Orchestre Métropolitain closes season with American composers
The orchestra performed works by Florence Price and Margaret Bonds alongside Gershwin and Bernstein Sunday, exploring the challenge of finding surprise in familiar forms.
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The Orchestre Métropolitain closed its season Sunday afternoon with a program bridging discovery and established repertoire, exploring how musical innovation doesn't always arrive in new works.
Conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who has brought samples of his work with the Philadelphia Orchestra back to Montreal since taking that role in 2012, led the ensemble through pieces by Black American composers Florence Price and Margaret Bonds, alongside George Gershwin's Piano Concerto and Leonard Bernstein's Chichester Psalms.
Price's Song of Hope, a cantata for chorus, soloists, and orchestra, opened the concert. Though composed in 1930 during a difficult period of racial conflict, economic crisis, and personal hardship for Price, the work wasn't premiered until 2022. The choral and orchestral writing is dense, shaping itself to the text in a flowing form that blends lyricism with descriptive effects. Soprano Suzanne Taffot stood out among the four soloists, whose voices were largely absorbed into the chorus, with mezzo-soprano Queen Hezumuryango also making an impression.
Margaret Bonds's Montgomery Variations, written in the mid-1960s, opened the second half. The work depicts different racist episodes of the era, including segregation on Montgomery buses and an attack on a Black Baptist church in Birmingham. The spiritual "I Want Jesus to Walk with Me" serves as the theme, returning across seven movements, one depicting the bombing musically. Bonds's orchestration is more varied and detailed than her teacher Price's, yet both works, despite their historical and political significance, offered limited reward for repeat listening.
The Chichester Psalms proved the concert's strongest moment—a fine demonstration of Bernstein's facility. Though the chorus could have engaged the text more deeply, Nézet-Séguin was in his element, highlighting the numerous accidents—syncopes and dissonances—that animate the score. Young soprano Laurier D'Amours-Poirier handled the complex part placed at the choir's right side with ease. The program was recorded for broadcast on Mezzo and Medici.