MONTREAL — Awards and prizes for contemporary music are plentiful but not — with the exception of the Pulitzer — familiar to concertgoers. Since 2014, the Canadian-based Azrieli Foundation has worked assiduously to establish its biennial Azrieli Music Prizes as honors with gravitas. The prize packages are generous, the juries are impressive, the applicant pool is international, and the performers are first-rate.
The prizewinning compositions? Hit and miss. This was the lesson of the gala concert Oct. 28 performed by the chorus of the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal under its chorus master, Andrew Megill, in the Maison symphonique.
Four works were heard, three in premieres and all choral — 2024 being the a cappella year in the Azrieli rotation. Most substantial and least comprehensible was Simetrías Prehispánicas (“Pre-Hispanic Symmetries”) by Juan Trigos, a Mexican-American composer on the music faculty at the University of Kentucky. The piece was the inaugural winner of the Azrieli Commission for International Music, a prize offered to a composer who is mindful of “the world’s diverse cultural heritage.”
Syncopations were unrelenting. Texts were divided between Spanish and the indigenous Aztec language, Nahuatl. The prevailing chaos might have been authentically expressive of warfare, but no other reflection of the human condition could be detected. Symmetries? Not from my seat. Nor did projections of images of gods and animals from Aztec myth add anything meaningful to the presentation.
The evening began with Light to My Path (2015) by Josef Bardanashvili, a veteran composer of Georgian birth based in Tel Aviv. Four psalms are the main source materials for this winner of the Azrieli Prize for Jewish Music, an award that recognizes an existing work on a Jewish theme. It created a palpably liturgical atmosphere with unison male singing reminiscent of plainchant (the program notes allege an affiliation with sacred music of Georgia, Lithuania and Poland) and clusters for women intended to evoke illumination (with the help of a vibraphone). Soothing dissonance was the dominant idiom. The saxophone on stage made no significant contribution.
Next came The Parable of the Palace, the 2024 Azrieli Commission for Jewish Music, by Yair Klartag, a 39-year-old Israeli with a growing portfolio of prizes. Scored for choir and four double basses, this 18-minute work traded in various modernist devices and effects, including high-position agitation from the quartet of big fiddles stationed near the conductor. There was some use of pizzicato but no attempt to exploit the melodic potential of the instrument.
Interaction between instrumental and choral elements was mostly confrontational. The composer’s stated purpose was to riff on the metaphysics of Maimonides and this philosopher’s attempts to reconcile Aristotelian logic with Jewish beliefs. How the use of an extinct Judeo-Arabic language forwarded his aim is not clear.
The final selection (performed in front of an audience significantly thinned out by the Trigos piece) was kanata by Jordan Nobles, a 54-year-old Vancouverite. Winner of the Azrieli Commission for Canadian Music, this 15-minute cantata was ostensibly inspired by the experience of traveling the breadth of Canada by train. Again, there was no coherent text but rather an array of phonemes derived from place names in English, French, and Indigenous languages. One might suppose the landscapes of the world’s second-largest country to yield some degree of contrast, but the effect was mostly of a mezzo-piano continuum modestly animated by pulses.
The 50-odd singers of the OSM Chorus (some of them pressed into service as soloists) managed all this heroically and without the respite of an intermission. The vigorous beat of Megill (batonless in the choral-conductor manner) was helpful to the audience as well as the choir. Sitting through almost two hours of unisons, clusters, whistles, whispers, and other extended choral techniques constituted what is known in the listening business as a challenge. I cannot say that I met it with ease.
Of course, three of the works were commissions, which is to say prizes awarded in advance to scores that might or might not work out. I suspect that the 2024 Azrieli crop will be better remembered for innovative technique than lasting effect. Not that you need to take my word for it. The concert was livestreamed on Medici TV, The Violin Channel, IDAGIO, and Amadeus TV.
A footnote is required on the Azrieli Foundation, a charity named after the late Montreal real-estate entrepreneur David Azrieli, who was responsible for (among other projects) the high-rise Azrieli Center in Tel Aviv. Headquartered in Toronto, the foundation is active on many fronts but especially generous in the area of music, thanks to Sharon Azrieli. This soprano, one of David’s daughters, served (with the radio broadcaster Mario Paquet) as an onstage MC on this occasion.
Notable among Azrieli initiatives is the Hope Project, a series of performances over five days (Oct. 30 – Nov. 3) by 13 orchestras in Israel intended to commemorate the atrocities of Oct. 7. “The power of music to heal, inspire, and elevate us in the darkest of times is unparalleled,” Sharon Azrieli is quoted as saying in the Jerusalem Post. “This project is our offering to find strength and hope together, using the transcendence of music to uplift and bring light.”
