days, billboards and TV adverts proclaimed that in Montreal, “La fierté a une ville”—“Pleasure had a metropolis.” A central picture of the advert marketing campaign was Dutoit conducting the OSM.
Dutoit stormed out of Montreal in 2002, declaring he’d had it with the musicians’ union. It emerged later that the union had had it with Dutoit, and with what would right this moment be referred to as a poisonous work setting. Darkish years ensued, together with a five-month strike. However the OSM managed to search out one other artistically critical and charismatic chief, the Californian Kent Nagano, who turned the music director in 2006. Nagano had made his profession in Germany. He led the OSM for its first, excellent recordings of Beethoven symphonies. He additionally quizzed the orchestra’s help workers about who the native Wagner-style gods and heroes may be. Some nice orator? A navy hero? Not likely, they replied. Round right here it’s largely hockey gamers. Peacekeepers. Whoever designed the Métro subway system.
Nagano, not clearly a gregarious fellow, took the solutions severely. He dutifully commissioned new compositions in honour of Terry Fox and Roméo Dallaire, carried out Inuit throat singers and an ode to the Métro’s founding anniversary, and confirmed up in a Habs jersey on the Bell Centre extra typically than a few of the hockey crew’s goalies.
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These successive amorous affairs have been studiously chaperoned by OSM administration and the town’s main political and cultural figures. Lucien Bouchard, the firebrand politician who got here inside an ace of profitable Quebec’s 1995 secession referendum, is now 82 and has been chair of the OSM board for longer than he was ever in elected politics. He offered greetings by video to the Olympic Park crowd. Every week later he was current in individual when Payare led the orchestra for its correct season opener on the Maison symphonique, an austere and resonant live performance corridor that opened 10 years in the past as a legacy venture from one other premier, Jean Charest.
As a successor to Dutoit and Nagano, Payare appears a bit slight. He’s a largely unknown amount within the music world. The orchestras he’s led—Belfast, San Diego—are wonderful bands, however you don’t construct a worldwide fame in such outposts. To the OSM, this was really a part of the attraction. Madeleine Careau, the OSM’s CEO—its chief administrator for the reason that Dutoit days—jogged my memory that Dutoit was 37 when he got here to Montreal, Nagano 48. Neither was extensively thought of a star then both. “We needed any person who’d wish to win with us. I don’t consider within the OSM simply needing a conductor, the conductor should want the OSM,” she stated. “It offers him power.”
I ponder whether just a little cross-town competitors will give Payare power too. He’s the primary OSM music director who’s youthful—by 5 years—than Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who conducts the Orchestre Métropolitain. Originally of the Nagano years, Nézet-Séguin was a virtually negligible think about Montreal’s musical panorama, a pleasant child working a relatively under-financed orchestra that performs solely a fraction as many concert events because the OSM. However he’s grown into a worldwide juggernaut as music director of the legendary Philadelphia Orchestra and the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and hailed as a star wherever he works all over the world.
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Posters close to the Maison symphonique proclaim that Nézet-Séguin and his upstart orchestra are “Nearer Than Ever.” Is that the way it feels to Payare? “By no means,” Payare instructed me. He referred to as Nézet-Séguin “an excellent artist” and famous that outdoors North America it’s frequent to have multiple status orchestra. That’s the precise angle to have, and it lets Payare consider the harder activity: constructing a relationship with the musicians in entrance of him and the viewers behind him.
The spotlight of his first live performance on the Maison symphonique was Dmitri Shostakovich’s 1937 Fifth Symphony, an outline of menace and chaos lasting almost an hour. Conducting from reminiscence with no rating in entrance of him, Payare elicited an astonishing efficiency. Typically he exchanged smiles of pleasure with particular person members of the orchestra. Different occasions he’d maintain his head down for lengthy minutes, assembly no person’s gaze, seeming to listen to just some dream of the work underway. Payare seems to be like enjoyable however seems like enterprise.
Collectively, the untested conductor and the storied orchestra will file, tour and premiere new works. Plans for all the above are additionally within the works. In our interview in his backstage workplace, Payare was tight-lipped about them, for now.
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“It’s just a little bit kitsch to say, but it surely’s been like a dream come true,” he instructed me, referring to his first appearances with the orchestra and a dwell viewers. His appointment was introduced in January, within the depth of the COVID lockdown. Days later he led the masked and distanced OSM in a streaming video live performance in an in any other case empty Maison symphonique. “We did an incredible Brahms First Symphony that ends nearly like a scream of pleasure. And there was no person within the viewers.” Now the viewers is again, and the enjoyment is enhanced accordingly. What Payare does subsequent will grow to be the stuff of legend. In Montreal, this kind of factor often does.
This text seems in print within the December 2021 challenge of Maclean’s journal with the headline, “Conducting electrical energy.” Subscribe to the month-to-month print journal here.
