Exit Requiem of Fauré a week before Christmas. A zest of programmatic logic ended up prevailing at the Laval Symphony Orchestra (OSL), where Thomas Le Duc-Moreau ended up conducting with care and efficiency, on Wednesday, the two suites of The Arlesian before a second part dedicated to Christmas.
It is difficult for the OSL to reconcile the process of recruiting a new leader and proper programming. To “test” Thomas Le Duc-Moreau in the middle of December, we could not have him direct only Jingle Bells ! But the solution finally found, with The Arlesian by Bizet, was the right one.
By removing from the program the Requiem by Fauré, the OSL also saved a choir, and possibly rehearsals as a result, and, at the same time, saved paper, since the program was a simple QR code. But perhaps some form of communication had taken place since the audience didn’t seem too surprised.
Efficiency
In any case, we can judge a leader on the basis of The Arlesian. The judgment actually happens largely outside our eyes, in the upstream work with the orchestra in rehearsal. Thomas Le Duc-Moreau did a good job. This could be seen and heard from the beginning of the Prelude of the 1re Suite of The Arlesian in the ardor of the strokes and strokes of the bows. The direction is effective, the sense of driving the sentences is not the most poetic. Often, one might wish for a bit of longer breathing at the ends of sentences or segments. Le Duc-Moreau connects the musical ideas in a fairly straightforward and Cartesian way.
But, on the contrary, the chef leads his boat with efficiency, as shown in the Farandole of the 2e Suite. In the balances, when there are strings, woodwinds and brass, the winds dominate a lot, but the loud and dry acoustics of the André-Mathieu room do not help to balance things correctly.
The soloists planned in the Requiem were used in the second part, the baritone Olivier Bergeron singing Little Santa Clausthe soprano Magali Simard-Galdès Midnight Christians and the two sets share The Twelve Days of Christmas. We really wonder if the orchestral arrangement of this traditional song by Simon Leclerc is intended for two unamplified voices. The singers were covered in many places, but we do not see how the conductor could have done better.
The two orchestral fantasies about Christmas were very different. THE Christmas Festival by Leroy Anderson, very sonorous, evolved an American “pop” atmosphere, a little vulgar, and the admirable Celebrations by Gilles Bellemare meditative, then exuberant, was in a very Quebecois mood.
This concert in excellent spirit, like that of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra with Simon Rivard the day before, had filled the André-Mathieu Hall very well, which must have greatly delighted the orchestra’s administrators.
