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Renaud Loranger has just completed his fifth festival program since his appointment as artistic director of the Festival de Lanaudière. Yet it feels like he’s just getting started. After just one season (2019), nothing has gone according to plan. 2020 and 2021 were pandemic years, and 2022, a sort of comeback but still haunted by the shadows of an end to the crisis that sometimes still seemed fragile. 2023, in a sense, is the year of a real relaunch. A relaunch that is by no means easy, as Renaud Loranger tells us, whom I was delighted to meet to find out more about this year’s programming, and also about the post-pandemic challenges facing the classical music world.
Renaud Loranger was appointed artistic director of the Festival de Lanaudière in 2018, to the general satisfaction of the classical community. The Montreal native has a long and rich experience in the classical music world. He has lived partly in Europe for several years, and has been or still is associated with prestigious labels such as Deutsche Grammophon, Archiv and Pentatone. In other words, he has developed a solid network that includes renowned organizations, agents and artists. All this allowed Festival friends, and music lovers in general, to dream of great summer musical moments in the Joliette region. As Renaud Loranger himself puts it, the Festival’s first season was “off to a flying start”, confirming the stature of a program concocted by the artistic director. Big names of planetary stature, and our national must-sees. In short, it was a vintage year. The only one before the Crisis.
2023 promises us, in addition to a long-awaited return to “normality”, magical moments with the Montreal Symphony, Montreal Orchestre Métropolitain, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Rafael Payare, Andrew Wan, Charles Richard-Hamelin, the Grands Ballets, etc., but also William Christie and his Arts Florissants, Leonardo Garcia Alarcon with his Choeur de Namur and the Capella Mediterranea (in Monteverdi’s Orfeo! OMG!!), Marco Beasley who will team up with Constantinople, the French trumpeter Lucienne Renaudin Vary with Les Violons du Roy, Richard Galliano on accordion, and so many others.
So, everything back to normal, really? As if nothing had happened? That’s what we discussed.
PAN M 360: Hello Renaud. What a pleasure to see you again, and to talk about a totally post-pandemic Festival season! When you arrived, you must certainly have had a line, a long-term vision of programming. The pandemic turned everything upside down. Is it back to normal this year, as if nothing had happened? Or have you been forced to rethink your initial ideas from top to bottom?
Renaud Loranger: No. I’m a bit adamant about that. I think good ideas are always good. If they haven’t been implemented, they should be. The general orientations don’t change. Of course, it’s not like it used to be. It’s harder to make long-term plans. Or even medium- to long-term. It’s much harder to convince a certain number of artists to come. Many of them are rethinking the way they work, and they’re not necessarily available to come to America for the summer. They say yes, we’re going to tour North America… in the summer of 2058 (which means they don’t know when).
I don’t think we’ve found our rhythm yet. We’re trying to project ourselves, but it’s hard, and it’s like that all over the world too, although, in America, we face other challenges than in Europe.
Another problem is inflation. And yet another, the labour shortage. In Canada and Quebec, we’ve been very well supported by our governments during the crisis, but right now, emergency aid is disappearing. It’s normal, in a way, but it’s happening at the same time as the problems I’ve just mentioned. You can imagine the headache.
That being said, I’m currently seeing some very encouraging signals from the ticketing side. We think people are coming back in good numbers, which wasn’t the case last year.
Pan M 360: Is there a guiding principle behind your 2023 program? I see a lot of “big and safe titles” in terms of repertoire. Has caution been part of your equation, to make sure you bring back the audience?
