The start of the 2024-2025 season of the Société de musique contemporaine du Québec (SMCQ) was a success. A program of great stylistic coherence enabled the various performers of the SMCQ, together with the Petits chanteurs du Mont-Royal, to radiate magnificent music, contemporary in its rigor and demands, but sometimes romantic in its suggested affects. Kaija Saariaho’s amusing choral piece Horloge Tais-toi! (Clock, Shut Up!) kicked off the evening with a piano-only accompaniment version, and ended with an orchestral version of the piano score, still with the children choir. As the title suggests, there’s something both mechanical and playful about this piece, in which the object’s insistent ticking seems to be particularly well embodied in the mouths of children, who we imagine dreading the hour when they have to get up to go to school. A version by the Maîtrise de Radio France, available on YouTube, shows an extended spatialization of the choir, leaving plenty of space between the singers, spread out over the whole stage. This wasn’t the case yesterday, with the Petits chanteurs grouped together in the traditional, tightly-packed way. I would have liked to hear the result with the French placing. I think the effect of the tic-tacs must be more impressive.
This was followed by another Saariaho piece, Lichtbogen, directly inspired by the northern lights. If you can imagine the kind of music that might emanate from these hypnotic ripples of color, chances are it sounds like Lichtbogen. A full chamber orchestra conjures up a sonic kaleidoscope of luminescent, shimmering abstraction, all the more pleasing for its warmth. Projections of authentic aurora borealis added an entirely appropriate visual magic.
I didn’t know what to expect from the young composer Hans Martin, who was unknown to me until yesterday. I must confess to having been pleasantly seduced by his musical proposal for choir (Les Petits chanteurs again) and orchestra, entitled Stance and based on a text by Renaissance poet Claude de Pontoux. The poem deals with the passage of time, which destroys everything except, apparently, the character of the person to which is destined, seemingly, the text (the beloved?). What’s most striking is the roundness of Martin’s sound, which is imbued with a fleshy but elusive tonality, for once its fullness is reached, it is traversed by dissonant shivers that invite it to escape higher up the scale. But it’s always caught up, in a slow, sustained chase. It’s truly beautiful, and I’ll enjoy listening to it again some day.
Saariaho’s Jardin secret (Secret Garden), for stereo support and accompanied by graphic projections, began the second half of the concert with a vaguely impressionistic electronic expression.
This was followed by the evening’s most substantial piece, Arras by Montrealer Keiko Devaux, a large and beautiful construction of moving, organic, sumptuous music, as the title suggests, that takes us back to the city that was a mecca for Flemish tapestry in the Middle Ages (now situated in France). Like a commission for the 14th-century Dukes of Burgundy, Devaux weaves a rich interweaving of motifs and textures, assembled in a general canvas showing a background of harmonies seeking consonance. On top of this panorama, modernist gushings set the score in the 21st century. Like a romantic summer landscape over which a veiled mist settles, and which is traversed by tremors and breakthroughs revealing the underlying perspective.
Musically, we know from Devaux herself that many personal references and musical memories are integrated into the score. In the harmonic support, we hear and feel a fundamental Romanticism to which contemporary exploratory impulses are added. The fusion is magnificent, and Arras deserves to be played in Europe, in Arras itself, the inspiring cradle of art behind this exceptional music.
I have said elsewhere that Devaux is, in my opinion, one of the most stimulating composers of the current generation in North America. I’ll say it again without hesitation, and add that Europe is well within her reach (while hoping she stays here forever!).
The SMCQ’s 59th season, if yesterday’s concert was any indication, will be a vintage one.
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