Virée classique de l’OSM | Telling the Story of Madame de Staël in Music

The PAN M 360 team is very present at the Virée classique, presented by the OSM. On the ground, in the free activities and the indoor concerts, Alain Brunet, Alexis Desrosiers-Michaud and Alexandre Villemaire report on what they saw and heard at the events presented in Montreal until August 18.

Entitled Sur les traces de Madame de Staël, Esther Laforce, a librarian at the BAnQ, offered a musical journey through part of the work of the French and Genevan woman of letters accompanied by the harpist Antoine Malette-Chénier. The novel Corinne ou l’Italie served as the backdrop to the story. The audience was led to discover the eponymous character of the author, an Italian poet, and her love story with Lord Oswald Nelvil, an English nobleman. The sustained research and the story painted once again very aptly constructed by Esther Laforce are presented as a form of ambulatory where we follow the evolution of the relationship between the two protagonists, in particular through their state of mind and through different mythical places in Italy, from Rome to the Kingdom of Naples. Commenting musically on the action with pieces taken mainly from the 18th century harp repertoire (Krumpholtz, Petrini, Naderman), Antoine Malette-Chénier played his role to perfection, embodying in his own way the character of Corinne whose lyre was the instrument of choice. His interventions were in turn marked by lightness, melancholy and torment.

Despite a good musical performance, we found it more difficult to connect with the story and its characters, compared to last year when the epistolary relationship between George Sand and Frédéric Chopin offered lighter and even humorous moments. Here, the style of the language and the content of the subject require a little more sustained and internal concentration, which the open and semi-crowded location of the Espace GEL makes more difficult to fully appreciate.