Julien Proulx, artistic director and conductor of the Orchestre symphonique de Drummondville, had to react quickly to current events. “Quite quickly,” he says. “I planned a completely different season and postponed our planned season, because it was huge and it wouldn’t have made sense for it to be presented in a piecemeal fashion.”

“We’re probably going to be exploring throughout the year,” Proulx continues, “with, maybe towards the end, one or two shows where we’re really going to get back into the venue.”

Is a conventional concert following the guidelines of distancing from public health possible?

“Basically, no. Our audience appreciates our Great Concerts series, they know the hall well, they know the orchestra well. In that kind of situation, they would be faced with a much less interesting situation. It’s going to be colder, it’s going to be less crowded, it’s going to be a smaller orchestra. That’s why I took the gamble of exploring other places, maybe bigger, where the distance would be easier to manage, where families could come and see the concerts.”

The head of the OSD does not think that the technological shift is a solution that applies to everyone.

“The issue of our ability to continue to live as a community,” he says, “is different depending on the size and mission of the community. In Berlin, New York, and even closer to home with the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal and the Metropolitain, we knew that these ensembles would move towards broadcasting and streaming, among other things. I do not believe that the OSD’s mission necessarily lies there. What’s important and interesting for us and for regional orchestras in general is to meet people. We will go out and connect with them in the city, in the parks, in chamber groups or in small orchestras.”

Proulx raises the stakes: 

“Yes, we want to reach out to the people and occupy the territory, but we also want the musicians to live musically as well. With a few exceptions, orchestral musicians in Quebec are contractual freelancers, and the current structure of cultural organizations is such that, in an emergency, the people who can be tossed aside to save the furniture are precisely those who make the music, which makes no sense. In our way of subsidizing art, we subsidize institutions and offices. I felt it was my duty, whatever the cost, to give musicians jobs.”

Proulx is also the artistic and musical director of the Chœur de la montagne, one of the largest amateur choirs in the province. 

What about that side of things?

“Non-professional choirs face several problems. First of all, the purpose of singing in an amateur choir is to be with friends and acquaintances. It’s singing collectively, it’s a social bond. So, singing two metres away with plexiglas, I don’t know if that’s workable. Secondly, it’s about numbers. There are 95 of us in Chœur de la montagne. We may have a big space, but we’ll have to find other solutions. The big issue is also the risk because of age. The average age of the choir is 65, which is likely the case with the majority of amateur choirs in Quebec.”

Is there a solution?

“We’re still thinking about what we can do so that when we start up again in a year’s time, we’ll be in better shape than we are now. I continued to hold Zoom meetings with the singers, where we talked about music, theory, and listened to works. We’re going to do a survey among them to find out what kind of courses they would like to take – courses in music theory, music literature, pronunciation, and even piano lessons, so they can accompany themselves while singing. Then we could make small groups, divide the choir into several ensembles. If we don’t do anything, we lose a year, and I don’t want that. For sure it’s a big issue, that’s why we make sure we have lots of plans and possibilities and that we can adapt quickly.”

Orchestre symphonique de Drummondville
Chœur de la montagne

Walter Boudreau, conductor and artistic director of the indispensable Société de musique contemporaine du Québec (SMCQ), says that the COVID-19 crisis arrived as a general surprise: “It’s a real catastrophe, and it’s unusual what’s happening to us. An invisible death lurks around us.”

The first thing to do, of course, was to adapt, postpone, and cancel the SMCQ’s many planned activities, including all those related to the year-long tribute to composer Katia Makdissi-Warren.

As with all organizations, their calendar was completely revised. But when will it be possible to present a concert before an audience? No one knows, because every week, new directives come along and shake up the plans. “What is worrisome is the MNM festival scheduled for February 2021. Whether or not it will take place cannot be confirmed.”

One of the main fears of the chief and artistic director is for the audiences. “Where will the fun be? It shouldn’t be difficult for the audience. If you have to avoid human contact, hugging, talking over a drink after the concert, that won’t be possible.”

For Boudreau, the music concert is a fundamentally collective activity, an act of fraternity and sharing. He adds, “you can’t replace live music with virtual music. The virtual is a beautiful crutch, a very beautiful crutch, but it’s not that. The solution is to defeat the pandemic. In the meantime, they are band-aids, temporary ways to keep your head above water.”

