Contemporary / Musique de création / période moderne / post-romantique

M/NM | University Climax at the Maison symphonique

by Alain Brunet

The idea of a co-production between the Société de musique contemporaine du Québec and McGill University’s Schulich School of Music is an excellent one. And it’s not a new idea: the two institutions have collaborated in the past.

L’idée d’une coproduction entre la Société de musique contemporaine du Québec et l’École de musique Schulich de l’Université McGill est en soi excellente. Et cette idée n’est pas neuve, les deux institutions ont collaboré par le passé.

What does this relationship look like in 2025? Friday’s evening at the Maison symphonique, in the context of Montréal / Nouvelles Musiques, was an opportunity to think about this.
Over the years, Maestro Alexis Hauser has continued to lead Montreal’s finest student symphony orchestra. At the Maison symphonique, this was certainly the case. Very well behaved. Rigor. Clarity. Cohesive, solid performances, particularly in the more classical works on the program – we’re talking here about Richard Strauss’s symphonic poem Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Prokofiev’s 2nd Piano Concerto played by Alexey Shafirov, twice winner of the McGill Concerto Competition – precise throughout, lively and tonic in the attack, fluid in general, and at the encore a generous Prelude Op. 3 No. 2 by Rachmaninov.

Au fil du temps, maestro Alexis Hauser dirige encore et toujours le meilleur orchestre symphonique estudiantin à Montréal. À la Maison symphonique, c’était certes le cas. Fort belle tenue. Rigueur. Clarté. Exécutions cohésives, solides, particulièrement dans les œuvres les plus classiques au programme – on parle ici du poème symphonique Ainsi parlait Zarathoustra de Richard Strauss, ainsi que du 2^e Concerto pour piano de Prokofiev joué par Alexey Shafirov, lauréat à deux reprises du concours de concertos de McGill – précis sur toute la ligne, vif et tonique dans l’attaque, fluide de manière générale, et au rappel un généreux Prélude op. 3 n° 2 de Rachmaninov.

The final piece on the program, by Richard Strauss, whose main theme was widely popularized as the theme for the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, was also exemplary in the context of a university performance and a floor filled with an audience of mostly students, friends, family and many other open-minded music lovers, all happy to be there.

However, it seems to me that the performance of György Ligeti’s Lontano, played in the first part of the program, demanded more timbral depth, texture and power to carry through the work’s obsessive discourse, based on plays of tension deployed slowly over an unusual (for the time of its creation) linear flow. We had the impression that this very important part of the program, at the heart of its theme, had been less well chiselled, and it was the same for Continental Divide, an SMCQ commission to young composer Liam Gibson, presented as a premiere. Did we really grasp all its nuances?

In the first half, Ligeti’s Musica ricercata, transposed for organ and played by the excellent Jean-Willy Kunz, was impeccable in the context of a transposition.

For the cinematic side of things, there was no question of showing film extracts on the big screen during the orchestral performances. Instead, we opted for scenic evocations of Stanley Kubrick’s great classics: the spectral binoculars from The Shining, the ceremonial mask from Eyes Wide Shut, the famous monolith from 2001, around which primates begin to think like sapiens, and so on. We also tried mapping projections on a rear façade of the amphitheatre – too bright for the projected forms to be intelligible? Good flashes, a certain taste, interesting premises, a certain discretion… How can this evocation of brilliant cinema be maximized in a symphonic performance context? There’s no doubt that the highly gifted Sylvain Marotte will be able to answer this question for the future.For the cinematic side of things, there was no question of showing film extracts on the big screen during the orchestral performances. Instead, we opted for scenic evocations of Stanley Kubrick’s great classics: the spectral binoculars from The Shining, the ceremonial mask from Eyes Wide Shut, the famous monolith from 2001, around which primates begin to think like sapiens, and so on. We also tried mapping projections on a rear façade of the amphitheatre – too bright for the projected forms to be intelligible? Good flashes, a certain taste, interesting premises, a certain discretion… How can this evocation of brilliant cinema be maximized in a symphonic performance context? There’s no doubt that the highly gifted Sylvain Marotte will be able to answer this question for the future.

And then there was a full house that evening, mostly populated by delighted people. That was already a lot for the SMCQ and the McGill Symphony Orchestra. Who, by the way, complained about some of the program’s inconsistencies (Prokofiev for piano and orchestra after Ligeti… why?) and the thinness of some of the performances on the contemporary side. Nevertheless, most of us enjoyed a fine Friday at M/NM.And then there was a full house that evening, mostly populated by delighted people. That was already a lot for the SMCQ and the McGill Symphony Orchestra. Who, by the way, complained about some of the program’s inconsistencies (Prokofiev for piano and orchestra after Ligeti… why?) and the thinness of some of the performances on the contemporary side. Nevertheless, most of us enjoyed a fine Friday at M/NM.

