MONTREAL — Rafael Payare seems to have injected the same brand of rejuvenating juice into the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal that he has administered lately in his San Diego Symphony. He’s been thinking big again; that’s what they normally do in his native Venezuela, we’ve been told.
Following the pattern of his friend, countryman, and fellow Southern California-based conductor Gustavo Dudamel, Payare’s goals include a complete live Mahler symphony cycle and a Mozart/Da Ponte opera cycle, while adding the big Shostakovich symphonies to that tally. There are aspirations to put the orchestra back on the road big time with tours on multiple continents. Already, the OSM’s recording program — once one of the most prolific and distinguished symphonic music lines from North America — is back in business humming along with three releases out over the last two years, two more in the pipeline (Symphonie fantastique and Daphnis et Chloé), and The Rite of Spring planned for the 2025-26 season. There will even be an El Sistema OSM variation of the vaunted Venezuelan music education program that gave Payare his start.
First things first, though — gotta finish off the 2024-25 season, which Payare and the OSM did in the Maison symphonique on May 30 (during the annual meeting of the Music Critics Association of North America) with a program anchored by Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, a symphony of songs that continues his Mahler project. (It would have been the composer’s actual Ninth Symphony had he not been so morbidly superstitious about the number nine.)
The most enterprising aspect of the program, however, came in the first half of the night: two newly commissioned works from a pair of Canadian composers that forged links not only with the indigenous peoples of Canada but also with Das Lied itself (which the creators say they realized “only after the fact last February”). They were short pieces — six and 10 minutes, respectively — but they packed a punch above their weight.
Ana Sokolović, a refugee from the violence in Serbia 33 years ago, contributed You Can Die Properly Now, a “lullaby” for the hundreds of dead indigenous schoolchildren whose remains had been recently discovered in British Columbia. First, a singer rattled a hand drum and sang underneath an outline of a teepee onstage to create some atmosphere. Then came massive chords from a grand piano, deep growling from a contrabassoon and double basses, and subdued clustered drones. I could hear an explicit kinship with the most downcast passages in the center of “Der Abschied” (The Farewell) from Das Lied. Soprano Emma Pennell, who is a Two-Spirit (dual gender) person with indigenous roots, was singing in their native Mi’kmaq language for the first time, and they grew achingly impassioned as the piece rose to a climax after a dramatic string slide.
With nary a pause, Payare launched into the second piece, part-indigenous Ian Cusson’s Un cri s’élève en moi, written in a much different, more melodic, reassuring style with a text that affirms the resilience and power of women as givers of life. Here, the more flowery aspects of Das Lied’s “Von der Schönheit” (“Of Beauty”) and “Der Abschied” movements linked up, with soprano Elisabeth St.-Gelais singing in French against music that sometimes shimmered and twittered. Both made an emotional impact that lingered through the intermission.
The OSM wasn’t known — internationally, at least — for its Mahler back in the 1980s and `90s, nor for the rest of the big Germanic late-Romantic repertoire, for that matter. There is a Das Lied von der Erde recording (Sony) from the Kent Nagano era, but I find it rather dull and superficial. Payare is trying to shore up that end of the repertoire. His Mahler Fifth — his first release with Montréal (Pentatone) — is pretty good, with a lot of the bustling energy that he also produced in his San Diego Symphony performances.
The Payare/OSM Das Lied on this occasion was greatly improved over the Nagano recording, with the demonic streak that surfaced in the more volatile passages and some sweetness when needed. Payare’s tempos were mostly right on the mark, with expressive fluctuations here and there as he bounced and swayed to the beat. Yet there were some potentially sublime passages — for example, the great climax in the orchestral interlude of “Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde,” the drunken abandon of the coda to “Der Trunkene in Frühling,” and especially the the unearthly beautiful final minutes of “Der Abschied” — that Payare just glided through matter-of-factly instead of punching home a point or meditating soulfully. Give it some time to marinate.
Das Lied isn’t programmed in concert as much as one would think, most likely because the songs for tenor are a voice-killer, the poor fellow having to compete with a big orchestra going full tilt. It could be especially tough in a live hall like this. Such was the case with Nikolai Schukoff, who bellowed with all his might in “Das Trinklied” yet could barely be heard most of the time. Mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung, a Mahlerian of long standing, definitely could be heard, full of expression, heart, and even some physical acting out of the text, but the wobble in her vibrato was a bit of a trial.
For someone (me) who last saw the OSM back in the late 1980s and early 1990s during the Charles Dutoit regime — despite the Swiss conductor’s current persona-non-grata status in North America due to allegations of sexual assault, it is still called the orchestra’s “Golden Age” — today’s OSM is almost a different species. They are certainly in a better concert hall now, whose acoustics and design — a modified shoebox with lots of wood surfaces, a longish reverberation time, a sound that comes at you full blast from the front with not much resonance from the rear — reminds me of Segerstrom Concert Hall in Costa Mesa, CA (both happened to use Artec Consultants, Inc. for acoustics).
The OSM seems poised to acquire a wider repertoire, not leaning as heavily toward French music as they understandably have historically. Thankfully, Payare also wants to push Latin American music in Montreal; they do share the same hemisphere, and it has great audience appeal. I can’t say yet that another “golden age” for the OSM is imminent, but things are looking up in the Place des Arts.