Boudreau points out that the SMCQ has the particularity of producing concerts based on works and projects. The organization doesn’t have to support a group of salaried musicians, as is the case with conventional orchestras. “The SMCQ is fortunate to be able to adapt financially and artistically to the current context, which will result in a few promising projects to affirm the organization’s mission of promoting and supporting contemporary Quebec music.”

For example, a special online ordering program will be created to support composers.

In addition, the pandemic has allowed the organization to move forward more quickly on a major project. The SMCQ is currently digitizing all of its sound documents: the organization’s mission is to make this priceless heritage accessible to the public, and a thousand recordings of works have been digitized to date.

Boudreau emphasizes the importance of the SMCQ for the history of Quebec culture. A true living museum, for 54 years it’s been collecting  a multitude of artifacts, there to remind us of where we come from.

And the director puts it this way: “a people without history is a people that does not exist.”

L’Orchestre de la francophonie has given itself an educational mandate that leads it to renew its pool of performers every year. All these fine people hit the road for summer concerts at the end of a residency during which each new member of the ensemble learns his or her repertoire. What about during the pandemic?

The current situation obviously upends the plans of Jean-Philippe Tremblay, founder of the orchestra in 2001, but unlike all those who have discovered Zoom in recent weeks, one could say that the OF was one step ahead. The conductor explains:

“We’ve been using the Acceptd platform for four years now, which was specifically designed to allow us to audition online. Of course, we also like to do live when possible, but we started working with it when the number of auditions exceeded 100 – we’ve had years with over 400 auditions.”

The one good thing that happened with COVID-19, Tremblay also points out, is that it gave L’Orchestre de la francophonie time to reorganize.

“The auditions were over and we invited 37 musicians to join the orchestra this year, so we still wanted to give them something. I consulted Maurizio Ortolani, Senior Director of Digital Experience at the National Arts Centre. He’s a specialist in distance learning and he helped us set up our tools. We bought about 50 cameras with built-in stereo microphones, so that musicians and teachers could interact. There will be group classes, but also private lessons, which for us is a novelty directly related to the situation. There will also be lectures, master classes, etc. Each musician will also be required to give a 30-minute recital.”

For the summer of 2020, the OF’s Plan A consisted of travelling to festivals to give interpretations of Beethoven’s nine symphonies, the complete works of which the OF released in 2010 on Analekta.

“We had to do it with a slightly smaller orchestra than usual,” Tremblay explains, “because we’re conserving our resources for a big hit next year, as the orchestra celebrates its 20th anniversary.”

Tremblay has many other things on the go besides leading the OF, so he has a fairly good overview of the situation.

“For the past year,” he says, “I’ve been working with the University of Ottawa and, of course, in the fall it will be online as well? I hope to be back in July 2021 with L’Orchestre de la francophonie, but while I’m saying that, I’m looking at my international guest conductor engagements and, over 16 weeks, I’ve already cancelled or postponed 13 of them… At the moment there are cancellations until the end of May 2021 in Europe… There will no doubt be restrictions, but I hope that we will finally be able to put all these people together. Because that’s the beauty of our work, the beauty of our art.”

Is an online performance recorded with a phone camera appropriate for ALL works? Of course not. According to the artistic director of Nouvel Ensemble Moderne (NEM),, the recognition of the impasse of the confined concert came early enough. “You can’t play online, it’s impossible. The works in our repertoire are far too complex to try to synchronize them live on screens at home.”

According to Normand Forget, artistic director of Nouvel Ensemble Moderne (NEM), a longstanding institution of contemporary music in Quebec, concert music is fundamentally a living art. He points out the following paradox in passing. “Our music is not made for the digital transition, and that’s completely strange because we’re considered modern!”

The artistic director also maintains that “it is a mistake to associate digital with video capture and production: digital art encompasses a whole range of practices requiring specialized knowledge that the performing arts do not possess. »

The NEM has done what most performing arts ensembles and organizations have done: “we have made a whole section of our repertoire and highlights of our journey accessible on the web. “The Artistic Director says he is taking advantage of this break to pursue a broader reflection, which has been underway for some time now, on the role of modern music, its accessibility and the dialogue between creator and performer.

