I’ve come to Montreal to witness the Montreal Symphony Orchestra bid adieu to the Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier, its home for the past 47 years. Emotions are running high on this brilliantly sunny June day, yet it wouldn’t be entirely accurate to say this is an especially fond farewell. The auditorium was designed as a multi-purpose performance space that, in addition to the orchestra, hosts ballet, opera, visiting Broadway musicals and pop music concerts. Indeed, the orchestra has long been relegated to perform there only on weekday nights. The primary problem, however, is the acoustic. Kent Nagano, the orchestra’s music director, puts it as plainly as possible: “It’s rather difficult to play Haydn, Mozart or Bach in a 3,500-seat hall.”
Nagano is in a reflective mood – and with good reason. Tonight, an era ends. On September 7, another era begins with the orchestra’s inaugural concert at its new, $250-million home at Place des Arts. Culminating in Beethoven’s Ninth, the performance is being recorded by Sony for release in 2012.
Nagano became the music director in 2006 following the dramatic departure of Charles Dutoit, whose relationship with the orchestra had soured, triggering a firestorm in the press. A long, bitter strike ensued. “I found that I’d walked into a very unstable situation,” says the soft-spoken and indefatigably diplomatic Nagano. “The visibility of the conflict meant that our audiences began to consider what other options they might have for their leisure time. Yet it was clear to me that nothing is ever quite like you’ve read about it in a newspaper. And it’s also true that what may be accurate might not necessarily reflect the truth.” Without extra financial resources, Nagano says, he had but a single option: “The only choice was to be genuinely appealing to our public. And our aim was to raise the bar, not to lower it. We believed that the audience would respond to quality.”
Looking back through the orchestra’s archive, Nagano was shocked to discover gaping holes in the repertoire. “We couldn’t find a record of certain Beethoven symphonies ever having been played. They probably were played here 40 years ago, but they weren’t active parts of the orchestra’s repertoire – and it was the same with important symphonies by Haydn, Schubert and Schumann. So our first task was to bring the repertoire back into balance, because it’s partly through finding that balance that one also develops good orchestral health.”
Those who know Nagano’s work entirely through his recordings may be surprised by the conductor’s focus on the standard repertoire. After all, he first made a name for himself as music director of the Lyon National Opera with a spectacular Virgin Classics recording of Prokofiev’s rarely-staged The Love for Three Oranges, winner of Gramophone’s 1990 Record of the Year Award (Nagano is once again the golden boy of the Gramophone Awards, having garnered the most nominations of any artist on the roster at last year’s ceremony). And, before Lyon, he’d cut his operatic teeth as assistant to Sarah Caldwell during the heyday of the now legendary Opera Company of Boston.
In Lyon, Nagano also presided over productions and recordings of Busoni's Doktor Faust, Carlisle Floyd’s Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos and the French version of Salome. I suggest that by championing unusual repertoire, Nagano is, like Caldwell, something of a maverick himself. Yet he doesn’t look happy with my comment (sincerely intended as a compliment) and quickly takes a verbal step back. “Well, let’s put this in a broader context.
The opera companies of Lyon and Boston have the challenge of being regionally based with very dominant and established institutions nearby. In the case of Boston, there’s obviously the New York Metropolitan; with Lyon, there’s the Paris Opera. Both companies answer that challenge by performing the full standard repertoire, of course, but they also display their own strong personalities which manifests itself partly in a tendency to explore what lies beyond the standard repertoire. That’s what Ms Caldwell was famous for. Even though our season in Boston was built upon Bohème and Figaro, she wasn’t afraid to mount Sessions’s Montezuma, Nono’s Intolleranza, or to give the US premiere of Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron. It took a company like Ms Caldwell’s to push the boundaries and provide a platform for these works.
“In Lyon, the situation was a little different because the company dates back to Lully’s day. But, still, with Paris not so far away, it took an enormous amount of creative ambition in order to become visible. We, too, performed the full, standard repertoire, but when the time came to decide which works to record, we thought very, very carefully. And we decided that we wanted our recordings to live for a long time and not have a shelf life of just a few years. We wanted to contribute a recorded document that would become a reference point.”
Nagano was born and raised in a tiny town on a lonely stretch of central California’s coastline. His parents made their living as farmers. As a boy, he says, he longed to live in New York City to be in the thick of things. Today, there are few if any visible traces of his rural California roots other than his shoulder-length hair. In a very real and literal sense, Nagano has become a man of the world.
His career took wing in Europe, starting in Lyon in 1988, then in Manchester with the Hallé. He spent six years in the German capital at the helm of the German Symphony Orchestra, Berlin (and retains the title of honorary conductor there – a sign of the musicians’ admiration and affection for him), while simultaneously serving as music director of the Los Angeles Opera. Since 2006, the year he took over in Montreal, Nagano has also been general music director of the Bavarian State Opera in Munich.
Such is the peripatetic life of the modern maestro, one might say. Yet Nagano seems to take special pleasure in soaking up the local culture of the cities where he’s lived and worked, so much so that it’s no surprise to learn that, after graduating from university, he’d seriously considered a career in law in order to pursue his interest in international politics and diplomacy.
