Concert review

musique de film

The magic of Miyazaki comes to life with the FILMharmonic Orchestra

by Frédéric Cardin

Saturday night, the FILMharmonic Orchestra paid tribute to composer Joe Hisaishi, a loyal partner of director Hayao Miyazaki, the genius of Japanese animated film for the last 50 years. As a result, the entire magical and benevolent universe of Miyazaki’s characters came to life in the minds and hearts of the audience filling the Wilfrid-Pelletier Hall at Place des Arts in Montreal.

Impeccable Classicism

Hisaishi’s music is of impeccable romantic classicism. The silky melodies carried by the strings are accompanied by the pleasant chirping of colours from the woodwinds and percussion, as well as the sometimes heroic bursts from the brass. It is music filled with caressing tones, bathed in safe harmonies, but which, thanks to the composer’s talent, prevents the music as a whole from falling into the banality of uninspired writing. Hisaishi takes us with him into this world of simple sweetness and beauty, inhabited by an extra touch of youthful wonder.

That said, as conductor Francis Choinière mentioned during one of his interventions (short and effective, let us emphasise), Miyazaki’s world (and by extension Hisaishi’s music) carries within it, equally, the naivety of childhood through its fairy-tale worlds and a heartfelt dose of more advanced reflection on the environmental crisis, the transition to adulthood, and freedom.

From Kiki to Mononoke, and of course Totoro

Kiki’s Delivery Service kicked off the evening with its delicate theme. Then, the excerpt Requiem from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind reminded us of Hisaishi’s classical roots with this melody derived from Handel’s Passacaglia, cleverly adapted for the needs of this soundtrack. An excerpt from the music of Princess Mononoke, a masterful score curiously underlined in this concert, followed before diving into a substantial suite of themes from one of Miyazaki’s most iconic films: My Neighbour Totoro. Hisaishi’s pen for this film, with its exquisite sweetness and simplicity, blossoms with captivating melodies for the strings and fine, graceful touches for the woodwinds, with Gershwin-esque tones that stand out strongly in certain places. No big, evil villains in this film and its score, no tearful drama, no full-blown battle, just the friendly and fascinated tenderness of discovering a parallel world filled with gentle creatures. A music that feels so good, you cannot not love it deeply.

The second part of the concert gave us two long suites from two essential films of the Miyazaki canon: Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle. If Chihiro is not lacking in effective passages, it is Howl’s Moving Castle that stands out. Especially with that incredibly memorable waltz. But not only that, because the story, although classic Miyazaki, still contains some of the most epic moments in all of the master’s films. The music reflects this with great acuity, while remaining true to the composer’s leitmotifs: simplicity and quality.

Two encores, including a reprise of the Totoro theme with the entire audience as an ad hoc choir. Everyone left the room humming To to-ro, To tooo Ro.

One drawback: the amplification used gives a filtered and less natural colouration to the strings. One begins to wish that the FILMharmonique Orchestra would perform at the Maison symphonique instead. But well, it’s a detail that ultimately has little consequence on the success of this enchanting evening that we would be ready to experience again at any time.

And that anytime could be March 21 in Quebec City, as the same program will be given at the Grand Théâtre. People of the capital, don’t miss it.

DETAILS AND TICKETS

expérimental / contemporain / Multidisciplinaire / Musique de création

Semaine du Neuf | Lovemusic: A Clash of Bodies and Sounds

by Jeremy Fortin

On Thursday, the Lovemusic collective presented Protest of the Physical at La Chapelle scène contemporaine. It was a daring concert that explored the intersection of the body and music. The result? A diverse program performed with great sensitivity by the collective’s members, though it occasionally missed the mark.

The concert opens with “In die Ferne, dem Berg zu” by German composer Annette Schlünz and choreographer Anne-Hélène Kutujonsky. In my view, one of the concert’s highlights, the piece begins with the musicians dropping a handful of pebbles onto the floor. The relationship between the pebbles and the musicians is certainly ambiguous, but the pebbles hold a certain significance for the performers. Once they have taken their places at their instruments, the group’s artists mingle on stage, continuing to breathe as if their instruments were part of them and their breath emanated from them.