“This crisis makes the question of art more relevant. Composers will have no choice but to write works so that the musicians and people in the hall appreciate their experience, which will lead to initiatives, changes in codes. It will take strong works to bring people back into the concert halls,” notes Normand Forget in passing.

As for next season, many unknowns remain.

Like all performing artists, the NEM is first and foremost subject to government directives. “Also, we are in residence at the Université de Montréal, which brings other challenges. We have to follow the administration and collaborate with all the staff to pursue our mission there as much as possible. »

The artistic direction of the NEM has therefore been juggling for the last few months with several scenarios as well as postponements and cancellations on the calendar, “depending on the rules, which is quite difficult to imagine because it changes almost on a daily basis. Silence, a concert with 100 artists on stage, will certainly have to be cancelled. »

However, collaborations and new projects are emerging, no longer conceived in terms of concerts, but of events that can be broadcast online. And of course live concerts, but imagined with little or no audience in the hall.

A total of 223 records were considered for the 2020 Long List by 201 music journalists, broadcasters, and bloggers from across the country, and the 10-album Short List will be announced live on July 15, on a CBC Music radio special. Eleven members of this expanded jury will then be selected to serve on the Grand Jury. The winning album will be revealed live on CBC’s Gem online viewing service, and on CBCMusic.ca/Polaris, at a special filmed event this fall, rather than at a grand gala as is customary. The Polaris Prize offers $50,000 to the artist(s) who created the Canadian Album of the Year, judged solely on artistic merit, with no consideration of musical genre or commercial popularity. The other nine artists on the 2020 Short List will receive $3,000.

 For this 2020 edition, 12 Quebec artists have been selected. Anachnid, Marie-Pierre Arthur, Backxwash, Chocolat, Louis-Jean Cormier, Corridor, Flore Laurentienne, Jacques Greene, Kaytranada, Men I Trust, Leif Vollebekk, and Zen Bamboo are part of this Long List, which is a good ratio. It remains to be seen if any of the Quebec artists on the list will make it to the end. In the entire history of the Polaris, only one has won the great honour, namely Karkwa in 2010.

Previous winners are Haviah Mighty (2019), Jeremy Dutcher (2018), Lido Pimienta (2017), Kaytranada (2016), Buffy Sainte-Marie (2015), Tanya Tagaq (2014), Godspeed You! Black Emperor (2013), Feist (2012), Arcade Fire (2011), Karkwa (2010), Fucked Up (2009), Caribou (2008), Patrick Watson (2007) and Final Fantasy/Owen Pallett (2006).

Here are the 40 artists selected for the Long List for the Polaris 2020 Music Prize:
Allie X – Cape God
Anachnid – Dreamweaver
Aquakultre – Legacy
Marie-Pierre Arthur – Des feux pour voir
Backxwash – God Has Nothing To Do With This Leave Him Out Of It
Badge Époque Ensemble – Badge Époque Ensemble
Begonia – Fear
P’tit Belliveau – Greatest Hits Vol. 1
Caribou – Suddenly
Daniel Caesar – CASE STUDY 01
Chocolat – Jazz engagé
Louis-Jean Cormier – Quand la nuit tombe
Corridor – Junior
dvsn – A Muse In Her Feelings
Jacques Greene – Dawn Chorus
Sarah Harmer – Are You Gone
Ice Cream – FED UP
Junia-T – Studio Monk
Kaytranada – Bubba
Flore Laurentienne – Volume 1
Cindy Lee – What’s Tonight To Eternity?
Men I Trust – Oncle Jazz
Nêhiyawak – nipiy
OBUXUM – Re-Birth
Owen Pallett – Island
Pantayo – Pantayo
Lido Pimienta – Miss Colombia
Joel Plaskett – 44
William Prince – Reliever
Jessie Reyez – BEFORE LOVE CAME TO KILL US 
Riit – ataataga
Andy Shauf – The Neon Skyline
Super Duty Tough Work – Studies in Grey
U.S. Girls – Heavy Light
Leif Vollebekk – New Ways
Wares – Survival
The Weeknd – After Hours
WHOOP-Szo – Warrior Down
Witch Prophet – DNA Activation
Zen Bamboo – GLU