Baroque / classique

Violons du Roy, Celebrating Friendship at The Crossroads of Baroque and Classical Music

by Mona Boulay

Continuing their 40th-anniversary series, Les Violons du Roy presented their Jonathan Cohen, Mozart, and Friendship concert at the Palais Montcalm on Thursday. As the title suggests, the program offered a repertoire drawn both from Mozart’s works and from those of his close friends.

The evening opened with the Sinfonia for Strings in F Major, Fk. 67, by Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, eldest son of his famous father Johann Sebastian. This work is a very interesting choice, with avant-garde colours for its time, in the midst of the transition from Baroque to Classical. There are daring harmonic tensions right from the opening of the Vivace, perfectly underlined by Les Violons du Roy, who give us a superb version of the work. This is an opportunity for each orchestra section to shine, particularly in the Allegro, where the question-and-answer play of the theme is wonderfully executed, a veritable wave of sound moving from one part of the chamber orchestra to the next.

The concert continues with two guests: Mélisande McNabney on fortepiano and Isaac Chalk on viola, for a concert in C Major by Michael Haydn, older brother of the more famous Joseph Haydn, and, as the title suggests, also close to Mozart. The piece highlights each of the two soloists in turn, despite their rather different playing styles: on the one hand, the pianist’s precise, subtle touch, and on the other, the violist’s more rocambolic, baroque flights of fancy. While there is no doubting the individual quality of each of these two performers, their joint playing is open to question. Indeed, while each shines in his or her solo parts, the duet parts sometimes lack synchronization and ensemble playing, especially for the ornamentation effects or the rallentando and accelerando, typical of the style of the period. The staging may have something to do with this: Melisandre at the pianoforte has her back to Isaac Chalk.

After a short intermission, Les Violons du Roy return to the stage, this time with two flutes, two natural horns, and a bassoon. The wind section swells the ranks for the Symphony in E-flat Major by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, also the son of Johann Sebastian, and a friend of Mozart. At the start of the piece, it seems that one of the horns is struggling to warm up, the instrument being renowned for its technical difficulty. The piece unfolds well, although the flutes, often in their lower registers, are hard to hear, yet they stand upright in the middle of the stage, giving greater visual impact than aural impact.

The concert closes with Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A major. Stéphane Fontaine, clarinet teacher at the Conservatoire de Québec and principal clarinet of the Orchestre Symphonique de Québec, brilliantly interprets the soloist’s part with a well-rounded, worked-out sound, mastered from low to high register, with absolutely remarkable soft nuances. Her highly successful performance leaves a strong impression on the audience as she closes the concert, accompanied by all the subtlety of Les Violons du Roy, decidedly masters in the art of dosage, finesse and precision.

Africa / Morna

Black History Month | Cape Verde Honoured at Théâtre Maisonneuve

by Sandra Gasana

Lucibela opened the evening after a purely instrumental first track, beautifully orchestrated by a total of seven musicians: two brass players, a cavaquinho, bass, guitar, drums, and the musical director at the piano. Usually, the solos come a little later in the evening, but this time we were treated to saxophone and trumpet solos right from the start of the concert.

In an average French, she addressed the crowd: “It’s a pleasure to be here. Cape Verde is known thanks to Césaria,” she adds, before moving on to Areia de salamanza, which she performed with unparalleled mastery. Her voice is the closest I can think of to Césaria Evora. With a few dance steps, she seemed to float in her orange dress.

The show was a mix of classics and lesser-known pieces by the barefoot diva. The star among the musicians that evening was undoubtedly the saxophonist. Even when he wasn’t playing, he stayed on stage to dance, unlike the trumpeter, who came and went. And when he played, he carried the audience with him, as the applause testified.

The classic Besamo Mucho was a particular highlight of Lucibela’s performance, as she got the audience singing along, before giving way to Ceuzany.

“I’m very happy to sing for you,” she says in shaky French. “Thank you Cesaria!” Like Lucibela, her first song was gentle, bringing out the depth of her voice, and after that, it was party time. In fact, she takes off her heels and starts dancing barefoot, a little nod to the diva?

After Sodade, which delighted the audience, she continued with Amor Y Mar, this time without the horns. The horns return for Ceuzany’s last song, in which she pushes her voice a little like American soul singers.
After a brief intermission, we’re off again with Teófilo Chantre, who wrote many of Césaria Evora’s songs. In impeccable French, he addresses the crowd between Fatalidade and Mãe Carinhosa.

