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Alix Goolden Performance Hall
August 8, 2007
"What a sextet - and what a fugue at the end - it's a pleasure. Awful, how pleased I am with myself!"
So wrote Tchaikovsky to his brother, Modest, regarding his recently completed string sextet Souvenirs de Florence.
I Musici de Montreal and conductor Yuli Turovsky closed their spectacular concert on Wednesday night with a ravishing performance of Tchaikovsky's most popular and sunniest chamber work.
Yes, the playing was astonishingly accurate and ensemble immaculate, even during some of Turovsky's more dramatic rubatos. They even managed to tame the Alix Goolden's notoriously bright acoustic.
But you don't get to make over 40 recordings with a major independent label just for playing nicely together and, indeed, there was more to the playing than simply accuracy and intonation.
The energy and momentum of the work's opening, for example, was all but overwhelming; the slow movement featured exquisite solo violin and cello over delicate pizzicatos. The scherzo, a little sombre perhaps, reminding us of its composer nationality, nevertheless possessed plenty of life and the razor-sharp final chord was miraculous.
Although the finale was far from rushed, it was tremendously exciting and brought the evening to a thoroughly satisfying close - and the audience to its feet.
Turovsky directed what I imagine to be a very Russian performance, soulful and featuring some fairly extreme rubato - which is very risky indeed, unless you are directing a group of this calibre. (I noticed a fair amount of eye contact between the players, almost as if they were playing chamber music.)
The evening opened with Mozart's Divertimento, K.136 - something of a repertoire staple in this town. The quick, outer movements were light and airy, with playing as smooth as silk; the slow movement was quite lovely.
From a modern perspective, this was in some ways a distinctly old-fashioned performance, with some exaggerated dynamics and dramatic rallentandos at the close. I think Mozart is man enough to survive, though, and when the playing is this good, it would take one far more stony-hearted than I to demur.
Borodin's "Chamber Symphony" turns out - as I realised, while waiting in the queue to get into the hall, it probably would - to be an arrangement of the composer's well-known String Quartet No.2
The arrangement, by Lucas Drew, was most effective and the added weight of the sound was almost enough to persuade me that I enjoy it more than the original - heretical thought though that may be.
Turovsky directed a lush, atmospheric and engaging performance. Once more there were some extreme, almost mannered tempo changes and dynamics, but they seem far less out of place in this type of music. The only place where Turovsky did, to my ears, go too far was the accelerating cello line which launches the quicker music of the finale.
So slowly did it begin and so dramatic was the accelerando that, for one brief, surrealistic moment, I thought we were listening to the theme from Jaws.
Dennis Gougeon's Coups d'archets was composed for I Musici de Montreal's fifteenth anniversary in 1998.
The work begins with a highly linear cello solo - Turovsky demonstrating that he has not lost his touch on his instrument - with plenty of glissando harmonics. After a short time there sounded what seemed at first to be an echo coming from back stage. It soon transpired to be coming from the rest of the group, who walked onto the stage while playing - at which point Turovsky handed the cello back to its player and exchanged his bow for a stick to direct the rest of the piece.
From this moment on the work became a dazzling showcase for the virtuosity of the group - both individually and collectively; you most emphatically do not hear string playing like this every day. And rarely have I heard such an enthusiastic and deserved response in this town for a work written within the last decade.
This was a much-anticipated evening and I doubt that anyone was disappointed. It is surely a mark of great music-making that, even if one disagrees with the interpretation, it nonetheless engages and moves.
Let us all hope that I Musici de Montreal do not wait another twenty years to visit.
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