The piece ends as it began—with the guitar—using glissandos to guide the dancers’ movements as they search for their precious stones.

Hands, Drum—Three Bones by composer Nik Bohnenberger continues the concert. This piece is designed to be interactive, with the audience expected to perform the movements displayed on screen in order to alter their own listening experience of the piece. While some effects do not impact the listening experience itself, the biggest issue arose in the attention paid to the musicians during the piece—which was very little. Constantly distracted by the screen, the listener must therefore choose between listening to the piece or following the instructions displayed on the screen.

Seed, a piece by composer Bethany Younge, is certainly interesting from a conceptual standpoint. Featuring musicians who seem alienated from their instruments, we can sense the tension they share with them. The musical aspect thus unfolds along these same lines, where what is played stems from the very movement of these bodies on stage as they resist their instruments.

Inferno, by composer Helmut Oehring, concludes the concert. Blending music and sign language, the piece is a real slap in the face. As the cellist begins the piece by bowing her strings in sync with the soundtrack, a crescendo builds until she unleashes her instrument while letting out a series of screams. When the other musicians join in, the piece undergoes a drop that marks the beginning of the second section, performed entirely in sign language. A third section, blending body percussion and instrumental playing, reaches its climax as all four perform at the peak of their abilities, reintroducing—this time on the clarinet—the cries of despair heard earlier.

expérimental / contemporain

Semaine du Neuf | When the collective becomes an entity

by Z Neto Vinheiras

No hay banda – Lori Freedman, Daniel Áñez, Noam Bierstone, Pablo Jiménez and Ana Maria Romano

“Nada nos quita lo bailado” is already by its title a pretty direct message that whatever the differences, whatever the oppositions, we’ll keep moving and we’ll keep dancing – together. It is a popular reference for that which can’t be taken from us – our memory, our history, our experiences. I suppose that’s exactly what Ana Maria Romano wanted to bring to this form of composition, a collective one, where every musician, with their own individual baggage and story, is part of the process and the product as a whole – the collective becomes an entity. As a listener, I could feel the interconnectedness and the horizontal process of this piece becoming what I was experiencing in Sala at that moment.

I am always specially interested in hybrid formats and constellations of differences and contrasts – although with an apparent separation both sonically speaking and on stage, between acoustic instruments and the electroacoustic apparatus, Ana Maria Romano, Lori Freedman, Daniel Áñez, Noam Bierstone and Pablo Jiménez’s No Hay Banda made us feel like there was one for the night. As relevant as it is now in such a completely distorted world we’re living in, we could hear the speakers shouting “No borders! No nation! Stop the Deportation!” and a Free Palestine, echoing through the room: field-recordings made by Romano at the International Women’s day march that happened the last 8th of march in downtown Montréal. Once more insisting on the intersection of our motives and existences. Known for her strong policies on gender activism and intersectional feminism, Romano treated the collaborative creative subject the same way – non-hierarchically, permeable, listening, sharing, playing and doing together.

The piece itself evoked sometimes feelings of tension, sometimes strange stillness or ambiguous contemplation. Sometimes too, an electronic trance. A well sustained place for improvisation and collaboration – certainly leaving the room very inspired, thank you!

Electro-Pop / musique de film / pop symphonique

Symphonic Tribute to Daft Punk: Effective Fusion, Mostly

by Frédéric Cardin

In the realm of symphonic electro, it was written that Daft Punk would have a prime place sooner or later. Since the remarkable music that the French duo wrote for the film Tron Legacy, which has since become a cult classic, we knew that the inventive glitch pop textures of all previous albums would one day be associated with a symphony orchestra.

That’s the idea behind the concert One More Time, an electro-symphonic tribute to Daft Punk presented at the Wilfrid-Pelletier Hall of the Place des Arts in Montreal, last night and again tonight. On stage: the FILMharmonic Orchestra conducted by Francis Choinière, the singer Barnev, a guitarist, a bassist, a drummer, and a keyboardist/vocalist.