He continued with Voz de Amor and then invited the crowd to dance, which they did timidly, but as the evening progressed, the audience loosened up. Indeed, they let loose completely when Elida Almeida, who was the last to perform, challenged the audience: “Is this how you dance at home?” she asked, addressing the crowd. “Well, you have another opportunity,” she added, and that’s all it took for the entire theater to get to its feet and show what it could do.

Paying homage to Cape Verde’s best-known musical style, the Morna, she transported the audience with her unique and distinctive voice. Each of the singers offered melancholy and festive tunes, sometimes switching from one to the other almost without transition.

As this was the last show of the tour, Elida brought the house down, getting the audience to sing along with Sodade, but this time with all the artists who joined her on stage, taking the time to thank all the musicians, before finishing with more classics.

The only snag of the evening: the song E Doce Morrer No Mar was missing. It’s true that this song is by Brazilian artist Dorival Caymmi, but Césaria popularized it all the same. I’d been waiting for it all evening and came home empty-handed. But that’s just a detail. I’ll continue to sing it in my shows, as I’ve been doing for the last 5 years.

Photo Credit: Adam Mlynello

expérimental / contemporain

M/NM | No Hay Banda : Red Dada Theatre

by Frédéric Cardin

Last night, the Théâtre Plaza was transformed into a timeless and disconcerting space, somewhere between ‘early twentieth century’ Dadaism and ‘early twenty-first century’ avant-garde, for the premiere of No Hay Banda’s multidisciplinary show, Il Teatro Rosso. To put it into context, watch my interview with Noam Bierstone, of No Hay Banda :

Il teatro rosso, a tribute to Montreal’s Red Light

While the primary inspiration for the work, by Steven Kazuo Takasugi (music) and Huei Lin (direction and videography), was the old theatres of the early 20th century, often filled with heady red (seats, curtains, walls, etc.), the music had nothing to do with this retro-kitsch universe.

For an hour or so, an ultra-pointillist score, performed with precision by the members of No Hay Banda and accompanied by tape and video, teased the audience with varying degrees of intensity. Waves followed waves in crescendo-decrescendo, oscillating between almost naked passages and moments of almost unbearable sound saturation. As they churned out tons of notes, none lasting more than a second at most, the artists on stage (as far as possible) assumed poses that responded to or contradicted those projected on screen (pre-recorded with the same instrumentalists, playing the same score). There was a kind of discrepancy, both sonically and visually, between the live and the recorded performances (on stage, the musicians were dressed in vaguely Seventies attire, while the video was more 1920-1930s, but not stereotypical).

The music, which is totally abstract, is certainly not ‘easy’, but its reliance on staging and the relationship between the body language of the musicians on stage versus their doubles in the video creates a dramatic dynamic, a theatricality, that captures and holds attention.

And does this theatricality tell a story? More or less. The programme shows a division into two acts, Il Teatro Rosso and The Drowning. These are divided into three and four scenes respectively (The Spasms of Trapped Animals, Tar Pits, Grumpy Old Man, etc.), which are themselves further subdivided. What exactly do these titles mean? Everyone will find their bearings, more or less explicit. But having said that, the gestures of the artists and the dynamic nature of the music made it possible to follow the sequence more or less precisely. There was something reminiscent of Tristan Tzara’s creative fires at Cabaret Voltaire, accompanied by noise music and post-modern sets by Arp and Janco. The spirits of Cocteau, Picabia, Schwitters, and Duchamp were probably present in the Montreal venue.

In the end, this homage to the old red theatres of the interwar decades of the 20th century is also, in truth, a symbolic connection between two avant-gardes separated by a hundred years. On the one hand, one of the sources of all the experimental movements of the 20th and 21st centuries: Dadaism in the 1920s, and on the other, a young, hyper-active and inventive Montreal avant-garde (well represented in the audience that packed the Théâtre Plaza) of the 2020s.

No Hay Banda :

Sarah Albu, voice; Adrianne Munden-Dixon, violin; Émilie Girard-Charest, cello; Lori Freedman, bass clarinet; Felix Del Tredici, bass trombone; Daniel Áñez, piano; Noam Bierstone, percussion; Gabriel Dufour-Laperrière, sound engineering.

Publicité panam

expérimental / contemporain / Musique de création

M/NM | The Use of Audiovisuals as Creative Material—Welcome to Nicole Lizée

by Alain Brunet

Gravelbourg-born Montrealer Nicole Lizée is a true visionary in the field of using cinematographic or videographic material in the composition of musical works. On Saturday evening at UQAM’s Cœur des sciences (Agora Hydro-Québec), this was the program dedicated to her: Montréal/Nouvelles Musiques presented three of her works in a program of five.

