Speaking over the phone with a total stranger can be awkward, but it’s not when the voice on the other end belongs to Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who exudes the same air of genuine geniality that he radiates from the podium of a concert stage. As a resident of Philadelphia, where Nézet-Séguin has been music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra since 2012, I have been fortunate to experience the warmth he so effortlessly projects on a regular basis. It doesn’t matter whether he’s presiding over a glitzy opening night concert or leading a probing, thoughtful reading of a Mahler symphony: the joy of musical discovery and the ability to share these gifts with people, is always there.
In contrast with the forbidding image adopted by conductors of yore, Nézet-Séguin is refreshingly open and approachable; in political parlance, he’s the type you’d want to grab a beer with. But when we speak, he’s even more affable than usual. Perhaps that has something to do with the circumstances surrounding our conversation.
Nézet-Séguin – who, in addition to his Philadelphia perch has been the Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer Music Director of the Metropolitan Opera since 2018 – is about to embark on a US tour with his first love: the Orchestre Métropolitain de Montréal, which he has helmed since 2000. Joined by the internationally acclaimed mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, the tour will play engagements in Chicago, Ann Arbor, New York and Philadelphia.
Nézet-Séguin is excited to introduce the Orchestre Métropolitain to American audiences. He is also curious to see how audiences who may know him as a cultivator of the famous “Philadelphia Sound” or as a chameleonic interpreter of vast operatic repertoire, will receive his hometown orchestra.
“The orchestra is still relatively young – we are now about to celebrate our fortieth anniversary next season,” said Nézet-Séguin. “Compared to Philadelphia, which is 120 years old, it’s much more recent that the sound of the OM has developed into something recognizable. But I do believe there is now something recognizable about it, which has something to do with Montreal being very European as a city compared to the rest of North America. The approach of OM is very chamber-like, with a lot of listening going on between the sections and musicians. It’s also a sound that is very transparent and, dare I say, very tender, because the feeling in the orchestra is very family-like. As a result, there is a humility about the approach to music. It’s not an orchestra that is there to impress by being the most, the fastest, the loudest, the biggest. It’s more about serving the greater purpose of the music while exchanging between friends, like chamber music.”
The concert will be anchored by a performance of Bruckner’s Symphony no. 4. Nézet-Séguin has made the Austrian composer’s work a cornerstone of his repertoire: earlier this season, he conducted the MET Orchestra in its first-ever performances of Bruckner at Carnegie Hall and the Orchestre Métropolitain has recorded all nine of the composer’s symphonies. Nézet-Séguin views Bruckner as the ideal composer for the OM’s style. But that affinity wasn’t always the case.
“My own personal history with Bruckner was strange, because when I was a music student and started listening to recordings, I did not like Bruckner,” Nézet-Séguin said emphatically. “I thought something was wrong with me and clearly something was! Maybe it was because recordings didn’t give the complete sense. In some music, the difference is even more striking. It took me some years when I experienced it in concert and I fell in love with this music. When I first conducted a symphony by Bruckner, it was the Ninth and I believe I was twenty-six or something like this. Immediately I conducted it from memory and that told me something about how I felt at home with his music. And this is why he was a very early composer where we embarked with the OM, and me with ATMA Classique, on this journey of recording all the symphonies.
“These are cathedrals of sound and they are very large symphonies, but unlike Mahler it doesn’t give a lot of very individual reward for an orchestral musician,” Nézet-Séguin continues. “The reward is that, collectively, we get the sense that we serve some greater purpose. That is the spirituality of this music. I think that me being still a very spiritual person and having my roots and upbringing as a Catholic and church music all comes together in Bruckner. Québec in general being very close to the Catholic faith perhaps also explains this connection between the OM and the music. It’s also wonderful for us to start revisiting these pieces. I conducted all these symphonies for the first time over the years and they played them for the first time as an orchestra, as we discovered the language of this composer together. We are at the point now where we are gradually revisiting these masterpieces and this will be the case with the Fourth.”
Words like “service,” “humility” and “family” come up often when Nézet-Séguin speaks about the OM, and his own familial connections with the orchestra are quite strong. Montreal remains a home base for the conductor, even as his career increasingly includes long stretches of time spent in the United States and Europe. His longtime partner, Pierre Tourville, is the OM’s associate principal violist. Several weeks before we spoke, the musicians decided to permanently cement their relationship by offering Nézet-Séguin a lifetime contract, which he accepted. The move is not unprecedented – Karajan had one with the Berlin Phil – but it is also not common and it speaks to the kinship between the conductor and his ranks.