Starting slow but finishing witu panache

The program of arrangements of super famous songs is divided into an intro and five parts made up of mixes of the duo’s songs. The Intro, which blends The Prime Time of Your Life, Aerodynamic, and a bit of Tron Legacy, gives the impression of taking its time, just hinting shyly about what is to come. The energy gradually builds up, but it still feels like it’s lacking some oomph.

This is corrected with the second “movement.” The nature of symphonism reveals here with more conviction its contribution to the repetitive and mechanical impulses of Daft Punk’s music by offering some beautiful moments of harmonic depth in the strings and counterpoints that enhance the structure of the pieces (particularly Da Funk and Around the World).

The second and third parts continue in the same vein with sometimes thrilling performances of popular monuments such as Human After All, Lose Yourself to Dance, and Get Lucky. Although the presence of the guitar and bass adds a bit of an unsuspected “rock” touch to the tunes everyone could whistle, their use is not exaggerated to the point of overly distorting these catchy little gems.

Tron Legacy, less convincing

The mistake in the program is the arrival, after the intermission, of the thirty-minute suite of tunes from Tron Legacy soundtrack. And yet, it pains me to say it. I am a die-hard fan of this exceptional music, one of the best in cinema in the last 25 years, and one of the most accomplished albums in the entire Daft Punk catalogue. Tron Legacy already fused the symphonic and the electronic. There shouldn’t have been a problem. But I should have thought about it: it wasn’t a Cine-Concert, where the demand for accuracy of the music in relation to its sounds in the film is immense and unforgiving. It was a tribute with new arrangements.

And that’s where it relatively failed, in my opinion. The admirable textures, ultra-rich and complex, invented by the Dafts, were absolutely not reproduced. Simplified, even watered down, the pleasure was completely lost. Some themes were entrusted to a saxophone, others to a guitar. Nothing to do with the original music, and even bothering. In some pieces, the tempo was too restrained, ruining the creation of an exciting energy, as in the film. Moreover, an ostentatious rhythmic imbalance between orchestra and pop soloists almost ruined everything around the two-thirds mark. Embarrassing. Result: the build-up before the intermission was lost and the music from Tron Legacy felt boring, much too long. There were still some successful moments, like the Adagio for Tron, for example. But, overall, it was too little.

Feeling the vibe

I still asked myself the question: am I simply an old purist who loves his thing so much that he can’t imagine it any other way? I took the trouble to look around me, in the audience, to see if I was the only one finding it long. Unfortunately, I could indeed sense the same relative boredom from the other people present, except on a few occasions.

It’s such a shame, because many might have left this concert with a negative opinion of this thrilling soundtrack in its true version. In short, all the more reason to organise a true Tron Legacy Cine-Concert one day, with all the multiple and abundant details that make this composition memorable. Hey, with the real Daft Punk too?

Good catch-up

That said, and fortunately, the evening was salvaged by the final grand mix of the program and the return of the qualities that had made the first part a success. Aerodynamic, Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger, Face to Face, One More Time, and as an encore, Instant Crush allowed the audience to stand up and dance.

The singer Barnev performed well during his few appearances and interpretations, although he obviously omitted the characteristic Frenchie-Anglo accent of the Dafters.

If calibrations are in order, especially in the suite from Tron Legacy, we can rejoice in an effective and exciting offering, most of the time.

Another performance is taking place tonight.

DETAILS AND TICKETS

Baroque / Classical / Classical Singing

Arion Baroque Orchestra: Il pianto di Maria: Tears of Joy

by Alexandre Villemaire

For the penultimate concert of its season, Arion Baroque Orchestra invited Montreal’s music-loving audience to immerse themselves in Baroque Italy—an Italy in all its “caricatured” glory, to borrow the artistic director’s words to the audience, where emotions are expressed in their raw, unfiltered form.

For it is indeed emotions—sorrow and pain, certainly, but also love, friendship, joy, and elation—that run through this program curated by harpsichordist and guest conductor Marie van Rhijn. A program that also celebrated women composers during this International Women’s Day weekend.