The audiovisual materials Nicole Lizée employs in her works include various items taken from everyday life at different times in her life, toys, audiovisual archives, and other everyday artifacts. The composer also films her own scenes involving actor-musicians, such as the teacher who mistakenly explains to us what is an acceptable rhythm and what is an unplayable one.

It also makes use of absurdist humour and fantasy when it makes fake scores appear in the hands of a musician who recounts her setbacks with a possibly malevolent entity. Yet this narrative framework has no other purpose than to be one of the channels of expression for a piece of music, in this case, the re-orchestration of 8-Bit Noir, composed in 2019. In this case, flutist Marie-Hélène Breault is the sole instrumentalist on stage, around whom the composer has erected an audiovisual environment made up of video sketches. The DIY nature of the work is also a feature of this aesthetic, as can be seen in the other pieces on the program.

By Margareta Jeric, Les échos de l’Adriatique was premiered on Saturday by the Ensemble de la SMCQ under the direction of Cristian Gort. For flute, clarinet, percussion, electric guitar, piano, cello, double bass, support, and video device, this piece is accompanied by images of the Adriatic Sea—particularly a dilapidated, abandoned sardine factory on the Croatian coast, whose fate is unknown. The sounds imagined by Margareta Jeric illustrate the cracks in the scenery and nature’s reassertion of its rights. The musical work is full of percussive details, bells, high-pitched bow strokes, and more.

“Black Midi,” composed in 2017 by Nicole Lizée, is an evocation of this sub-trend also called Black MIDI, which consists of compositions using MIDI files to create a piece or remix containing a mind-boggling number of notes, arbitrarily placed on the score or in the composition program, to such an extent that the sheet of music ends up blackened with notes, hence the expression. Execution requires mind-boggling results, impossible for human fingers to interpret such scores. Around this idea of impossible-to-play music, the composer has imagined a narrative: the characters from the previous video are back, recounting their adventures with a sense of humour, stunned by the phenomenon.

For piano and audiovisual treatments performed in phase, this work includes frequent changes of tempo, accelerandos, metric modulation, and the use of musical toys. The aim is to extract this computerized compositional process and link it to the live performance, the piano played by Pamela Reimer wearing a wig in this context of strangeness and fantasy. Very interesting, entertaining, and humorous, but… you might want to give up before the 22nd and final minute of this work, which nevertheless makes its way into Nicole Lizée’s already considerable body of work.

Closures by Philippe Macnab-Séguin is a work in which the mass of sound expands, spreads, contracts, coils, or explodes in the manner of our life trajectories. The piece opens with a whirring sound, followed by slow glissandos leading to bursts of high frequencies. These successive waves are generated by an Ensemble de la SMCQ, this time comprising flute, clarinet, percussion (prominent vibraphone), electric guitar, piano, cello, double bass, stand, and video device. The movement of the tides gradually becomes a continuous rhythm, lightening again with ascending melodic spirals of clarinet and flute, then building up again and slowly fading out until a final percussive blow, topped by the same roar served up in the introduction. Frankly, this Philippe Macnab-Séguin must be taken seriously.

We conclude with “Dancist,” Nicole Lizée’s third work on the program, composed in 2019. In the same spirit as her other works on the program. “Dancist,” for clarinet, percussion, electric guitar, piano, cello, double bass and audio/video device, is dedicated to the surreal evocation of dance music, taking up a similar narrative framework, tinged with a kind of magical realism, as well as with caustic humour and self-reflexivity about her own creative process. The results lie somewhere between audiovisual installation and composition. As we leave the amphitheatre, we are reminded that Nicole Lizée has often performed her works with her own ensemble, which is less visible given her burgeoning career as a composer. The challenge ahead for her, we thought as we left the concert hall, is to create works that will have the same impact as those produced by her own orchestra.

Publicité panam

Classical / Modern Classical

OSM and Khachatryan | Music, Politics and The Human Condition

by Hélène Archambault

There are moments when you feel privileged to be where you are. Such was the case on Wednesday evening at the Maison symphonique. I think the feeling was mutual, at least if I’m to judge by the encore given by violinist Sergey Khachatryan, who gave a superb performance of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35.

The orchestra provided a setting in which he could express his sincerity, as when the flutes pick up at the end of his very personal cadenza, or again in the opening bars, as the strings introduce the solo violin.

The reminder is a piece by Grigor Narekatsi, a 10th-century Armenian mystic poet and saint of the Armenian Apostolic Church. In 2015, in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide, Pope Francis declared St. Gregory of Narek (Frenchized name), Doctor of the Church, the 36th, for his timeless writings. Timeless, Havoun, havoun is. More than 1,000 years apart, his play resonates.