• 

• 

Presented on Saturday, June 3, 2000 on the grounds of Saint Joseph’s Oratory, La Symphonie du millénaire was composed by Serge Arcuri, Walter Boudreau, Denys Bouliane, Vincent Collard, Yves Daoust, Alain Dauphinais, André Duchesne, Louis Dufort, Sean Ferguson, Michel Gonneville, André Hamel, Alain Lalonde, Estelle Lemire, Jean Lesage, Luc Marcel, Marie Pelletier, John Rea, Anthony Rozankovic and Gilles Tremblay.

No less than 15 ensembles with 333 musicians, a carillon, a large organ, 2000 bell-ringers, two fire trucks and 15 church steeples were then called upon to perform before a crowd worthy of the great pop festivals. One thing is certain, it was by far the most unifying contemporary music happening ever presented in Quebec, if not in Canada.

• 

Why such a deployment? Before making so-called serious music, Boudreau had come up in the golden age of counterculture and psychedelia, hence the band Infonie, of which he was the eminent leader, a formidable musical laboratory at the confluence of current jazz, rock, contemporary and modern music of classical tradition. This explains the composer’s fascination with the great countercultural events of his generation and his desire to plunge a mass audience into contemporary music, which at the time was considered austere and inaudible by the conservative minds of the small Quebec community and other backward pontiffs of our contemporary culture.

As was almost always the case with contemporary music at the time, the event triggered a torrent of nonsense from reactionary critics (no need to name them) and a flood of enthusiasm among open-minded music lovers.

“I don’t pretend that the Symphonie was loved by everyone, let alone that the composers involved achieved their life’s work,” said Boudreau, interviewed by La Presse the day after the performance. “I’m certain of one thing, however – La Symphonie du millénaire has captured the imagination, it has appealed to the majority of the audience, because they are culturally omnivorous. I too love blues and even heavy metal, but, more particularly, contemporary music. I know that this event gave us enough meat to go out and get a large audience. Our music is much more accessible than we think, it just needs to be presented in a context that encourages openness and discovery.”

• 

No broadcaster at the time, including the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, had bothered to capture this historic event on television. Filmmakers had nevertheless agreed to film on a volunteer basis, but no documents have been made public to date. It seems that a complex montage was necessary, given the relative quality of the images. We’re still waiting for the results.

In any case, “we have demonstrated the openness and intelligence of people, which many cultural and media decision-makers refuse to acknowledge,” Boudreau concluded. He thinks no less the same today.

What’s next? “Unfortunately, it would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to finance the public release of this recording,” Boudreau sighs, “it’s a question of copyright and performance royalties. Who can finance such an undertaking?”

The master tape of this historic recording sleeps peacefully on a CBC radio-dept. shelf. The work resurfaced on stage in a reduced format in 2017, as part of the SMCQ’s 50th anniversary, and… we still don’t know when and how the recording of this “toutpartoutphonique” work will be released to the public. Frustrating!

In the United States, according to data from BuzzAngle, relayed by Quartz, “the number of total on-demand streams were recently down 18.3 billion to 16.6 billion, a drop of about 10%. The data include streams of all major providers, including Spotify, Apple Music, and Pandora.”

For its part, the New York Times reveals that combined Top 200 feeds on Spotify in the U.S. slipped for at least three consecutive weeks in March.

“Facebook, Netflix and YouTube have all seen user numbers on their phone apps stagnate or fall off as their websites have grown, the data from SimilarWeb and Apptopia indicates. SimilarWeb and Apptopia both draw their traffic numbers from several independent sources to create data that can be compared across the internet.”

In Italy, Quartz also reveals, the 200 most popular songs on Spotify averaged 18.3 million daily streams in February 2019. After the national quarantine was imposed by the authorities, the total number of feeds for the 200 most popular songs did not exceed 14.4 million, a drop of 23% between March 3 and 17.

Same in Sweden: a drop of 3.9 million broadcasts per day, from 18.3 million in February 2019 to 14.4 million since the beginning of March.