I ask Nagano about the unique musical requirements of his post in Montreal. And, again, he immediately broadens the context. “Quebec is where European civilisation began in North America and the link to Europe remains. It’s fundamental to the culture here. It’s so powerful, in fact, that instead of being diluted over time, it seems to be growing stronger as the province’s identity develops. Quebec also has many of the same attributes that the rest of North America is famous for, both positive and negative, including the ability to maximise efficiency, to think outside the box and to pursue one’s dreams without the shackles of any social structure. Yet these exist within the context of a European cultural sensibility and aesthetic. I’ve often wondered why one finds this here in Montreal but not, say, in New Orleans or in Boston, where the ties to Europe were so strong 200 years ago. Surely the language – Quebec French or Québécois – plays an important role, though other languages are spoken here, too. But, the way I see it, Quebec is not a melting pot in the way the US is; it’s more what I’d describe as a mosaic – a very beautiful and coherent mosaic.”
It may be that putting things in a broader context – historically, culturally, socially, philosophically – is how Nagano’s mind works. Either that or he simply does not enjoy talking about himself, which surely makes him an anomaly among conductors. In any case, he’s taken his understanding of Quebec’s strong sense of identity and programmed the orchestra’s concerts accordingly.
“When we perform the work of a Canadian or Québécois composer, we put it at the centre of the programme; the rest of the programme is built around it. Also, we try to illuminate other parts of the repertoire by giving the audience a new perspective, a new way to experience the music. To give a specific instance, let’s take Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben, which has been performed regularly – one might even say it’s been over-performed. My question was, what connection does our audience in Montreal have with the literature of Nietzsche? And, since we’re primarily a French-speaking province, my staff and I couldn’t really come up with an answer. So we decided to re-examine Ein Heldenleben to try to explore Nietzsche’s intellectual, emotional and spiritual ideas in a very abstract way.” The result was a new work by François Dompierre that included spoken solo parts for past and present members of the Canadiens, Montreal’s beloved ice hockey team.
“The Canadiens are heroes to the Québécois,” Nagano explains, “heroes with a real responsibility of identity, image and inspiration for their many fans. And, at that particular moment when the programme took shape, there was a very unfortunate incident with one of the superheroes of the sport whose son was having some difficulties. So, here was a real-life example of gods, heroes and men whose lives are somehow interconnected yet different, with the idea that heroes are not supermen. And the nine or 10 players who performed with us recited texts that reflected some of the philosophical ideas that run through Nietzsche’s work. We hoped that would make Strauss’s tone-poem somehow more relevant to our time.”
Nagano eagerly offers another example. “Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. What does this work mean to us today? Does it even have any meaning? We know from the use of that famous rhythmic motive that there’s a heroic idea and that the grand finale suggests a sense of triumph. But it’s not the triumph of an individual, really; it’s the triumph of the ideals of the French Revolution – liberty, equality, fraternity. So, to explore this, we put together an all-Beethoven programme, pairing the Fifth Symphony with the music for Egmont, which, aside from the overture, is not well known here. And we looked to the heroic efforts of General Roméo Dallaire, a Montrealer, who was one of the leaders of the UN forces in Rwanda during the horrific genocide in that country, because there are important parallels between Goethe’s play and the Rwandan tragedy – issues of prejudice, cultural conflict, class conflict and nationalism.” Nagano engaged Paul Griffiths to write a libretto based upon Dallaire’s experiences and Dallaire himself attended the performance (Nagano and the orchestra have recorded their updated interpretation of Egmont – retitled The General – coupled with the Fifth Symphony for Sony).
“So that’s our approach to programming. It’s firmly rooted in the traditional repertoire yet at the same time I like to think that it’s very relevant to Quebec.” And the result? “The audience has embraced the orchestra as its own. One of the reasons we have a brand-new concert hall is because we regularly sell out a 3,500-seat house. The public voted to build this hall.”
Nagano’s creative approach to programming is manifestly evident in the orchestra’s farewell to the Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier – a concert performance of Wagner’s Das Rheingold. “Over the past five years, we’ve developed quite an audience for Wagner. And, at the same time, the themes of this particular opera – dreaming of Valhalla, an unattainable goal that finally seems to be attainable – seemed somehow apt in this context.” I restrain myself from mentioning what happens to Valhalla at the end of Götterdämmerung, but Nagano has read my mind. “It’s a conceit that’s meant to be slightly ironic and lighthearted. This is a very emotional experience for us.” On paper, Das Rheingold appeared an odd choice for a celebratory farewell. In practice, however, it worked magnificently. Epic, expectant and rife with conflicting emotions, it fitted the occasion with awe-inspiring precision. Of, course, it helped that the performance was superb. Nagano presented the score as an expansive yet tightly woven dramatic symphony, the singing was generally first-class and the orchestra played its heart out. Before the final, radiant D-flat major sonority had faded away, the audience erupted with cheers. The demonstration was long, loud andpalpably heartfelt.
Backstage, after the concert, Nagano looked fairly radiant himself. “You can feel the audience’s love for their orchestra,” he said, beaming proudly. “You can feel the love.”
by Andrew Farach-Colton
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