After intermission, Payare and the OSM attack Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11, Op. 103 “The Year 1905”. 11 young instrumentalists from Montreal’s Conservatory, McGill, and Université de Montréal music schools join the orchestra for the occasion. Knowing the history of this symphony is the key to fully appreciating it because it’s not the kind of piece you listen to while preparing a chickpea salad on Monday morning before catching the metro. The program notes are illuminating. Symphony No. 11 is intimately linked to the history of Russia, and later the Soviet Union, both in its writing and its reception by the regime. With the USSR having decreed Shostakovich’s music an enemy of the workers in the aftermath of the Second World War, new compositions had to wait until the 1950s. Composed at the beginning of 1957, Shostakovich recounts in music the popular uprising of 1905 against the Russian Empire.

The first movement, “Palace Square”, opens with a hostile winter scene, where bloody repression soon unfolds. Military snare drums, bugles, and folk song illustrations are all sound manifestations of the violence of the repression. The second movement evokes Red Sunday, and here again, Shostakovich uses musical material to depict the horror of the massacre and the desolation of death. The third movement, “Eternal Memory”, is reminiscent of the Revolutionaries’ Funeral March. As for the Finale, “Tocsin”, this is revolutionary fervor, characterized by trumpets and low strings, interrupted by an English horn melody, and ending with the sounds of cymbals and bells. When the music stops, you wonder what you’ve just experienced. I was moved, disturbed, and thrown to the ground. This concert embodies the human condition in all its fragility.

Photo Credit: Antoine Saito

Contemporary Jazz / expérimental / contemporain / Métal / Musique de création

M/NM | Metal and Contemporary Jazz at The SMCQ Buffet

by Alain Brunet

Wednesday evening at the Music Multimedia Room (MMR) of McGill University’s Schulich School of Music, David Therrien Brongo, percussion, Louis-Philippe Bonin, saxophones and Alexandre David, guitars, gave us a convincing glimpse of a creative alliance between contemporary music of classical origin, contemporary jazz and… metal. A few weeks after the OSM’s Voiviod symphonique experiment, which sought to magnify a popular repertoire in an orchestral context, the metal aesthetic was invited this time to the SMCQ and its M/NM festival.

This program, with variable geometry for its performers, was not intended to be fundamentally metal, but rather a hybridization of aesthetics seemingly foreign to one another, but coming together after a long history of almost mutual ignorance.

Thus, the first work on the program, Rocío Cano Valiñ’s Átropos, a 9-minute piece composed in 2020-21, features the advanced techniques of alto and soprano saxophones and the percussive interventions of xylophone, drums and other cymbals. The interest here lies in the saxophone playing, reminiscent of the last decades of contemporary jazz in its textural and atonal advances, but without introducing us to anything new.

Ditto for True North, composed in 2007 by Andrew Staniland, which uses comparable techniques for the saxophonist, whose scores are distributed over 4 lecterns encircling the performer, all coated with electronic processing.

In 2016, Montreal composer (originally from Saskatchewan) Nicole Lizée imagined a work inspired by the Parents Music Resource Center organization, the Mothers of Prevention, to use the nickname suggested by Frank Zappa to taunt the censorship of these uptight mothers, once scandalized by hardrock, metal or hip-hop for their crude, explicit, sexual and sometimes violent language.

On the big screen, an archive film is gleefully butchered: Tipper Gore’s mother (then the companion of Albert Gore, ex-US VP) and Susan Baker, wife of James Baker, ex-US Secretary of State, are rightly ridiculed for the creative use of their ridiculous indignation.

We know that Nicole Lizée has mastered the use of cinema in her work, this time devoted to a written, jerky percussive language, dotted with sharp changes and punctuations of varying intensity, always in phase with the editing of this widescreen pamphlet, percussion and electroacoustic treatment.

In my opinion, however, the program’s greatest interest lay in its second part, two works fusing contemporary written music, contemporary jazz and metal. David Therrien Brongo then swapped his typical classical percussion paraphernalia for a typically metal drum kit, an instrument that had deeply seduced him before he took up advanced percussion studies. This virtuoso clearly doesn’t have a jazz background; the stature of his playing obviously excludes swing, and his qualities lie elsewhere, in the fusion of his metal playing with his classical percussion expertise.

Infinite Jest (Superpose III), a 7-minute work composed in2010 by Alexander Schubert for a power trio of sorts, was closer to musique actuelle/contemporaine in its lexicon and discursive framework: saxophone drawing atonal lines and belching out many sounds typical of free research; guitar also introspective, impressionistic, rather tenuous given its possibilities, and very contemporary drums based on a complex path defined by the composer.