In France, the situation is similar: according to Les Jours, relayed by Huffington Post, Spotify, Deezer and Apple Music lost between 10 and 15 percent of their listeners during the week of March 16. A lobby of France’s music multinationals, the Syndicat national de l’édition phonographique (SNEP), in turn confirms that the top 200 French albums on streaming platforms fell by 22 percent.

Last February, Spotify boasted that it had gained 10 million new paying users in the last three months of 2019. With 124 million paying users, Spotify was on a roll at the time. What’s the situation today?

While rap, pop, and rock are stricken with negative statistics, quiet music is flourishing in the corners: classical, opera, mood music and soft experimental sounds have been gaining ground in Europe and North America, Chartmetric says, drawing on several sources. “The interesting inflection point is between March 16 and March 23, where all three groupings trend high and to the right, peaking at the April 9 end of the timeline. Approximately 80 percent of the artists here do so. So, no matter what their MLs momentum was, they seemed to march to the beat of the same drum at the same time.”

François-Mario Labbé, President of Analekta, Canada’s largest independent classical record company, corroborates the data. “Classical music and jazz are among the few musical genres that have increased their influence during the pandemic. By a lot, in fact, about 25 percent. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) and our own corporate reports confirm that classical music is benefiting from the pandemic. There is also evidence that soothing music is becoming more popular in these uncertain times.

“As for the decline in other genres of music, another explanation is that people are listening to less streamed music because they don’t have to travel to work in the morning and evening. And they watch more television.”

Does this mean that business is going well at Analekta, without any major difficulties on the horizon?

“Two years ago,” says Labbé, “I had set myself the goal of reaching 100 million streams in 2021. But from March 1, 2019, to March 1, 2020, we’ve exceeded 80 million, which means we’re going to make 100 million for the coming year.”

COVID-19 also creates an opportunity to showcase local talent at Analekta.

“When the Panier Bleu was launched in Quebec, Angèle Dubeau said to me, why not follow suit? The idea came up to put playlists online made by our label’s star artists – Dubeau, Maestro Kent Nagano, Charles Richard-Hamelin, Luc Beauséjour, etcetera. The reception is very good, it’s done in this Quebecois spirit of buying local, because our classical artists are among the best in the world. We have nothing to envy the major music labels, we have an extraordinary production. It’s a way of saying to our fellow citizens, support us!”

You can do so right here.

PAN M 360 pays homage to this towering Polish artist whose influence has extended beyond contemporary music of Western origin, through adaptations of his works for film and television – The Exorcist, The Shining, Wild at Heart, Shutter Island, Twin Peaks, etc. It was also Penderecki himself who (quite) recently conducted a symphony orchestra in the performance of the famous Symphony No. 3 by his late compatriot Henryk Gorecki, whose soloist was none other than Beth Gibbons (Portishead). We also know that Jonny Greenwood (Radiohead) worked with the composer in 2012, which was significant for the musician, who was then in the process of mastering contemporary orchestral language.

A composer since childhood, Penderecki has composed more than 150 works for classical performers and also avant-garde musicians, including eight symphonies, four operas, some 20 concertos, some 15 pieces for solo instruments, more than 15 for chamber orchestras and more than 30 for choral singing.

The first phase of his compositional life was devoted to serial music, thus atonal and post-dodecaphonic. It was said at the time to be dependent on the orchestral aesthetics developed by Anton Webern and Pierre Boulez, from two different generations. Thus it was part of the dominant contemporary movement of its time, that is to say until the mid-’70s. 

This formal body of work was informed by a strong Christian fervour, as witnessed by his St. Luke Passion (1965-66), a key work that the Montreal Symphony Orchestra performed in the summer of 2018, under the direction of Maestro Nagano, at the Lanaudière Festival, as well as in Krakow, Poland, and at the famous Salzburg Festival in Austria.

The composer courteously granted an interview to La Presse; at the end of the phone call with this writer, the vitality of his voice and his liveliness of spirit offered no hint that he would move on to another dimension less than two years later.

Penderecki perfectly engaged the paradox between contemporary music and sacred music, present throughout his entire oeuvre from the 1950s onwards (Psalms of David), even in its most experimental phases.