To convey the various emotions of these works, the spotlight was on the voice, featuring French contralto Anthea Pichanik. In the first part, which opened with Antonio Vivaldi’s cantata *Cessate, omai cessate*, the power of her voice captivated us, as did her embodied portrayal of this rejected lover lamenting his rejection by his Dorilla. Pichanik possesses a rich, brassy timbre in her mid-range, with full-bodied high and low notes, which were, however, sometimes lost in the orchestral mass and at certain phrase endings, yet she displayed a commanding stage presence and a grounded, committed performance. In the excerpt from Maria Margherita Grimani’s cantata *Pallade et Marte*, the aria of the god Mars—a triumphant march with a distinctly martial style, yet retaining a very light touch—was performed with verve. It is above all the dialogue between the cello and the bassoon that captures the listener’s attention in this work. Originally composed for cello and obbligato theorbo, Marie van Rhijn adapted it by replacing the theorbo with the bassoon, writing a specific part for it, much to the delight of Mathieu Lussier. The dialogue between the two instruments effectively illustrated the relationship between the two protagonists, Athena and Mars, with an almost humorous exchange that one would not have imagined possible in this way within the 18th-century repertoire. A short concerto for harpsichord, subtitled “Madrigalesco” by Vivaldi, served as a bridge between these two pieces in the first part, showcasing the harmonic richness of the composer’s language.

The second part was entirely devoted to the voice, featuring excerpts from Maria Teresa Agnesi’s Serenata Ulisse in Compania and Giovanni Battista Ferrandini’s cantata Il pianto di Maria, whose title inspired the name of this concert. Ferrandini’s cantata, much like a Stabat Mater, recounts the suffering of the Mother of Christ as she watches her son on the cross. Originally composed for soprano, the version performed in this concert was transposed down a third. Too high for a contralto in the original key and even too low for a soprano, this version—adapted for the occasion to suit the voice on stage—gave the work a very maternal quality. In the cavatina “Se d’un Dio fui fatta Madre”—the Virgin expresses her pain and even her indignation at seeing her son die. The musical and harmonic line is simple yet rich, carried with warmth by Pichanik’s voice and supported by the orchestra and Marie van Rhijn in phrasing and conducting of a thrilling and touching intensity.

With a program that this year features a thoughtful blend of well-known composers and new discoveries—including a third of its 2025–2026 season dedicated to female composers—Arion continues to bring a breath of fresh air and a welcome variety to the repertoire of 17th- and 18th-century music on the Montreal scene.

Photo Credit: Elliana Zimmerman

Experimental / jeunesse

Semaine du Neuf | Sound understanding for children under 3 years… and us

by Vitta Morales

When covering a contemporary music festival, one must expect to be thrown a couple of curve balls before the end of the festivities. Composers and performers alike are, after all, tasked with increasingly pushing and reinventing performance practice and compositional techniques; not to mention the advances in technology that contemporary composers often feel pressured to incorporate in their ongoing conceptions.

Having said all this, I was caught completely unprepared to review Ptitécouti, a piece by the Hanatsumiroir Ensemble who prepared a spectacle conceived specifically for children aged 0 to 3. You can imagine my feeling out of place as a moustachioed childless adult lurking about the Édifice Wilder scratching down notes while the babies, toddlers and their parents attempted to enjoy an afternoon of contemporary music. 

Don’t say I don’t do anything for you, dear reader.

As concerns the music and spectacle itself: our principal performer Ayako Okulo made use of modular wooden shelving that housed in its centre, a transparent tank of water which she splashed, let drip from her hands, blew into, and on which she placed what seemed like sea shells that floated about and clinked together. 

There were microphones placed strategically so that all the minute sounds and textures could be appreciated over the sound system. There were temporal delay effects employed as well and light up cushions for the children to repose themselves and take in the sights and sounds. 

Okulo, then opened little compartments on the wooden shelves and pulled from them windchimes, she then made use of various ocarinas and her skills as a flutist became apparent as she employed fluttering tonguing techniques among others. 

