L'Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal

Hélène Guilmette, soprano

Québec soprano Hélène Guilmette graduated from Université Laval in musical education and piano and went on to study voice with Marlena Malas in New York. She finished third in the international Voix Nouvelles competition in Paris and second at Belgium’s Queen Elisabeth International Competition in 2004. Hélène Guilmette has appeared in numerous recitals in Canada (Orchestre symphonique de Montréal and Orchestre Symphonique de Québec, Les Violons du Roy, Festival international du Domaine Forget, André Turp Musical Society…), but also in France, Benelux, Germany, Switzerland, Turkey (Istanbul International Music Festival), Australia (Australian Brandenburg Orchestra), South America (Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires) and in the United States, in works such as Mozart’s Mass in C Minor and Requiem, Handel’s Messiah, Saint-Saëns’ Oratorio de Noël, Bach’s Saint John Passion, and Haydn’s Theresienmesse and Nelson Mass. Conductors with whom she has worked include Marcello Viotti, Paul Goodwin, Sigiswald Kuijken, Ottavio Dantone, Thomas Hengelbrock, Bernard Labadie, Yoav Talmi, Kasushi Ono, Alain Guingal and Sylvain Cambreling. And she has shared the stage with José Van Dam in a recital of German and French art songs in France.

In opera Hélène Guilmette has made appearances as Crobyle in Thaïs, Pedro in Don Quichotte, Frasquita in Carmen, Papagena in The Magic Flute, Nadia in The Merry Widow, Servilia in La Clemenza di Tito and Sophie in Werther at opera companies in Montreal, Quebec City, Avignon, Nancy and Lille, at the Opéra Comique de Paris, at Tokyo’s New National Theater and in Quebec City (as the Countess Ceprano in Rigoletto). In 2004-2005 she sang the roles of Pedro (Don Quichotte), Frasquita (Carmen) in Avignon, Papagena (The Magic Flute) in Nancy and Nadia (The Merry Widow) at the Opéra Comique in Paris. In 2007 she made her debut at Brussels’ Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in the role of Pamina (The Magic Flute) and in the same theatre sang the role of Sophie (Werther) alongside Jennifer Larmore. She also debuted at the Opéra National de Paris as Mélisande (Ariane et Barbe-Bleue) and as Amour (Orphée et Eurydice).

In the company of Andreas Scholl – with whom she has recorded Handel’s Duello Amoroso for Harmonia Mundi – she performed last summer at the Istanbul International Music Festival and at the Schubertiades in Schwarzenberg, Austria. Hélène Guilmette has also made a first recording of art songs from France and Québec (Poulenc, Hahn and Daunais) on the Ambroisie label with French pianist Delphine Bardin.

Her projects include Sophie in Werther at the Opéra national du Rhin (under Michel Plasson), Constance in Dialogue des Carmélites at Munich’s Bayerische Staatsoper (under Kent Nagano), Eurydice in Orphée et Eurydice at the Opéra de Nantes, Mélisande in Ariane et Barbe-Bleue at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater at Théâtre des Champs-Élysées with Andreas Scholl (under Julia Schröder), Vivaldi’s Stabat Mater with Les Violons du Roy, and a recording of Handel’s Dixit Dominus and Ode for the Anniversary of Queen Anne with the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin (under Marcus Creed) on the Harmonia Mundi label.

Hélène Guilmette has been the recipient of grants from the Canada Council, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Fondation Jacqueline Desmarais.

Brian Manker, cello

Principal Cello of the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal since 1999, Brian Manker enjoys a diverse and varied musical career. A frequent soloist with the OSM, Mr. Manker has also performed throughout North America as a member of the Harrington String Quartet and the Atlanta Chamber Players, and with many distinguished artists including Walter Trampler, Gary Graffman, André Laplante, and Jean-Philippe Collard. A Grand Prize winner as a member of the Harrington Quartet at the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition, he has participated in many music festivals, including Norfolk, Blossom, Chamber Music East, Roundtop, Swannanoa, Ottawa, and has given masterclasses at Centre d’arts Orford and Domaine Forget, and at the Canton International Summer Music Academy, in China. He has performed in radio and television broadcasts on the CBC, WFMT Chicago, and WQXR New York, and can be heard on numerous recordings of chamber music and of course with the OSM. In May 2006, Brian Manker was a jury member at the prestigious and historic Prague Spring International Cello Competition. Mr. Manker received a special commendation from Sir Yehudi Menuhin at the Portsmouth International String Quartet Competition. Currently on the faculty of McGill University, Brian Manker has also taught at West Texas State and Emory Universities.

Program notes

The era of big international tours by the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal opened in April of 1962 when the Orchestra, led by Zubin Mehta and Jacques Beaudry, went to Europe for the first time with stops in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Vienna and Paris. Audiences were particularly enthralled in Russia (then USSR), where the Orchestra played to full houses, including at the 6,000-seat Kremlin Palace. At the concert hall in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) the audience went wild. There was prolonged cheering, musicians were decked with flowers, and autographs were in demand.