“Sacred music was forgotten, which is no longer the case. Numerous Passions, it must be said, have been written in the history of music. I am delighted that mine is alive and well. It is considered my most important work, but I believe that others are of equal quality – for example, Utrenja (1970-1971) or Symphony No. 7, known as Seven Gates of Jerusalem (1996).”

This simultaneous assumption of Christian faith and of the most avant-garde musical forms of his time is remarkable in this exceptional composer, who also gradually reintegrated Romanticism and post-Romanticism into his approach, without it being anachronistic for all that. 

“My music,” he said, “must first of all be connected to the emotions. It is also important for me to avoid unnecessary complications that disengage the listener or force them to overanalyze while listening. To captivate the listener, you need formal clarity, harmonic clarity.” (Alain Brunet)

All the more reason to pay this modest tribute to him and perhaps introduce his work to music lovers who have not yet experienced his colossal work.

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2020: Actions – Fire! Orchestra

Wishing to collaborate with musicians from outside the realm of classical music, Penderecki composed Actions for Free Jazz Orchestra, a work performed in 1971 by the New Eternal Rhythm Orchestra under the direction of Don Cherry. The ensemble – whose members included Peter Brötzmann, Terje Rypdal, Tomasz Stanko and Kenny Wheeler, among others – played explosive music in which the dissonance owed as much to free-jazz improvisation as to the contemporary music that Penderecki was advocating at the time. The composer intended to continue the adventure, but it was not followed up.

Taking up the torch, the Fire! Orchestra led by Swedish composer Mats Gustaffson has just released a new version of Actions on the Rune Grammofon label. Gustaffson has considerably reduced the pace of the composition, from 17 to 40 minutes. Played this way, it evokes at times the oppressive music of Penderecki that was used in the films of Kubrick, Friedkin and Lynch. The circle is complete. (Steve Naud)

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1990: Penderecki: St. Luke Passion – Warsaw National Symphony Orchestra, Warsaw National Philharmonic Chorus

The Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki is a kind of free electron in the world of contemporary music. Through the use of serial processes, graphic notation and indeterminacy, his early works, like those of Henryk Gorecki, were part of an avant-garde movement not only in Poland but across Europe. Nevertheless, like his compatriot, his language later “softened” and he gave the impression of taking refuge in the music of the past. That said, the composer never denied the artistic and spiritual baggage bequeathed to him by his predecessors. His St. Luke Passion, written in 1966, is an excellent example of this synchronization between tradition and evolution. 

This monumental work, composed to commemorate the 700th anniversary of Münster Cathedral, was a real tour de force at the time, both in terms of the numbers required and the concept itself. Writing a religious work, a passion moreover, was a very daring gesture on the part of the young composer. It is a powerful, poignant, disturbing, extremely dramatic and resolutely moving work. Among the few existing recordings, the one headed by Penderecki himself is a reference. The reverberation of Christ the King Cathedral in Katowice gives this Passion a grandiose dimension, and the performers offer an effective and heartfelt vision of this essential work of religious music of the last 60 years. (François Vallières)

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1998: Orchestral Works Vol. 1 – Symphony No. 3, Threnody – National Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra

Although his body of work is considerable, Penderecki will forever be associated for me with one piece, his Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, in which 52 string players (24 violins, 10 violas, 10 cellos and eight double basses) engage in incessant and strident microtonal glissandi. From the outset, one has the impression of finding oneself in the middle of a beehive in full flight, then in a city where the air-raid sirens sound, not to mention the subsequent roar of airplane engines.

I know it’s supposed to make the listener feel all sorts of agony, but the effect of this music on me as a dissonance-loving listener is more one of fascination. My reference recording: the National Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Antoni Wit, made in 1998, and released on Naxos.