The whole thing was whimsical and put the term “play” into perspective where “playing music” is concerned. I could well imagine a preambulatory child being able to see themselves depicted, (if we assume for a second that self consciousness can precede walking), as the unfolding of the performance resembled that of a child exploring the contents of their toy chest.

The show notes tell us, in fact, that we were to expect music, scenography, and lighting that was “adapted to the psychology and understanding of the world of children under 3 years old. At the heart of the show: a luminous box full of surprises, made of various compartments and drawers.” It seemed that some children missed the memo, however.

 Many goo-goos and ga-gas from the audience seemed to have been uttered out of boredom or otherwise reaching their limit with the display on offer. It is admittedly hard to compete with Cocomelon and iPads. Their parents shuffled them out of the room preemptively once they got the feeling the situation was untenable where attention spans were concerned. 

This is not an indictment on the show itself, which I myself found charming, short, and sweet for the duration of its thirty minutes. Kudos from the aforementioned out of place mustachioed note-taking lurker.

expérimental / contemporain / Indigenous peoples

Semaine du Neuf | Sxelxéles te tl’etla’axel – Design for Inviting, the Power of Words… and of Sounds?

by Michel Labrecque

Dylan Robinson is a member of the Skwah First Nation and an associate professor at the University of British Columbia School of Music. His creative work and research focus on Indigenous activism and the arts. He is part of a movement that advocates for Indigenous people to break free from tradition by embracing contemporary music and the arts.

“Sxelxéles te tl’etla’axel” is a performance that combines visuals, choreography, and music to “define a new performance space inspired by Indigenous (xwélmexw) values of relationship and gathering protocols,” according to the program for La Semaine du Neuf.

I’ll be honest with you: as a music journalist, I’m completely out of my element in the world of contemporary music, and this performance isn’t going to help me feel any more at home there. I would have much preferred to cover the Bozzini Quartet or the Quasar Saxophone Quartet, which are more explicitly focused on music.

For here, the music is minimalist in every sense of the word: a piano, a harpsichord, and a viola, played only sporadically. The pieces were composed by Anna Höstman and Linda Catlin Smith, including the very minimalist yet lovely “Brocade” for piano and harpsichord.

On stage, there are also two screens displaying text or images, as well as three chairs on which the three performers take turns sitting; they also play instruments and read us stories, all of which begin with “once upon a time.”

In these narratives and on-screen texts, the idea of a transition between two worlds seems to emerge—of corridors to traverse, of taking the other with you. Of wounds, of resistance, of complicated paths. Water is also frequently mentioned. We hear a very beautiful text about a color that seems to possess emotions. There are also two parallel stories that offer different perspectives on life.

Here’s my take on it. Yours might have been different. What should we take away from this very slow performance, where the choreography basically consists of having the performers walk around? I’m not sure. At the end of the performance, the applause was polite. The woman sitting next to me, who is well-known in the contemporary music scene, seemed very ambivalent in her assessment.

But we left wondering. Maybe that was the point…

Photo Credit: Philippe Latour

Publicité panam
Classical / Experimental / Contemporary / Neoclassical

Semaine du Neuf | Quatuor Bozzini: A Journey into the Extremes of Sound

by Pietro Freiburger

On March 9th, a concert of new experimental music by the Quatuor Bozzini was held at the Chapelle Scène Contemporaine as part of the Semaine du Neuf. The program included music by living composers and highlighted the sound that made this ensemble recognizable in the international experimental music scene.

The concert opened with Companioning (2026) by Fulya Uçanok, a 2026 piece written for the ensemble that focuses on the ability to listen and interact during the performance between the members. A suspended, to a certain extent non-terrestrial atmosphere accompanied the audience throughout the performance of the piece, which exploits the sound of the instruments in a delicate balance between individual possibility and collective cohesion. The program then included two pieces written between 2014 and 2016 by Cenk Ergün, with whom the quartet has recently collaborated.

