OSM / Tribute to musical creativity

Tribute to musical creativity

Susanna Mälkki of the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris

for the first time in Canada

Chantal Juillet back with the OSM

Walter Boudreau conducts works by Reich, Vivier and Frehner

Movie projections on a giant screen

Montreal, October 6, 2008 – Susanna Mälkki, music director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris, will be making her Canadian debut with the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal at a non-series concert presented at Théâtre Maisonneuve in Place des Arts on October 29. Founded by none other than Pierre Boulez in 1976, the Ensemble Intercontemporain is one of the most prominent ensembles of its kind in the world. A unique and bold program will bring together Madam Mälkki, Société de musique contemporaine du Québec music director Walter Boudreau, and violinist Chantal Juillet. Excerpts from the James Dormeyer film Journal d’une création (Diary of a Creation) and from Jérôme Bosc’s stylized video City Life will be projected on a giant screen during the concert, while works by Frehner, Prévost, Ligeti, Reich and Vivier are performed by the musicians of the OSM.

An essential part of the OSM’s 75th season, this concert is closely linked to two Québec composers who cannot be ignored, marking as it does the 60th anniversary of the birth and 25th of the death of Claude Vivier, and the 10th anniversary of the premiere by Chantal Juillet and the OSM of André Prévost’s Violin Concerto. In addition, the Orchestra will perform Canadian Paul Frehner’s Lila, which won the Claude Vivier National Prize in 2007 as part of the OSM’s International Composition Prize.

Susanna Mälkki

Music director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain since 2005, Susanna Mälkki has quickly obtained international recognition for her talent as an orchestra conductor. Deeply committed to the cause of contemporary music, she is one of the few women conductors enjoying an international career. She led both the world and the North American premieres of Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s oratorio La Passion de Simone, an event that was acclaimed by the New York Times. Her collaborators have included the Klangforum Wien, the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and the ASKO and Avanti! ensembles, and she has conducted such prominent orchestras as the Rotterdam Philharmonic, the City of Birmingham Symphony, the Oslo Philharmonic, the Munich Philharmonic, the Danish National Symphony, the Berlin Philharmonic, the North German Radio Symphony, the Vienna Symphony, the Orchestre philharmonique de Radio France, the Swedish Radio Symphony and the Cincinnati Symphony.

Walter Boudreau

Walter Boudreau has been highly active, since the early 1970s, in musical creativity in Québec. Artistic director and principal conductor of the Société de musique contemporaine du Québec (SMCQ) since 1988, he has collaborated on a regular basis with the OSM in large-scale projects (OSMCQ, Symphony of the Millennium, Musimarch, Montreal/New Music International Festival…). In 1968, with poet Raoul Duguay, he founded Infonie, a colourful ensemble of about 33 members located somewhere in the middle of happening, jazz, contemporary music and multimedia.

The work of the Montreal-born composer and conductor has been rewarded with the prestigious Grand Prize of the Conseil des arts de la Communauté urbaine de Montréal. He is also the recipient of First Prize from the CBC National Competition for Young Canadian Composers, the Prix Jules-Léger for New Chamber Music, the Grand Prix Paul Gilson from the Communauté des radios publiques de langue française, in Paris, and a number of Prix Opus from the Conseil québécois de la musique. The Canada Council for the Arts presented him with its Molson Prize, in recognition of his career as a whole. He has won a Masque, awarded by the Conseil québécois de la musique, as well as the Théâtre du Nouveau Monde’s Prix Gascon-Roux for best sound design at the Theatre. Lastly, he has received the Prix Denise-Pelletier for performing arts – the highest distinction offered by the Québec government in the area of culture and science.

Chantal Juillet

The OSM has had a special relationship with violinist Chantal Juillet for some time. Winner of the OSM Competition in 1974, she joined the Orchestra in 1985, was appointed associate concertmaster in 1990 and has performed on a number of occasions as a soloist with the Orchestra.

