I am sitting in an otherwise unremarkable office, except for the majestic Heintzman & Company grand piano, a Canadian-made symbol of the melodious nature of operations herein and a testament to our symphony’s commitment to preserving local heritage.

Today, I have been granted rare backstage access at the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal to learn about the forthcoming season with Artistic Director Marianne Perron, who for more than a quarter century — spanning the careers of three conductors — has helped helm the programming priorities of Montreal’s oldest and most venerable orchestra. And while Rafael Payare is the Symphony’s newest public face, it is really Perron who pulls the strings.

Ironically, a broken violin sits on her desk.

“Yes, that’s mine,” she laughs, “and maybe one day I’ll get it fixed. But I never considered a career as a professional musician,” Perron tells me as she recalls her early life as a violinist. “I started lessons at age six. My mother conceived of it as just another part of getting an education. But I stopped at around 20. I love music, but it was not what I wanted to do. Honestly, I hate playing in front of an audience.”

Perron appropriately prefers to remain behind the scenes. Nonetheless, she is one of Montreal’s most inspiring women leaders, securing a coveted spot on the Women We Admire list, among other well-deserved honours.

Perron started with the OSM in 1999 as head of Education and Contemporary Music and continued climbing to her current role as Senior Director of the Symphony’s artistic sector, overseeing programming, community education, operations, production, and musician personnel. “Now, I am the head of all five of these departments,” she says with a smile. “So, voilà.”

The trick to success is making one’s job look easy — which it never is. And clearly, Perron is no stranger to hard work. She attended the Conservatoire de musique de Montréal, studying and advocating for contemporary music from Quebec and Canada, and later obtained a master’s degree in Musicology from the Université de Montréal, plus an MBA from the HEC with a specialization in cultural enterprises. So, her chops are impeccable from both the musical and management angles.

“There are many things I understand about balancing dynamics,” she explains. “It is always a question of balance.”

Music, too, is about balance, and patterns, and cycles, and Perron inherently understands that the OSM is faced with balancing tradition and progress, the Classical repertoire and more contemporary works, and Montreal’s cultural specificity with that of the wider global stage.

“True, the OSM is not primarily a contemporary music orchestra,” says Perron. “But all the same, it is an orchestra that programs the works of new composers. Not all conductors believe that contemporary music is important. But for our new conductor, Rafael Payare, it is extremely important. It is really at the heart of his practice. At the Virée Classique and the outdoor concert at the Olympic Stadium, we have contemporary Canadian music. We are now programming more Latin American works as a tribute to our new conductor. And we also have an orchestra that is capable of playing Bach regularly. We are an orchestra that really plays 400 years’ worth of music.”

That historical range is integral to the life of the OSM. For Perron, it is perennially a challenge to program a season with an ear toward both history and the future.

“There are lots of things to consider,” Perron tells me. “We think about how to develop the sound of the orchestra. There are so many great things about Rafael Payare — his artistic sensibility, his talent. But also, his ambition for the orchestra. Rafael Payare has a sonic vision which is in sync with the OSM. We are not going to totally transform but just search for those existing elements to develop. Rafael has a particular interest in Post-Romantic Germanic works. So, we think of those things, as well as the elements we want to develop with the orchestra. We have lots of conversations. I think it’s wonderful that Rafael wants to perform, for example, Bruckner. And then someone says, ‘wait a minute, before we play Bruckner, we should play this and this.’ And that will take Bruckner to another level.”

Perron grew up in a Montreal household where Classical music was regularly part of the sonic backdrop.

“We went to a lot of concerts when I was a kid,” Perron recalls. “They had a series at the Piano Nobile at Salle Wilfred-Pelletier which was called Musique & Brioche. They were short concerts aimed at families, and they had muffins and croissants. I loved those. My family subscribed to the OSM. I was seven when my father took me to the Seventh Symphony of Beethoven. And that became my favourite piece when I was seven or eight years old. And ten years later, my father returned to Place des arts to hear the very same piece. But this time, I was in the Orchestre de Conservatoire as a musician. That was a great milestone.”

To reach out to younger audiences, the OSM is experimenting nowadays with the form of symphonic performance, coupling the orchestra with cinema, for instance, as they did previously with Jaws and The Red Violin, and will be doing again this season with Stanley Kubrick’s epic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

“The role of the music in that movie is so special,” Perron says. “It’s interesting because there are lots of moments where there is no sound, there is no music. The orchestra wants to play all the time, but silence is really where the ‘wow’ moments are in that film.”

And yet, hardly a silent moment passes in our conversation. There is plenty to look forward to in the OSM’s 2025-’26 season, and Perron is excited about all of it: the return of Barbara Hannigan; Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro; A German Requiem by Brahms with Kent Nagano; The Rite of Spring with pianist Bruce Liu; Gustav Mahler’s Fourth Symphony paired with Perú Negro by Jimmy López, the OSM’s Composer-in-Residence, to celebrate Black History Month.

The OSM has chosen to launch its season with The Damnation of Faust by Berlioz, a bold and symbolic choice that gestures toward the spiritual bargains of our age, and their potential perils.

“We always try to draw a link between the pieces we are programming or commissioning and current events,” Perron reveals. “Is there an exchange? Is there an echo?”

In an era of increasing divisiveness, Montreal is arguably North America’s most progressive metropolis, and a municipal model for achieving linguistic and cultural harmony.

“It’s really about the richness of the whole community together,” Perron notes. “Montreal is very fluid. It’s a very safe place. There is a lot of pride here, but it’s not pretentious. There’s a lot of curiosity and creativity, too. I feel like it’s a city that is open to the world. And I think that reflects in the Orchestra. There is a suppleness that I think represents us here. The Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal is a mirror image of that.”◼︎

The OSM’s 2025-’26 season opens with The Damnation of Faust, 17 September 2025 at Maison Symphonique.