The first one, Celare, begins sul tasto for all four musicians, creating an almost hidden preparation (celare in Italian means precisely “to hide”) to what follows. Which was in the name of virtuosity of sound and dialogue, the main feature of the Bozzini Quartet. The second and last work, Sonare, was the one that differed most from the previous ones. There was something wild and brutal in this work: as much as the previous ones were expressed by subtraction, of sound and individuality, as much as this one manifested itself by the addition of sound material by each member of the quartet. A fascinating journey into the unexplored possibilities of sound for strings, warmly applauded by the audience.

expérimental / contemporain / Multidisciplinaire

Semaine du Neuf | Loneliness, hyperreality, connection, a harsh wake-up call

by Alain Brunet

Among the highlights (if not the highlight) of this “Semaine du Neuf,” Hide to Show is a mind-blowing work that demands extreme virtuosity to convey a metaphor for the virtual universe in which we are now immersed. The interview with its artistic director, cellist Pieter Matthynssens, had already piqued our interest, and Saturday afternoon’s performance in a studio-theater at the Wilder—unfortunately sparsely attended—definitely won over the majority of those who came to see this truly memorable show.

The work by Cologne-based composer Michael Biel challenged the eight musicians of the Flemish Belgian ensemble Nadar (cello, violin, clarinet, saxophone, flute, trombone, keyboard, percussion) to acquire a new skill: performing an extremely complex score in harmony with an electronic soundtrack, singing, dancing, moving through the space, operating the Venetian blinds in one of the six cubicles set up in the center of the stage, and playing in a group, as a duo, or individually.

For 70 minutes, this relentless barrage is unlike anything heard before, although the work is clearly descended from multi-style integrated collages—one thinks in particular of the works of John Zorn, Hermeto Pascoal, Frank Zappa, or Sun Ra. A generation or two later, the current era has led composer Michael Biel—who is not an orchestra leader like those mentioned above—to evolve his concert language/collage with the Nadar ensemble, blending multiple musical references drawn from electro, Japanese anime, pop, modern film music, and also contemporary music with classical roots. But… in a way, let’s agree that Nadar is somewhat Michael Biel’s band, at least in terms of the body of work presented over time.

Inspiration in music is a snapshot of the present moment, and we could witness its diversity in *Hide to Show*. This fragmentation of listening on the web inevitably leads to a multi-genre culture, as the composer demonstrates to further his point: what is real before your eyes and what is not, whether performed live or projected on a screen. Michael Biel does not explore deepfakes here (we imagine that will come later!), but rather real or virtual performance within a work where the performers evoke the loneliness of the web and the way each person expresses themselves there without always revealing their true identity—or revealing it only partially.

Thus, the lines are brilliantly blurred, and the game inevitably involves trying to distinguish between what is being performed in real time and what was previously recorded by the production cameras. The re-inserted recordings are therefore integral to Hide to Show, to such an extent that we gradually lose interest in distinguishing what is being performed in real time from what is not. As Pieter Matthynssens pointed out in an interview. This mind-bending whirlwind can also be seen as a legitimate extension of musical theater or chamber opera—a sort of hybridization of multimedia performance with the forms that preceded it, as we observed the day before with Quigital Corporate Retreat, another excellent work presented by soprano Sarah Albu and Architek Percussion. This is where we stand, and Hide to Show lifts us up.

expérimental / contemporain / Musique de création

Semaine du Neuf | Five Visions of Movement Between Instruments and Electronics

by Jeremy Fortin

From Bordeaux, the ensemble Proxima Centauri was in Montreal this week to present its concert Mouvements. It was a flawless performance by the ensemble, in which the dialogue between electronics and instrumental performers stood at the center of the presentation.

The concert opens with DEATH TALES, spurred, by Quebec composer Corie Rose Soumah, part of the emerging artists program of Le Vivier. The piece begins in near darkness, with a spotlight primarily focused on the snare drum player seated at the center of the stage. The roll initiated by the percussionist serves as a guiding line throughout the piece, developing in tandem with the electronic component, which in turn gradually enriches itself through the sounds being played. The other instrumentalists present (saxophone, piano, and flute) develop their own textures in dialogue with the snare drum, blending sustained and multiphonic sounds with the snare’s rolling rhythm. These layers of superimposed sounds gradually create a kind of irregular rhythmic pattern that evolves throughout the piece, establishing a certain stability within instability.