Renaud Loranger: I wouldn’t say caution, but rather awareness. Awareness of the importance of the repertoire’s canon and its unifying quality. Berlioz’s Fantastique, Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique, Beethoven’s Ninth (which has just been performed with the OSM and Rafael Payare), these remain great pieces that aren’t played as often as you might think. We haven’t played the Ninth in over 15 years! But to answer your question, I’d like to tell you about a well-known mythical figure from Antiquity (a period I’m very fond of): Orpheus. Orpheus is a metaphor that can be applied to all sorts of things. It’s the figure of the artist, it’s the figure of the human being in love whose feelings go too far. Tragedy becomes inevitable. I find that from Monteverdi to Rachmaninov, with the piano concertos and so on, we go right to the bottom of the human soul. We have Orpheus for real, with Monteverdi and Alarcon (it’s going to be an exceptional moment!), but we also have everything that can claim to be Orpheus through symbolism: Tchaikovsky, Chopin and so on. It’s a bit tenuous, but at the same time, I can see the lineage.
PAN M 360: I notice that several concerts are already sold out, including some in the “hors les murs” series. It’s going well, isn’t it?
Renaud Loranger: Yes, it’s a great series. Playing classical music in a brewery or in a squash field is a different and exciting approach. That being said, these concerts are quite intimate, with maybe fifty seats. They fill up pretty quickly. But it’s true that ticket sales are going well. Our church concerts are almost sold out at the moment, and several others will be, if sales are anything to go by. I’m superstitious, I don’t want to be too hasty, but I have to admit it’s encouraging. We can be cautiously optimistic.
PAN M 360: Post-pandemic recovery is a challenge all over the world and in all artistic disciplines. What particularities does this recovery represent for classical music specifically?
Renaud Loranger: That’s a very broad question… As far as we’re concerned, based on our figures and data, we can see that part of the traditional audience has disappeared. They don’t feel like going out and about like they used to. They may still have fears. They may come back, but only from time to time. In the end, it’s likely to be ten times less than before.
Another challenge, and it’s a paradox, is losing accessibility. What I mean is, we’re chasing money, for the reasons I mentioned earlier, among others. I’m afraid that to keep going we’ll have to raise ticket prices, which inevitably makes music less accessible. Once again, the governments (Canada, Quebec and cities) have been there for us, very much. But going back to pre-pandemic funding won’t be viable, because everything has increased so much in the meantime… Ideally, we’d like to keep this funding and make it permanent. That would ensure that we don’t fall back any further than where we were before.
PAN M 360: Despite this solid support, we’re still lagging behind Europe in this area. Although there are signs that things are changing over there?
Renaud Loranger: First of all, Europe’s tax base is much larger than ours. That’s a simple fact. Secondly, it’s true that support for the arts has been part of their culture for a long time. But it’s also true that we’re seeing the arrival of new political movements, new administrations in certain jurisdictions that are making decisions that are… astonishing. In the UK, the BBC is the target of such gestures. In France, certain city councils (Lyon, Strasbourg, Bordeaux) have become highly politicized, conveying an ideological vision of culture (among other things) as elitist. Classical music, and the classical arts in general, are especially targeted as such. This is a real change. I don’t think it’s positive. This risk of ideological politicization of culture is dangerous. And yet, it’s precisely because the classical arts are publicly funded that they are open to everyone – the opposite of elitism! These are expensive arts in general, and that’s why collective funding is necessary to prevent them from reverting exclusively to the private salons of people who can afford it.
PAN M 360: The Festival is now firmly established in an urban setting, right in the center of Joliette. That’s a new reality. Tell me about that.
Renaud Loranger: It’s funny you should mention that, because I was on the site of our new building a few minutes ago, the Maison de la musique René-Charette, right in the heart of downtown Joliette. We’ll have our offices there, as well as a performance space that will enable us to offer year-round programming. We’ll be able to accommodate around 100 people. It will be intimate, but above all open to all, not just in summer. We’ll be able to offer mediation activities, concerts and so on. We can’t wait to move in. We’re currently in offices near the Amphitheatre, but they weren’t designed for this kind of work. Remember, these are buildings that were built for the 1976 Montreal Olympic Games (Joliette hosted competitions)! They’re well beyond their useful life, let’s say. It will be a renewal with a new energy.
PAN M 360: Thank you for your time and good luck with Festival 2023!
Renaud Loranger: Thank you!
