In recent years, the Swiss recorder virtuoso Maurice Steger has established himself not only as one of the world’s foremost recorder players, but as a conductor of considerable merit. On Friday evening, when Montreal remained embedded in snow, Steger and the ensemble Les Violons du Roy let us believe in the hope and optimism that spring brings. It was not only that the program was uplifting, and for the most part joyous, but was primarily the result of Steger’s music-making.
To call his approach enthusiastic is to do both the man and the expression a disservice. From the moment he surged onto the stage, one was engaged. For Steger, there appears to be an organic joy in the living of music, in its performance, its communality, in its ability to bring together and transform. There was a communication with the audience and his musicians that was not only effective, but deeply touching on a purely human, yet spiritually fulfilling, level.
The concert was aptly entitled A virtuoso in Naples and featured works from the high Baroque period by Neapolitan composers. The evening confirmed the technical sophistication of the Neapoiltan compositional school and helped explain why, even at the time of Rossini, Neapolitan orchestras were so highly regarded.
Steger seeks to perform this music in prevailing performing practice style but he also seeks to evoke performance traditions and conventions of the epoch such as the widely-held practice of inserting works between movements or sections of other works. And so the concert began with the two first sections of Leonardo Vinci’s overture to the opera Elpidia, but before the concluding Allegro, we tasted the delights of Leonardo Leo’s Concerto for for four violins in D major. The integration of the concerto was not only seamless, but musically coherent and dramatically convincing. Steger conducted with a white-hot intensity and generosity, with every breath or rest containing the energy of the coming phrase. He leaned into the violin section, urging them, willing them into even more expressive playing. Les Violons du Roy responded with brio. String articulation was never dry or detached but was based, even in Allegro sections, on an sculptured and expressive legato.
Domenico Sarro’s Recorder Concerto in A major recorder concerto gave us the first chance to hear Steger as a soloist. The dramatic opening Largo (staccato e dolce) revealed his physically compelling attitude as soloist. There is nothing remotely conventional in his approach. He vibrates to every musical phrase in a viscerally physical way. One only has to look at his face to realise that it reflects the work’s every dramatic or lyrical turn. His playing was somewhat uneven here, pitch was occasionally defective and articulation in the Allegro not ideal, but the sense of musical commitment was all-enveloping. Steger appeared perfectly at ease with the occasional sacrificing of perfection for the required expressivity. The transition from the expansive Larghetto into the concluding Spiritoso was particularly noteworty, Steger looking and listening with obvious pleasure at Sylvain Bergeron (baroque guitar and archlute) setting a wonderful ambiance and tempo for the movement, before taking up the torch and blazing a blistering path to the end.