The concert continues with Away by French composer Brendan Champeaux, a duo for timpani and piano accompanied by live electronics. The piece unfolds as a dialogue between the piano and the timpani, facilitated by the electronics, which capture the sounds of both instruments and bring out a third mediating voice—the electronics themselves. It is a restrained yet effective work that sets the stage for what is certainly the most daring piece of the concert.

That piece is Nemorensis by Argentine composer Demian Rudel Rey, written for tenor saxophone, electronics, and video. The saxophonist enters the stage wearing a futuristic outfit equipped with a helmet featuring a tinted visor. The saxophone itself is modified with an extension containing three additional mouthpieces as well as an extension at the neck. From what could be perceived, this device serves to filter the sound of the instrument and invites us to rediscover the saxophone through unfamiliar sonic textures.

The fourth piece on the program, Ombres by French composer Raphaèle Biston, marks a complete break from what preceded it with Nemorensis. Here, the four instrumentalists share the stage with pre-recorded electroacoustic sounds that evolve alongside the instruments with the aim of reproducing their timbre and creating a unified texture across the ensemble and the electronics.

The concert concludes with La cité du son by Mexican composer Arturo Fuentes, a piece just as compelling as the rest of the program. In it, the composer layers sound recordings from the cities of Bordeaux and Mexico City. It is therefore up to Christophe Havel, responsible for the electronics during the concert, to interact with the instrumentalists in order to create a dialogue between these two cities, so different from one another.

Publicité panam

Semaine du neuf | Quigital Corporate Retreat, a satirical immersion in corporate culture

by Olivier Martin-Fréchette

As soon as we climb the stairs leading to the Espace Orange at the Wilder Building, we are immediately plunged into the immersive satirical performance Quigital Corporate Retreat, performed by Architek Percussion and soprano Sarah Albu.

Employees of the fictitious company Quigital welcome us by offering a badge bearing a QR code that allows us to register on Quigital’s online platform. Once there, we are asked to complete various tasks: scanning a colleague’s badge, buying virtual objects or privileges with points accumulated in the app, or even chatting with Quincy, Quigital’s conversational robot.

The role-playing game is therefore quickly set in motion, and we find ourselves participating in the performance even before entering the auditorium. The immersive effect is already effective. I can already feel that slight existential disgust that only a mandatory, unpaid corporate networking event can provoke in me.

Then comes the moment to enter the hall, where the “conference” portion of the show begins. We are introduced to the characters who will occupy the stage: Karen, the “She.E.O.” (Sarah Albu), as well as the employees who will serve as examples during the training session (Architek Percussion: Noam Bierstone, Ben Duinker, Alessandro Valiante, Parker Bert). Each of them is introduced and makes their entrance onto the stage in a perfectly ridiculous choreography accompanied by a soundtrack worthy of the smooth jazz fusion of The Rippingtons.

The tone is clear: we are about to witness a particularly sharp and unapologetic satire of late-stage capitalism, its performative discourse of inclusion, and its predictable tactics of manipulation. Throughout the concert, the speech of the lecturer and She.E.O. oscillates between ready-made phrases worthy of the worst TED Talks given by out-of-touch businesspeople, combined with indoctrination mantras reminiscent of those found in American megachurches. All of this unfolds in front of a giant screen on which PowerPoints, training videos, impossible questions, forwarded emails, and occasionally the company’s conversational robot are projected. The latter eventually replaces the vast majority of the employees (the audience), who, by the end of the piece, are all fired except for the three people who collected the most points on the app during the pre-concert and the intermission. Through the role-playing experience, the entire presentation makes us feel the alienation of employees at the bottom of the corporate ladder in the face of large corporations and their performance-optimization tools that will eventually cost them their jobs.

The parody is very skillful. It is obvious, but the constant use of the linguistic codes and aesthetics of the corporate world allows us to maintain a certain suspension of disbelief, enabling us to experience an immersion rather than simply watching a performance.

