For the pièce de résistance of this year's Montréal Chamber Music Festival, its founder – and still its driving force – Denis Brott assembled an historically-correct, one-player-to-a-part orchestra of modern instrument virtuosos that even included a few Bach experts like harpsichordist Luc Beauséjour and Baroque trumpet star Jens Lindemann. But historical authenticity was largely besides the point in their performance of Bach's six Brandenburg Concertos in the Maison Symphonique at the Place des Arts. They were put together collaboratively in a minimum number of rehearsals led by James Ehnes whose Quartet formed the core of the ensemble alongside principals and other high-ranking players from the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal and the National Arts Centre Orchestra in Ottawa. And with the audience sitting on stage with the performers and in the choir loft, it felt like the kind of communal experience that Bach would have recognized.
This camaraderie reminded me of Petruchio and his troupe of traveling players from Kiss Me Kate, only here it was Bach and the kind of free-lancers ensemble who would have been called upon, probably at a moment's notice, to play them all for the Margrave of Brandenburg-Schwedt – which they never did – which Bach hoped would land him a job – which it never did. Regardless the musicians and Bach would have been more concerned with pure entertainment value than historical correctness.
The First Brandenburg launched with brilliant fiddling from Ehnes and OSM leader Andrew Wan, death-defying work from the horns, and energetic growling from a formidable continuo contingent of cello, double bass and bassoon. The oboes were lovely throughout with their trilling, intertwining in Bach's iconic sensuous way, straying from the score with almost indecent poetry. Amy Schwartz Moretti played the violin solo bursting with energy, and there was no stopping the horns who added a wonderful cornucopia of improvised notes with a few clunkers thrown in, as all French horns must, to add to the fun.
The Second Brandenburg can be so about the trumpet rather than the extraordinarily intricate musical games Bach plays with our minds – after all, there are no proper tunes, only riffs on fragments of a fugue. And so in a more egalitarian focus on the performance, Ehnes played with a breathtakingly clean line and cellist Chloé Dominguez warmed up the continuo while marking harmonic points like stars. But of course it is also about the trumpet because Bach reserved a special place in his music for such heraldic writing. And there couldn't have been a more appropriate choice than the Canadian Lindemann who played Bach like jazz with a noble tone that suggested gold, and occasionally sounded notes of sad hilarity in the last movement's most high-flying of passages. The Third Concerto found all ten strings at their silkiest with the three cellists game and good-natured at Ehnes' enthusiastic speeds, responding with bumptious and entirely human Bach.
In the last three concertos after intermission the full range of Bach's imagination came into play. Ehnes swept through the long roaming riffs of Bach's landscape in the Fourth Concerto with the two flutes trailing like clouds. In the Fifth, Schwartz Moretti took seriously to heart Baroque issues of affect and gesture and created a lovely, entirely 18th-century pastoral narrative complemented by Luc Beauséjour's soft and gracious playing, even in the biggest flourishes of his iconic first movement cadenza.
After the Fifth danced away with its glorious D major energy, the sweet, often rhapsodic intimacy with which violists Milena Pajaro-van de Stadt and Victor Fournelle Blain sang their soulful music seemed to reflect Bach's inner faith in the Sixth, while their virtuosic scurrying being chased by the cellists and double bass reflected the composer's human desire to please. The third movement took off with a spring in its step energized by Brott's indomitable playing of the virtuosic cello line; then, with a few last sighs, the music – and the festival – came to an end.
Laurence's press trip was funded by the Montreal Chamber Music Festival.