The first performance of The Variations on a Rococo Theme by Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) took place in Moscow in November of 1877. Nicolai Rubinstein conducted and cellist Wilhelm Fitzenhagen, to whom the work was dedicated, was the soloist. These variations, set to a theme by Tchaikovsky himself, pay elegant tribute to the composer’s idol Mozart. The modest-sized orchestra plays an accompanimental role, with only the winds having any real dialogue with the soloist.

After Leningrad, the OSM went on to Vienna, regarded as the musical capital of the world, with its legendary Musikverein. The audience filled the seats to the sides of the stage, and the musicians were fully aware of the challenge facing them. The concert ended with tumultuous applause, an unforgettable moment in the Orchestra’s history. “Rarely, aside from the world’s most prestigious orchestras, “ wrote Eric Mclean in the Montreal Star (May 2, 1962), “has an orchestra on tour received such glowing praise in this musical city where it is so difficult to please.”

The success of The Marriage of Figaro by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) was such that at its premiere on May 1, 1786, several of the arias were encored. “At the opera’s conclusion,” related the singer Michael Kelly in his Reminiscences, I saw that the audience never stopped applauding and clamoring for Mozart.” The magnificent aria “Deh vieni, non tardar,” from Act IV, is sung by Susanna to her lover Figaro while pretending to be waiting for a tryst with the Count.

Mozart’s recitative and aria A Bernice … Sol nascente  is what we call a licenza, an aria added to an operatic performance (usually at the end) to a text having nothing to do with the rest of the opera and written as an homage to someone of high rank in the audience, in this case Sigismund von Schrattenbach, Archbishop of Salzburg whom the young composer was perhaps seeking to flatter.

Over the years, the OSM undertook seven additional tours to Europe, all to critical acclaim. In 1987, it appeared at the Leipzig Gewandhaus under Charles Dutoit. This hall was originally constructed in Bach’s day and twice rebuilt. Felix Mendelssohn, Arthur Nikisch, Wilhelm Furtwängler, Kurt Masur, Herbert Blomstedt and Riccardo Chailly have all, at one time or another, held the position of musical director at this venerable institution.

There were two particularly fertile periods in the life of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) for the production of cantatas. The first was in Weimar between 1708 and 1717; the second was in Leipzig from 1723 to 1750. Cantata No. 21 (Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis –  My heart and soul were sore distressed). In the aria “Seufzer, Tränen, Kummer, Not” (Sighing, weeping, sorrow, care), Bach weaves an exquisite dialogue between soprano and oboe.

In Leipzig Bach wrote the Coffee Cantata (No. 211), based on a satire by Picander, in which a despairing father attempts to convince his daughter to stop consuming the precious beverage. In the aria “Heute noch” (This very day), Lieschen makes a deal with her father to accept a husband and give up coffee.

In the course of that same tour in 1987, the Orchestra also performed in London’s Royal Festival Hall. There it played the symphonic poem Don Juan by Richard Strauss (1864-1949). Numerous cultural icons have treated the Don Juan legend, including Byron, Molière and of course Mozart. In Strauss’s version, based on fragments of an 1843 verse play by Nikolaus Lenau, we find what is almost a miniature opera, the 24-year-old composer’s first real masterpiece. In it, the legendary womanizer is condemned to the endless quest for the eternal feminine. When the desire to possess beauty no longer absorbs him, the hero is prepared to accept death.

The OSM has played to French audiences on a number of occasions, including in the Théátre du Châtelet in Paris. There, in the spring of 1992 it performed Mother Goose by Maurice Ravel (1875-1937). This work, based on stories by Charles Perrault, Marie-Catherine, the Countess d’Aulnoye and Marie Leprince de Beaumont, was first heard in the form of a suite for piano four hands on April 20, 1910 in Paris’s Salle Gaveau. The following year, Ravel orchestrated it and wrote two additional numbers for it, the “Prelude” and the “Danse du rouet.” In 1912, he slightly expanded the score and turned it into a ballet in which the Sleeping Beauty dreams of other tales during her long sleep.

At the conclusion of the 1969-1970 season, the OSM and its music director at the time, Franz-Paul Decker, went to Japan for the first time as part of Osaka’s Expo ’70. The orchestra was to return to Japan on eight additional occasions. In 1999, in Tokyo’s Suntory Hall, the OSM performed the Prelude to Afternoon of a Faun by Claude Debussy (1862-1918). First heard on December 23, 1894 by an enthusiastic audience that demanded it be repeated, the Faune irrevocably left romanticism behind and ushered in the age of modernism. Part of its appeal lies certainly in its tonal ambiguity, much in the way Mallarmé’s poem charms through its musical manipulation of syntactical and verbal dualities. While the opening flute theme more or less alludes to the faun (a mythological woodland creature) itself, Debussy was not at all seeking to transcribe the verse directly into music but rather conjuring up its ambiance. The poet is said to have exclaimed: “This music prolongs the emotion of my poem and sets its scene more vividly than color.” 

Lucie Renaud
Translated by Robert Markow