The soprano’s voice is constantly amplified by a headset microphone, and moments guided by traditional pop instruments alternate with moments where the instrumentation consists of office objects transformed into percussion instruments, all interspersed with sampling and pre-recorded tracks. The way very contrasting musical styles combine stands out for its fluidity. The only moment when I thought I noticed a technical issue, I ended up wondering whether the glitch was actually part of the show.

Stylistically, the piece navigates between several worlds. We move from the typical music of training videos—such as the jazz fusion mentioned earlier—to duos of voice and pitched percussion evolving in unison over atonal melodies. These passages are punctuated by moments of complex percussion performed on computer keyboards, pens, a stapler, or even mugs. Each of these musical languages brings its own connotation to the narrative thread of the work.

It is also worth highlighting the remarkable versatility of Sarah Albu, who moves effortlessly from a classical lyrical voice to a modernized form of sprechgesang, and then to interpretations that sometimes evoke cabaret singing or even outright pop.

In the end, the piece constitutes a true demonstration of virtuosity on the part of all the artists involved. This virtuosity lies not only in the musical demands, which require extraordinary instrumental mastery, but also in the quality of the acting, the development of the technologies used, and the attention paid to every detail of the staging by Marie-Josée Chartier. In the hall, one could feel a certain euphoria among the audience—not only thanks to the show’s particularly effective humor, but also because it offered a truly refreshing immersion, something new compared with what we are used to seeing in contemporary music.

Publicité panam
Classical Period / classique

Caprice / ArtChroral | Beethoven et la Révolution française

by Alexis Desrosiers-Michaud

By way of introduction, a bit of history. It is well known that Ludwig van Beethoven had a certain sympathy for the French Revolution. The most convincing example is his Third Symphony, the Eroica, originally dedicated to Napoleon Bonaparte—a dedication he famously scratched out when he learned that Napoleon had crowned himself emperor.

What Matthias Maute explained to us on Friday at the Maison symphonique de Montréal was that Beethoven incorporated patriotic popular songs into his Fifth Symphony—songs that were heard during the capture of Maximilien Robespierre, the jurist who played a central role in the Reign of Terror and whose criminal tribunal sent thousands of opponents to the guillotine, among them the famous victim Marie Antoinette. At the time, we did not yet realize that this information would open up a completely unexpected listening perspective.

After an incisive first movement (and a somewhat hastily delivered Ave Verum Corpus by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as an introduction), Ensemble Caprice offered us a lyrical second movement. One can debate Beethoven’s tempo markings endlessly, but the pace here was less Andante con moto than an emphasis on the phrasing of the winds, while keeping the cellos comfortable in their rapid passages. The placement of the woodwinds at the back of the stage on raised platforms proved particularly effective, leaving the brass on the floor level. The balance was perfect, with the lower strings positioned just to the left.

Remembering the historical context introduced earlier, the horn call at the beginning of the third movement took on an entirely different meaning. Instead of merely recalling the famous motif of the first movement—often described as “fate knocking at the door”—it sounded more like a call to celebration. The third movement then becomes a preparation for the jubilant finale, carried by excited strings.

After the intermission came the Mass in C minor, the “Great Mass” by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, performed in its original—and therefore incomplete—version. The jewel of the evening? The two soprano soloists, Janelle Lucyk and Myriam Leblanc, who truly gave back to Mozart what belongs to Mozart. This Mass contains some of the most beautiful solo lines in his sacred repertoire, and what they sang on Friday evening was not merely a succession of notes but real musical phrases and dialogues—between themselves and the orchestra—culminating in the four-part cadence (soprano, clarinet, oboe, and bassoon) of the Et incarnatus est, a masterpiece of musical intimacy.

Tenor Emmanuel Hassler performed admirably as a replacement for Philippe Gagné, who was ill, while bass William Kraushaar was solid in his single intervention. One hopes to hear him again in a concert where he will have more opportunities to shine. As for the choir, it was excellent; the division into two choirs created a fine balance among the voices and with the orchestra. At no point was it overshadowed by the ensemble.

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