The Orchester Métropolitain’s outdoor concert on August 2, 2022 was a huge success, with an attendance of some 50,000 people. That of Wednesday evening, given a year later, day for day, seems to have at least equaled this figure, while going even further in terms of surprises and blows of brilliance.
After Pénélope McQuade last year, it was comedian Katherine Levac who hosted the evening, maintaining a certain bond with the public, especially the most neophytes, of which she candidly admitted to being a part.
But it’s chef Yannick Nézet-Séguin who wins the prize for the show with his three outfits for the evening, going from a black rhinestone jacket to a multicolored camisole then to a pink shirt, always with his usual shorts .
The orchestra began the evening with a piece not on the program, the irresistible Mambo from the Symphonic Dances of West Side Story.
Total change of atmosphere then with a piece by Vancouverite Jean Coulthard (1908-2000), a pupil of Vaughan Williams, who sits in the pantheon of Anglo-Canadian composers. His Kalamalka (Lake of Many Colours), an “orchestral prelude” created in 1974 for the CBC (in a bygone era when state radio was commissioning works), is a magnificent ten-minute piece. , eminently Debussyist, where the winds occupy an important place.
Jump back almost a century then with the last two movements of Dvořák’s Symphony No. 7 in D minor, Op. 70, which the conductor, well in his time, asked members of the public to immortalize with their telephones.
Nézet-Séguin defended this work very well, so much so that we would like to hear him conduct it in its entirety in a more favorable place like the Maison symphonique. The scherzo is delivered with pleasant impatience and the finale is distinguished by a fine sense of lyricism and architecture.
Then came the Quebec moment of the evening, with André Mathieu’s Romantic Rhapsody, a work that should have been created on Mount Royal in the 1960s, an event that fell through. However, the work has come back to life through the good care of the tireless Alain Lefèvre, but also of the orchestrator Gilles Bellemare. We hear it in particular in the film Le prodige, on the life of Mathieu, but also on a recording with the Orchester symphonique de Montréal.
Lefèvre defended it with his usual intensity on a large Steinway moved for the occasion. He received a warm ovation from the audience.
The Rhapsody was followed by the gleaming Danzón no 2 by the Mexican Arturo Márquez, a score from 1994 which is a hit all over the world.
Then came the last candy of the evening, the interpretation of La vie en rose with none other than Ariane Moffatt, with a rhythmic and colorful orchestral accompaniment.
Let’s hope that we will find some of this enthusiastic audience this year for the indoor season.