The best piece on the program was the last: Delta, an 11-minute piece composed in 2024 by guitarist Alexandre David, paired this trio, of which he is one of the gunners, with a magnificent contemporary dance video.

The dancers’ performances were projected onto a large screen as they performed. A veil of synthetic textures covered these much more muscular impulses, which in no way precluded finesse in the writing. A total spectacle. This was the pièce de résistance, and certainly a source of inspiration for these musicians, who still have a lot to say if they wish to continue the experiment.

musique contemporaine

M/NM | Music with soul and Indian ink

by Frédéric Cardin

Yesterday the Festival Montréal Nouvelles Musiques presented an unusual programme, Le son de l’encre, at the centre of which was the mechanical and symbolic process of line, drawing and writing. Five works for flute and various additions (video, gesture-animated sound interface, live calligraphy) were performed. The spirit of Asian calligraphy is associated with elegance, harmony and meticulousness. It was also in this state of sound, at least in general, that the music on offer flourished. Although ‘contemporary,’ most of the pieces on the programme were enveloped in more or less explicit echoes of Asian music, thanks to the harmonies on pentatonic scales.

Penned by François Dery, Claire-Melanie Sinnhuber, Tao Yu, Gualtiero Dazzi and François Daudin Clavaud, the evocatively-titled works (Bambous, Fleurs de prunes tombantes, Le son de l’encre, Vent léger, etc.) set the scene in a way that was both modern and timeless, bathed in an atmosphere that was often contemplative, even ritualistic. Some pieces were more poignant than others, such as Gualtiero Dazzi’s La demeure du rêve, a superb sound construction based on drawings by South Korean Kim Yung Gi, one of the great illustrators of our time, who died at the age of 47 in 2022. Gi’s drawings, four in all and admirable for their naturalness but also for their symbolic complexity, took the form of a series of family portraits set against each other. A deeply moving moment.

The presence of renowned calligrapher Shanshan Sun was necessary to accompany some of the works, such as Feu, neige, cendres by François Déry. I wasn’t as convinced by the coherent relationship between Sun’s live gestures and the music. Especially in the last piece of the evening, coordination seemed to be lacking, with Sun finishing his writing on a large piece of paper on the floor, while the musicians had finished playing. I’d say almost a minute passed during which I caught the look on the face of one of the flautists, silently wondering how long he should hold his instrument up…

Be that as it may, I must mention the great versatility of the Trio d’argent, made up of Michel Boizot, Xavier Saint-Bonnet and François Daudin Clavaud. Three flutes together, some would say, is suicide. The French have shown that it can be done very well, and sound magnificently too. The variety of flutes used was also a major factor. Western, Oriental, bass flutes (I love them!), etc., the colours deployed were numerous and beautifully applied, in a contemporary perspective, certainly, but not experimental.

It was an evening that was sometimes bewitching, often soothing, always pleasant and surprising. A lovely offering from the Festival Montréal Nouvelles Musiques, and it’s only just beginning.

Interview (in French) with one of the musicians :

Publicité panam

musique contemporaine / Piano

M/NM : Kafka’s Insect in metamorphosis under the Satosphère

by Judith Hamel

On Monday evening, a handful of audience members braved the icy gusts of wind and mountains of snow to make themselves comfortable on the beanbags of the Satosphère, in the heart of the Société des Arts Technologiques (SAT). All the way from Malta, composer Ruben Zahra and pianist Tricia Dawn Williams swapped the mild Mediterranean climate for the cold of Montreal to present Kafka’s Insect as part of the Festival International Montréal/Nouvelles Musiques (M/NM).

An immersive audiovisual performance, Kafka’s Insect is a retelling of Franz Kafka’s famous novel La métamorphose (1915). Spanning some 40 minutes, the visual narrative features characters from the Austro-Hungarian author’s story, as well as a real insect filmed from various angles and in motion. The narrative is built up in fragments and is supported by sound events taken directly from Kafka’s text: the pounding of rain against windows, the crash of a laboratory flask crashing to the floor, or the clash of apples thrown against a wall. These diegetic sounds blend with the soundtrack that is played live by piano and synthesizers. Towards the end of the piece, a dialogue is established between a violin recorded in the film and the piano played on stage. These interactions reinforce the cohesion between the sound and visual worlds, making the experience all the more immersive.

In addition, these looped elements encourage us to interpret the sound and visual scenes from different perspectives. This process amplifies the strangeness of the work, paying homage to the absurdity that permeates Kafka’s text.

The video projections – usually broadcast on a two-meter-diameter inflatable sphere placed at the center of the stage – have been specially adapted for this event, exploiting a large part of the surface of the SAT’s immersive dome. The film, shot for the most part with a vintage Daguerreotype Achromat lens from 1838, featured a singular aesthetic: soft light, with a blur evoking a flourishing imagination, just like Kafka’s protagonist. The circular image was projected onto the dome. Projections of the protagonist, depicted as a giant insect, were thus projected onto an imposing screen, creating a captivating atmosphere.

