Residents in the Northeast Corridor know Yannick Nézet-Séguin as the indefatigable Music Director of the Philadelphia Orchestra and Metropolitan Opera. These high-profile associations tend to overshadow his longest-standing creative partnership, as artistic director of the Orchestre Métropolitain de Montréal. Nézet-Séguin first led this outfit in 2000, when he was 25 years old; five years ago they handed him a lifetime contract. When the Kimmel Center revived its visiting orchestra series last year, it seemed a foregone conclusion that the head honcho would bring his hometown band to Philadelphia.
This was the Canadian group’s second visit to the City of Brotherly Love – they debuted locally in 2019, with a concert of Mozart and Bruckner. The program for their return again hewed to the familiar, with a Rachmaninov piano concerto and a Sibelius symphony, alongside a new work by Canadian composer Cris Derksen. Now as then, however, this orchestra’s particular style struck me as not ideally suited for Verizon Hall, a venue meticulously designed to support the acoustic of its resident ensemble.
With fewer players and a leaner, more transparent sound, the Orchestre Métropolitain sometimes seemed undergunned. Their string tone is brighter and more focused, their woodwinds delicate as a whisper. Brass chorales and timpani emerge with a classy nuance rather than overall bombast. Their prevailing sound tends to hurtle forward in a column, rather than envelop the audience from all sides of the hall. There were moments in the performance where this distinction flourished: climaxes in Sibelius’ Symphony no. 2 in D major were explosive and jarring at the same time. Still, you wanted a more heroic sound for this work that glorifies the strength and resilience of the Finnish people.
In Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto no. 2 in C minor, the deliberate lightness of the strings had a tendency to turn wan, especially in the Romantic thickets of the Adagio sostenuto. An indirect benefit of this, however, was that it allowed the listener to focus more intently on the eloquent playing of soloist Tony Siqi Yun. Yun’s style on the keyboard throws back to the old school: he is less granular with individual moments, focusing instead on crafting sweeping phrases and a big juicy sound. His touch was fiendishly fleet in an encore of Rachmaninov’s Prelude in B flat major, Op.23, no. 2.
Derksen, a gifted cellist in her own right, served as soloist for her own Controlled Burn, which opened the concert. The work draws from her heritage as an indigenous Canadian, and the title refers to a practice of intentionally scorching portions of forest in an attempt to ward off larger, unwanted fires. You could hear the crackle of smoke in the hum of her electric cello and the col legno strings that opened the piece. She used her amplified instrument to suggest nature elsewhere in the composition, with glissandi that perfectly replicated a seagull’s caw. Percussive elements (including drum machine) kept a steady rhythm that suggested ongoing smolder. As with Robin Holcomb’s Paradise – which Nézet-Séguin premiered in 2021 and which depicted the 2018 California wildfires – this was an ideal encapsulation of the wonder and terror of nature inside a piece of music.