Recognized as one of the country’s most brilliant musicians, she enjoys an international career that takes her to the five continents. She is a frequent guest with orchestras as pre-eminent as the Orchestre de Paris, the Orchestre national de France, the London Philharmonic, the London Philharmonia, the English Chamber Orchestra, the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra. The violinist has soloed regularly with great American orchestras like the Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Boston and New York, and has toured frequently in Europe, North America, South America, Japan, China and Australia. Today she is artistic director of the Saratoga Chamber Music Festival, which she founded in 1991.

Works on the program

André Prévost, Violin Concerto

Among other moments being celebrated by the concert is the 10th anniversary of the premiere of André Prévost’s Violin Concerto, which was commissioned by the OSM and Chantal Juillet. Fascinated by the creative act, director James Dormeyer spent two years, day after day, as a privileged witness to the creation of this work, from the first sketch to the final concert, given by Chantal Juillet and the OSM at Place des Arts. The film that resulted is called Journal d’une creation (Diary of a Creation), an excerpt of which will be shown during the performance. James Dormeyer set out to depict, with as much clarity as possible, not only the subtleties of a complex musical language but also the movements of the soul that were at the source of the work, with its author as with its performers.

Born in France, James Dormeyer settled in Canada in 1965 and joined Radio-Canada as a filmmaker in 1968. He has directed in several fields, ranging from variety to children's programs to news by way of dramatic series and music programs.

Claude Vivier, Orion

Orion, by Montrealer Claude Vivier, a composer the 60th anniversary of whose birth and 25th of whose death are being marked, was commissioned and premiered by the OSM in 1980. The work is also being presented as part of the Claude Vivier tribute series in the Montreal/New Music International Festival.

Vivier’s art is based on a melody. “I have to feel ‘close’ to my musical material,” Vivier stated. “I have to live it.” György Ligeti considered the music of Claude Vivier among the most original of his time.

Steve Reich, City Life

Celebrated American composer Steve Reich is featured with his City Life, for instrumental ensemble and samplers, an specially dense work that presents a New World of excess and immoderation, with images supplied by Jérôme Bosc and projected on a giant screen. City Life integrates real-life noises recorded in New York into the composition: car doors slamming, air brakes, a pile driver and boat horns are some of the things that engage in a dialogue with the musicians. The work, one of the composer’s most exciting, is being performed for the first time by the OSM.

Last year at the OSM, Jérôme Bosc’s Buster, a montage based on Buster Keaton movies, was projected to John Adams’s work Fearful Symmetries. The film was a great success.

György Ligeti, Lontano

Lontano by György Ligeti, who died in 2006, is a flagship composition of the 20th century. One of the composer’s best known works, it is nonetheless rarely heard in concert. In fact, the last time the OSM played it was in 1981, under the direction of Charles Dutoit.

Director Stanley Kubrick used György Ligeti’s music several times in his films, in particular Atmosphères, Requiem, Lux Æterna in 2001: A Space Odyssey and Musica ricercata in Eyes Wide Shut.

Paul Frehner, Lila

In 2007, Canadian Paul Frehner took the Claude Vivier National Prize with Lila at the OSM International Composition Prize. Lila is a Hindu creation myth in which Brahman transforms into the universe. It’s a “rhythmic play,” in the composer’s own description, “which goes on in endless cycles, the One becoming the many and the many returning into the One…. In Lila, there are no obvious audible references to Eastern musical tradition. The rhythmic and metric aspects of the score, however, are governed by a personal interpretation and application of Jhumra, a 14-beat cyclical metric structure used in Indian classical-music traditions.”

Non-series Concerts

October 29 at 8 p.m.

Théâtre Maisonneuve, Place des Arts

Susanna Mälkki and Walter Boudreau, conductors

Chantal Juillet, violin

György Ligeti Lontano

André Prévost Violin Concerto (premiered by Chantal Juillet) (with projection of the James Dormeyer film Journal d’une creation)

Paul Frehner Lila

Steve Reich City Life (with projection of the Jérome Bosc video City Life)

Claude Vivier Orion

Tickets starting at $24.75

15-30 years old: $15

Information and reservations: 514-842-9951 or www.osm.ca

The Orchestre symphonique de Montréal is presented by Hydro-Québec

in association with National Bank Financial Group