PERSPECTIVE — Not the first trip to Europe by the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal. Not even the first with its music director of two-and-a-half seasons, Rafael Payare, who led a six-concert campaign in 2022. The eight-stop 2024 tour that concluded Nov. 30 in Vienna is deemed by the OSM to be its 59th since 1962, when the ensemble was overseen by Zubin Mehta. Travel was abundant during the tenure of Charles Dutoit (1977-2002) and frequent enough under Kent Nagano (2006-2020). This band has spent a lot of time on the road.
Still, the 2024 sortie stands out — for its mostly A-list destinations, its gargantuan repertoire (performed by 103 musicians, not including local student recruits), and the impression that it produced in the minds of a reasonable quorum of concertgoers (and critics) that the 44-year-old Venezuelan conductor has formed a viable artistic bond with the orchestra.
How to describe the connection and its results? “Energy and refinement” were the slightly contradictory qualities suggested at intermission Nov. 28 by the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, who happened to be in the crowd at the black-box Munich concert hall known as the Isarphilharmonie.
These are both classic OSM virtues, although energy was arguably the dominant partner on this program anchored by Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. An athletic figure on the podium who uses all the space available to him, Payare drew plenty of pow from the sforzando chords of the first movement and kept the waltz (animated by a cornet, stationed near the harps) moving smartly.
The “Scène aux champs” was most atmospheric during the timpani rumbles at the end of the movement. Earlier, the stress was on the neurotic interventions of the strings. Leave it to Berlioz, thought I, to ruin a peaceful day in the countryside with his opium-fueled hallucinations. This being precisely the point a successful performance should make!
Special effects in this movement (oboe stationed in the balcony) and others (col legno bow strokes in the finale) went well. Brass made bold sounds in the “Marche au supplice,” and the “Songe d’une nuit de Sabbat” raced to a suitably uproarious conclusion. There are not many more viscerally exciting experiences than to hear a crack trombone section and tuba muscle through those descending chromatic scales at fortissimo.
The sonic highlight of the finale, however, was the backstage sounding of the bells during the “Dies Irae” theme — not routine tubular bells or digital fabrications, mind you, but two real carillon bells, recently acquired (with others) by the OSM through a donation by the music-loving Quebec industrialist Roger Dubois. It says something about the high artistic aims of the orchestra that it was willing to schlep these bronze behemoths (weighing together about 1,200 pounds) overseas for the sake of artistic integrity. A nod is also owing percussion principal Serge Desgagnés for mastering new instruments that need to be struck (on a video cue from Payare) in the right spot with the right force to maximize resonance and minimize the risk of a fracture. Despite their prodigious mass, these bells are fragile.
It was a big evening for Berlioz fans. Vigorous applause brought forth the zesty Marche hongroise as an encore. Payare did it the only way it can be done, full blast. The program had started with another Berlioz barn burner, Le carnaval romain, in a performance that was more about determined thrust than festive color. Our source of respite in this high-intensity evening was Schumann’s Piano Concerto as played with poetic freedom by Daniil Trifonov (who, in Munich and elsewhere, surely helped to sell tickets). OSM players remarked on how this Russian headliner (looking every inch the tormented romantic with his disheveled hair) could change his interpretive choices from night to night. “For sure tempos are not the same, but they are not crazy,” Payare commented in an interview.
Berlioz was heard in London, Luxembourg, Hamburg, Berlin, and Amsterdam as well as Munich. Paris and Vienna got Richard Strauss’ Eine Alpensinfonie, an even more extravagantly pictorial score documenting a daylong ascent of (and descent from) a peak in the Bavarian Alps. Again the special effects were convincing, starting with the pianissimo pre-dawn mists (more like mezzopiano in the bright Vienna Konzerthaus) and leading through natural wonders like the waterfall (cascading sixteenth notes and glissandos aplenty) to the summit, where our mountaineer, believably embodied by the OSM’s new principal oboe, Alex Liedtke, takes a few moments to catch his breath and admire the view.
There were highlights also on the way down, as storm clouds gathered. The wind machine is always an audience favorite. For years, I have commented on how the signature OSM string sound does not always work for late-Romantic Austro-German repertoire. No such reservations applied on this occasion. The sunset glowed as it should.
Payare, using a score, was an enthusiastic leader, hiking briskly forward and giving fortissimos full value. He was rewarded accordingly by the Konzerthaus crowd, who also had an opportunity to applaud the 20 students from the Universität für Musik (16 of them horn players) who formed the backstage band impersonating a hunting party.
The Vienna program started with Jeder Baum spricht, a six-minute overture with an environmentalist program by the Tehran-born Torontonian Iman Habibi. With Payare’s encouragement, the trees shouted as often as they spoke, often together with cinematic amplitude. A Viennese colleague whose judgment I trust thought the piece (premiered in Philadelphia in 2020) needed more time to develop its thematic materials. Its alleged links to Beethoven’s Fifth and Sixth symphonies were imperceptible.
Trifonov’s contribution was Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in a performance that balanced good-natured brilliance in the outer movements with quiet poetry in the Largo. As in Schumann, sixteenth notes were strikingly clear, especially in the left hand. Solo encores in both Munich and Vienna were derived from Mikhail Pletnev’s arrangement of music from Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty — I think. We live in an age of no announcements from the stage.
There was much joy at a post-concert party in the Konzerthaus. The players I spoke to thought the tour went brilliantly. Some waxed lyrical about their night in the Concertgebouw — despite the tricky onstage acoustics of that famous Amsterdam venue. (By the time the concert is finished, one wind principal observed, you have the place figured out.)
Ticket sales (the Vienna concert was sold out) spoke for themselves. Reviews were positive, if occasionally dotted with reservations. Der Standard (Vienna) noted “lots of physical strength, little metaphysics” in Eine Alpensinfonie. The Guardian (London) gave four out of five stars to the tour opener in the Barbican Centre, where the Symphonie fantastique performance “had plenty of colour and pace without quite sustaining its peaks of dramatic intensity.”
There was inevitable commentary on Payare’s extroverted style. “A whirlwind made human” declared the Suddeutsche Zeitung. Of course, the vital thing was to establish the conductor and orchestra as symbiotically linked rather than merely coexisting.
Mission accomplished. But what is the profile of the pairing? The dominance of Berlioz on this tour says something about the indestructible equation in the public consciousness of Montreal with French music — even though the name of Dutoit (the conductor once hailed as the creator of the Montreal sound) did not appear in the biographical notes in the program distributed in the Konzerthaus.
Nagano’s attempts to Beethovenize the OSM were well-intentioned but inconclusive. Payare is fond of big repertoire, having opened the 2024-25 season with Schoenberg’s incomparably capacious Gurre-lieder. He says he is prepared to “capitalize” on the lingering (if now historical) fame of the OSM discography on Decca but seeks an echt sonority for his Mahler and Strauss recordings on Pentatone. “Not Mah-lair,” he clarifies. “Mahler.”
Also part of the OSM sonic equation are the many new players, especially in woodwind positions. Liedtke, recruited from the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, is an excellent addition but his sound is plummier and less “French” than that of Ted Baskin, the longtime oboe principal he succeeded this year.
Even if the OSM sound is fated to evolve, these concerts offered evidence that the orchestra’s core of quality will hold firm. As for repertoire, Payare’s serious intentions are beyond question. Asked how he felt about the recent rise of “Beethoven Blues” by the pianist-bandleader Jon Batiste to the top of the Billboard classical chart, the maestro responded without hesitation: “I have no idea who that is.”