Interestingly, Bernard Herrmann’s soundtrack for Hitchcock’s Psycho, which also makes extensive use of the shrill and dissonant sounds of the violin, and Penderecki’s piece were both composed at the same time. The film premiered in November 1960, and Penderecki’s piece was premiered on Polish radio the following spring. (Michel Rondeau)

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2020: Symphony No. 6 “Chinese Songs”, Concerto for Clarinet – Polish Chamber Philharmonic Orchestra Sopot / Wojciech Rajski, Stephan Genz, Andrzej Wojciechowski

After the premiere of his Symphony No. 7 in 1996, followed by that of his Symphony No. 8 in 2005, there was something mysterious about the absence of the Sixth in the composer’s repertoire. So here it is at last, in a first recording made two years after its premiere by the Guangzhou Symphony Orchestra in 2017, twelve years after the Eighth, Songs of Transience, in which it also finds its genesis. Strongly inspired by Hans Bethge’s collection of texts, Die chinesische Flöte, from which he had used an excerpt in the latter, the composer first composed Three Chinese Songs in 2008, and then added five more texts by Chinese poets found in Bethge’s collection to what became his Symphony No. 6, Chinese Poems, for baritone and orchestra. While he was inspired by the same collection of texts as Mahler for his Song of the Earth, Penderecki is, at 27 minutes, more concise than his illustrious colleague and less expansive, too, on the orchestral side, although he does add interludes played by the solo erhu (Joanna Kravchenko). The latter recalls the composer’s taste for what might be called “exotic” sounds, but the fact remains that we are probably closer here to Mahler than to  the “noise” of Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, composed at a time when Penderecki was compared to Xenakis. The composer’s delight in playing with the colours of sound is evident in this Clarinet Concerto of 1995, which was previously a cello concerto (1989) and, initially, a viola concerto (1983). The work carries a strong romantic charge that conductor Wojciech Rajski transmits with sensitivity. As for the soloist, he traverses this virtuoso score with ease, with a nod to Gershwin included. (Réjean Beaucage)

Manu Dibango was asserting himself as a decisive conductor of global pop culture. A fiery arranger, an inspired composer, an efficient saxophonist (tenor and soprano) who also flirted with French pop (tenor with Nino Ferrer, organ with Dick Rivers), he was first and foremost a great conceptual leader. Among the best African musicians from the 1950s until his death, Emmanuel N’Djoké Dibango proved that modern Africa had much more to offer than a repertoire of traditional music, however rich and diverse it might be. (Alain Brunet) 

To pay homage to him, PAN M 360 suggests five essential albums from his immense discography.

1972: Soul Makossa

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1972: O Boso (Soul Makossa)

Active since the ’50s and, although he was part of the variable geometry of Fela Kuti’s  collective Africa 70, it was with this album, released in 1972, that the Cameroonian saxophonist Manu Dibango really made himself known throughout the world, particularly thanks to the success of the now-classic “Soul Makossa” and its magical mantra, “ma-mako, ma-ma-sa, mako-mako-ssa”. This song – originally commissioned by Cameroon’s Minister of Sports, who wanted an anthem to support the national soccer team – found its way into the hands of a few New York disc jockeys, who quickly adopted for at their parties. It has since been borrowed by Michael Jackson, Rihanna (who was sued), Quincy Jones and several others. But O Boso is more than just an album with a worldwide hit, it is for many the most successful album of the late saxophonist’s career. It’s also the one the neophyte should start with to discover the multifaceted musical universe of Dibango. In eight tracks, O Boso offers a multitude of musical styles that defy easy categorization: Afro-folk, jazz-fusion, brassy funk, Afrobeat… Almost 50 years after its release, this record remains a true timeless nugget. (Patrick Baillargeon)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4S3k4iN9fUA

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1976: Afrovision

The late Manu Dibango made his mark on the world map of music with the enormously influential 1972 hit “Soul Makossa”, the title of which essentially served as a calling card. While fellow sax-man Fela Kuti, in nearby Nigeria, was refashioning hard American funk with local fuji and highlife into a weapon of political resistance, “the Lion of Cameroon” was applying a lighter touch, or at least more lighthearted – his blend of funk and makossa (a style named from the Duala-language word for “dance”) was cheerful and uncontentious, if often as aggressive and uptempo as Kuti’s jams. Dibango’s sax demanded attention, forcefully, but rewarded it with a hydraulic uplift in the listener’s spirit.

An overview of Dibango’s seven-decade career leaves no question of his constant creative restlessness. 1976’s Afrovision is solid evidence of that – having established his brand with his 1972 hit, this album found him eager to show off his diversity, as well as his capacity for keeping up with current stylistic and production trends.

