Montreal Orchestra Passes Tough Budapest Test – Slipdisc

Canada’s Orchester symphonique de Montréal played Budapest last night on the second leg of a major European tour with their young conductor Rafael Payare. Alexandra Ivanoff reviews for slipdisc.com.

L’Orchestre symphonique de Montréal made its debut in Hungary on October 22, closing the city’s annual Liszt Festival at the MÜPA (Palace of Arts).

Not only was this a national debut, but it also introduced Rafael Payare to a sold-out audience, who rewarded him with lusty bravos. The young maestro impressed throughout a grueling program of Liszt’s Les Préludes, Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major with Icelandic virtuoso Víkingur Ólafsson and finished with Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10, conducted by Payare from memory.

Resembling the young Giuseppi Sinopoli, Payare is a product of the Venezuelan sistema that has produced a number of successful conductors, the successors of Gustavo Dudamel, music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Opéra de Paris.

Payare’s podium style is captivating, moving from elegant ballet positions to rap dance to the stance of a massive eagle ready to pounce on its prey. He has elegant control over phraseology, Blizzard-grade tempo cueing precision and an innate understanding of how to build exciting climaxes. Payare is a horn player, so mercifully his affection for wind instruments was evident to this listener: rather than relegating them to the role of accompanists to the strings, the woodwind and brass received ample attention as soloists and sections. So much so that the whole concert was mostly a glorious showcase for horns.

Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, a favorite of Budapesters after several visits, studied with two famous Hungarians, György Sebők and György Sándor. “You Hungarians are lucky,” he announced from the stage. “You have so many great composers. Liszt gave birth to modernity! I spent time today with György Kurtág (who is now 96 and still composing),” he continued. “I have the feeling that Hungary is my homeland.”

Ólafsson’s performance of Ravel was magical. His journey with this quirky concerto was effortless in all the stylistic demands of the score, from straight-forward classical to swinging jazz to the composer’s blissful oriental meanders. The dreamy waltz of the second movement stunned with its intense pianissimos – so subdued and intimate that the audience forgot to cough. After the mad circus of the third movement, Ólafsson’s encores were, unsurprisingly, Kurtág’s mystical Aus der Ferne and Bartók’s Drei Lieder aus Csik, based on Carpathian folk tunes.

The four movements of Shostakovich’s 10th are a crucible for any conductor. Written shortly after Stalin’s death in 1953, the lengthy first movement can have difficulty maintaining audience concentration and attention due to its slow tempo and wandering quality. Payare constructed a long dramatic structure, weaving in and out of the score’s mood changes, often letting the viola section take the lead with their velvety polished tone.

The second movement, dubbed the Portrait of Stalin, begins with vicious hacking frenzy from the violins and plummets into a swamp of sonic hostility. The sentence is short but to the point: the composer bites back at his pursuer.

The third and fourth movements become noticeably brighter, using Shostakovich’s acronym D-Eb-CH, his name in reference to pitches, a device he incorporated into several of his symphonic works. Here he adds EAEDA (solfeggio: E-La-Mi-Re-A), which refers to his secret passion for a young woman, Elmira. He maps these notes to a solo horn and uses it like Siegfried’s Ruf while building an orchestral texture around it. After the storm and urge of the work’s beginnings, love memories come together in the finale.

In every moment, from tender to bombastic, Payare passed the test with flying colors. The celebratory hat to Liszt with Les Préludes, where he artfully crafted the wind and brass contributions, established Payare from the outset as the dynamic maestro to follow in the future.

Alexandra Ivanoff

Photo: OSM/Antoine Saito