The integration of projected texts, while making the story easier to understand, sometimes broke the immersion. On the other hand, the moments when synthesizers were added to the piano created a particularly enveloping atmosphere. Finally, the impeccable synchronization between live music and video, facilitated by a click in the performers’ headphones, was an appreciable element that enhanced the fluidity of the performance.

This show marked the final M/NM event presented at the SAT, but the 12th edition of the festival continues with several more concerts to be discovered in the coming days. Focusing this year on the dialogue between music and images, M/NM offers no fewer than 18 concerts over 16 days.

photo: Emma Tranter

Publicité panam

expérimental / contemporain

M/NM | ¡Némangerie mâchée!… What a Menagerie!

by Alain Brunet

On a historically stormy evening at the Society for Arts and Technology, M/NM nevertheless honored the biennial’s theme: the meeting of image and music. The program ¡Némangerie mâchée! attracted a highly motivated audience, and for good reason: this superb video-voice performance must be presented to the public again, given its real unifying potential. Together, vocal ensemble Phth and visual artist Beth Frey create a whimsical, sometimes hilarious world of humanoid mutants, expressed through the 5 singers, improvisers and seasoned onomatopists.

From left to right, looking behind the audience where the performers are: Sarah Albu, Elizabeth Lima, Kathy Kennedy, Gabriel Dharmoo, David Cronkite together develop a hallucinatory vocabulary in which singing and all the other sounds coming from the human body find artistic coherence: borborygms, onomatopoeia, croaks, chirps, cries, baby cries, greasy laughter and other sounds of our lives blend with romantic or baroque lyrical singing, jazz singing, barbershop, doo-wop or other well-known and tried-and-tested vocal practices. Very cool!

We have to admit that this avant-garde lexicon has been enriched by its practitioners over the last few decades, and that it is now obsolete to consider this practice as an experimental fantasy. On the contrary, these augmented singing techniques are making a major contribution to real advances in music today, here and now.

¡Némangerie mâchée! projects a series of video tableaux in which the strange creatures express themselves vocally, a kind of improvised lipsync that never ceases to captivate the audience until the end of the performance.

“The formless, chromatic nature of Beth’s creatures,” state the program notes, ”shares striking conceptual and sensory echoes with their bizarre voicing by Phth, known for a sonic palette that welcomes the organic beauty and ugliness of sound without discrimination.”

Beth Frey’s art-video is perfectly matched to the work of the performers and improvisers, expressing themselves in real time and drawing on their profound knowledge as singers.

Absurdist humor is not the only cardinal virtue of ¡Némangerie mâchée! Through the prism of the outright laughter induced by this performance, other sensitive emotions and perceptions emerge: pain, sorrow, panic, astonishment, tolerance of difference, you name it.

Can’t wait for the sequel!

Publicité panam

Africa / Indigenous peoples

Black History Month | An Afro-Indigenous Immersion

by Sandra Gasana

For its third edition, Immersion plunged us into a meeting between two African women artists, Dalie Dandala, from Congo-Brazzaville, and Lerie Sankofa, from Côte d’Ivoire, and an Atikamekw woman, Laura Niquay. Together, they shared with us the fruits of their 21-day artistic creation residency, during which they got to know each other, created together and sang in each other’s respective languages.

Under the direction of Fredy Massamba, himself a renowned artist, the art of staging had its place in this show. From dress to dance to the many instruments played by the three women, nothing was left to chance. Each woman took her turn to explain her songs, with the others participating in the chorus or playing an instrument. At times, it was hard to tell whether the language was African or native, as the boundaries were so porous.

Singing, dancing, instruments and their arrangement came naturally, allowing the artists to tell their own stories. Ngoma, percussion, guitar, handpan drum and ahoco: it was all there. Each artist sang in her mother tongue, with occasional bits of French.

“Nzobi, in my language, means ritual or prayer, a bit like vodou,” explains Dalie Dandala before intoning her song in Nyari. She is joined by Lerie on percussion and Laura on backing vocals before dancing away, all dressed in red.

In turn, Lerie shares a song in Avikam about women and their desire for freedom when mistreated by their husbands. Dalie and Laura accompany her, one on the ahoco and the other with poetry in the Atikamekw language, with a touch of French.

Despite a string coming loose on her guitar in the middle of the show, this didn’t stop Laura from playing it on the track “Stéréotype”, which denounces prejudices about the role of women, with Dalie and Lerie on backing vocals and percussion.