Obviously, a disco number was de rigueur on any album released in 1976, and so Afrovision kicks off with the sparkling, punchy “Big Blow”. As though to say, “you all got what you came for, now stick around and see where I’m going”, that track is followed by the unexpected, sax-free “Streets of Dakar” with its melodic percussion, mewling slide guitar, and mild, rubbery groove. The energy level spikes again with the dancefloor fillers “Aloko Party” and “Bayam Sell’am”, and then comes “Baobab Sun”, which not only showcased Dibango’s chops at the vibraphone (as does the closing title track), it suggested a strong reorientation towards jazz, which Dibango would take further in the years that followed. (Rupert Bottenberg)

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1985: Electric Africa

In the mid-’80s, Herbie Hancock recorded Future Shock and Sound-System, excursions into electro-funk and instrumental hip hop. Miles Davis triggered his latest contemporary funk-jazz eruptions with synths, bass and electric keyboards. Then based in the Paris area, Manu Dibango was into American music, which he adapted to his funk-makossa-bikutsi-jazz. The strength of this groove, the singularity of the breaks and riffs initiated by the tenorman and his huge rhythm section, was taken to the fore. These long, horizontal, irresistible grooves, punctuated by multiple complex asides, were generated under the guidance of Bill Laswell, a visionary producer at the time. Dibango’s extraordinary cohort included Cameroonian bassist Francis Mbappé, Beninese keyboard-player Wally Badarou, American keyboard-player Bernie Worrell and Guinean griot Mory Kanté. All this was capped by the leader’s voice, baritone phrases in Douala, his expressive tenor playing and the female backing vocals. And of course there’s pianist Herbie Hancock’s memorable solo at the heart of the title piece, ten minutes and 28 seconds of pure enjoyment. (Alain Brunet)

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1986: Afrijazzy

Afrijazzy is the culmination of the relationship between Bill Laswell and Manu Dibango. Although he was limited in the articulation and knowledge necessary for high-level jazz, the tenorman had reached exceptional heights in collective performance, comparable to Carlos Santana at the time of his jazz forays (Caravanserai, Welcome, Borboletta). Montreal music lovers remember that Afrijazzy‘s material was played at the Spectrum in the summer of ’86, at the end of a veritable tropical storm that had battered the city. The concert was simply fabulous, although different from the recording released during the same period. Once again produced by Bill Laswell in a New York studio, Afrijazzy‘s repertoire is closer to pan-African music, from Ghanaian highlife to the South African jazz of Abdullah Ibrahim and Hugh Masekela, and the Afrobeat of Fela Anikulapo Kuti. A small army of musicians took part in these historic sessions, even more considerable than the one mobilized for the opus Electric Africa. The powerful makossa-funk infusions re-emerged at the end of the programme, reminding us that Dibango was also a popular-culture musician, and one of his crucial missions was to get asses moving. (Alain Brunet)

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1994: Wakafrica

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In 1994, Africa’s musical movers and shakers gathered around Manu Dibango to record a summit meeting. The Wakafrika sessions have been held in Paris, London, Los Angeles and New York. Youssou N’Dour (Senegal) covers “Soul Makossa” in Wolof, Salif Keita (Mali) sings on “Emma”, Ray Lema (Congo) on “Homeless”, King Sunny Adé (Nigeria) on “Hi-Life”, Peter Gabriel (in the heyday of Real World) and Geoffrey Oryema (Uganda) on “Biko”, Ladysmith Black Mambazo (South Africa) on “Wimoweh”, Angélique Kidjo (Benin) and Papa Wemba (Congo) on “Ami Oh!”, Bonga (Angola) and Touré Kunda (Senegal) on “Diarabi”, and the list goes on… This is a collective work, fundamentally pan-African, which bears witness to the great currents in vogue a quarter of a century ago (b’balax, makossa, highlife, juju, gospel, zulu, etc.), all arranged, orchestrated and directed by Manu Dibango. The musician had moreover respected the particularities of the styles and cultures of the stars on the programme. In other words, the leadership and unifying power of this giant Cameroonian transplanted to France. (Alain Brunet)