STORY AND LINKS: Montrea Symphony announces opening concerts for new hall

By Robert D. Thomas
Music Critic
Pasadena Star-News/San Gabriel Valley Tribune/Whittier Daily News

The Montreal Symphony Orchestra (or L’Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, for you French speakers) will open its new symphony hall Sept. 7, 9 and 10 when Music Director Kent Nagano will conduct the orchestra in music from the province of Québec along with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. (Click HERE to read more about the new hall).

Nagano, who has headed the OSM since 2006 and was Los Angeles Opera’s music director for five years before that, will begin the hall’s opening concerts with Jesus, erbarme dich, a choral work by Claude Vivier, followed by Gilles Tremblay’s Envol: Alléluia performed by Timothy Hutchins, the orchestra’s principal flute. The concert will also include the world premiere of an orchestral piece by young Québecois composer Julien Bilodeau.

Short unpublished texts by Wajdi Mouawad, Marie-Claire Blais and Joséphine Bacon will echo Schiller’s Ode to Joy, the text for the final section of the final movement of Beethoven’s 9th. The choral forces in that conclusion will be Canadian soprano Erin Wall, mezzo-soprano Mihoko Fujimura from Japan, tenor Simon O’Neill from New Zealand and Russian bass Mikhail Petrenko (Russia). Toronto?s Tafelmusik Chamber Choir will join the OSM Chorus.

For more details, click HERE.
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(c) Copyright 2010, Robert D. Thomas. All rights reserved. Portions may be quoted with attribution.