On Sunday afternoon, Salle Bourgie hosted the Baroque Christmas in Montreal concert presented by the Arion Baroque Orchestra. Artistic director Mathieu Lussier made a bold choice with this concert, which aimed to immerse the audience in Montreal life in 1780 by featuring mostly composers unknown to the public.
The concert began with a motet entitled Cantate Domino, performed by soprano Janelle Lucyk accompanied by the serpent, a period wind instrument traditionally used as a bass. The piece was performed with a gentle, introspective touch, immediately immersing the audience in the winter atmosphere of the holiday season.
We then had the pleasure of hearing the first symphony in a cycle of six symphonies by Michel Corrette on the theme of the holidays, as well as a hymn by Capel Bond entitled Blessed Be the Lord God of Israel “for Christmas Day.”
However, it was the following seven hymns that caught my attention. These short cantatas were composed here by an Ursuline nun in the early 19th century with the aim of replacing the tavern songs that were too often sung at that time. While, in theory, these hymns perfectly illustrate the Montreal music scene at the turn of the 19th century, they were lost in the concert due to their simplicity and harmonization, which Mathieu Lussier himself describes as “sometimes clumsy.”
After a series of hymns by various composers from France and the United Kingdom, as well as Michel Corrette’s Fourth Symphony and excerpts from Charles Dibdin’s A Christmas Tale (one of the only non-religious pieces in the concert), the concert ended with an arrangement of excerpts from Handel’s Messiah. The aim of this exercise was to illustrate how, with limited resources and personnel, such grandiose pieces as this could be performed at the time without a choir or even a soloist. The first two excerpts, Thou Art Gone Up on High and The Trumpet Shall Sound, were performed purely instrumentally, allowing Mathieu Lussier to showcase the virtuosity of the bassoon in the solo part. The soprano joined the rest of the orchestra to close the concert with the aria If God Be for Us.