These women even got the audience involved on one track, when Fredy Massamba couldn’t hold back from dancing. Indeed, he did so at one point in the evening when he joined the trio on stage, quickly accompanied by Louise Abomba, a visual artist from Cameroon.

They closed the show with a tribute to twins, considered a blessing in many African cultures, in song, music and dance. The complicity was more palpable between the two African artists, of course, but Laura managed to carve out a niche for herself while giving them the space to create a stronger bond between themselves.
This was followed by a question-and-answer period, during which the audience had the opportunity to ask the three artists a few questions. The theme of women was central throughout the show, the power conferred on them, their role in society and the prejudices to be deconstructed about them.

To the question “What’s next?” from the audience, we learned that Laura, who is currently working on a blues album with an all-female band, has invited Dalie and Lerie to participate in her project. So we’ll have to wait for a follow-up to this artistic immersion that resulted in a cultural symbiosis between Africa and one of Canada’s aboriginal peoples.

musique contemporaine

Ali Zadeh @ Molinari: a visit that will live long in our memories

by Frédéric Cardin

The three-day event Le quatuor selon Ali Zadeh (The quartet according to Ali Zadeh), organized by the Molinari Quartet, reached its climax on Saturday evening, February 15, at the Salle du Conservatoire de Montréal. In the presence of the composer, a small, elegant woman of 78, we listened, probably for the very first time, to all her string quartets in one go. This was made all the more special by the fact that it included the premiere of a work written specifically for the Molinaris, her Farewell quartet.

WATCH THE INTERVIEW WITH OLGA RANZENHOFER FROM THE MOLINARI QUARTET (In French)

After a full and fast-paced introduction by multidisciplinary artist Nicolas Jobin, who is also a “specialist” in the work of Franghiz Ali Zadeh, the seven quartets by the Azerbaijani composer were launched in non-chronological order, contrary to the Molinari Quartet’s usual practice for this kind of event. An idea of Mrs. Ali Zadeh’s which, I think, turned out to be a happy one, as it favored an alternation between harmonically “modernist” works and those more openly “folkloric”.

I won’t summarize each piece here, but the final impression of the many listeners present is probably that of an authentic fusion, sophisticated without abstruse cerebralism, of Eastern and Western musical universes. The language of Azeri sacred chants, called mughams, is omnipresent in Ali Zadeh’s expressive palette, but with variations in intensity and explicitness depending on the quartet. While 2015’s Reqs (Dance), and especially 1993’s Mugham Sayagi, her most famous work (commissioned by Kronos), are strongly tinged with what Western ears perceive as obvious orientalism, others such as Dilogia (1974, rev. 1988), In Search Of… (2005), and even the premiere Farewell (2025) are more strongly in the wake of chromatic modernism, or even the Second Viennese School (Farewell is explicitly inspired by Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto). That said, even in these, the soul of an art music linked to Islamic sacred chant remains perceptible, for those who know how to listen.

Franghiz Ali Zadeh’s music is an authentic fusion, a brilliant syncretism, all the more natural as it has been personally experienced by the artist throughout her life (Nicolas Jobin’s lecture was very enlightening in this respect). This music is even more powerful in its expressiveness because Ms. Ali Zadeh possesses two additional major assets: firstly, she is an excellent musical narrator, who knows how to tell stories with sufficient focus to set a lively scene, but also to leave interpretative space, both for the musicians and for the listeners, so as to allow each and every one to immerse themselves with a certain freedom of perception. Secondly, Ali Zadeh is a fine colorist, using almost the entire palette of string techniques such as col legno battuto, tremolos, glissandos, pizzicatos, mutes and so on. Elsewhere, the musicians sing, or (in Mugham Sayagi) also play percussion, moving around the stage and playing backstage. The rhythms used by Ms. Ali Zadeh, often demanding but propulsive, endow her music with an infectious accessibility.

For this ease of reception, combined with an elaborate academic knowledge and structural complexity that is anything but obtuse, Franghiz Ali Zadeh’s musical proposal is one of the most inspiring of our time, and perhaps one of the most promising for the future of contemporary creation.

This kind of world-class event (which also included two previous days of conferences and discussions) is a landmark event. The Molinari Quartet gave us the kind of privilege that music lovers in Berlin, Vienna or Paris know so well. The ensemble has benefited from the support of a far-sighted and essential patronage (the Lupien Family Foundation), to which we are grateful.

I’ll end with an arrow aimed at a few media “competitors” (forgive me, but you’ll understand): to my knowledge, no one from Radio-Canada, La Presse or Le Devoir was present. This just goes to show the deplorable cultural state of the mainstream media, unable to grasp the unique and historic nature of this event.