Tag Archives: Orchestre Metropolitain

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Big Shiny Tunes

Sloan with Econoline Crush, Peachfest, Penticton BC, 9 August 2025

Sloan perform in Okanagan Lake Park, Penticton, BC, 9 August 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“The archive has always been a pledge, and like every pledge, a token of the future. To put it more trivially: what is no longer archived in the same way is no longer lived in the same way.”
—Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever

I spent some time in English Canada this summer and in doing so had the opportunity to see a band I’d never seen, Sloan, the celebrated Canadian alternative outfit that dominated MuchMusic throughout the bulk of the 1990s.

I was surprised, despite having never owned a Sloan recording, that I was able to identify hit after remarkable hit. Apparently, these earworms had made an indelible impression upon my memory merely from hearing them over and over. In a time before the internet, before streaming became the dominant way of consuming cultural products, repetition worked.

The archive of the internet in many ways erases or at best flattens memory. Just because every record ever made is available to access at any given second does not mean that we do. And if and when we do, we seldom remember them in the same ways we did during the physical media age.

There exists a theory, Freudian in origin, that archiving is the subconscious reaction to a morbid fear of death. But what to make of the impulse to archive without the intention of ever accessing the archive? Imagine the sheer volume of music that nobody ever listens to filed away on the web. In the record-store days, we called it dead stock. On the internet, let’s call it zombie inventory.

What good is preservation without repetition?

Orchestre Metropolitain at the foot of Mount Royal, 30 July 2025

Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts the OM at Parc du Mont-Royal, 30 July 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

“…the music of a well-ordered age is calm and cheerful, and so is its government. The music of a restive age is excited and fierce, and its government is perverted. The music of a decaying state is sentimental and sad, and its government is imperiled.”
—Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game

Gustav Holst, The Planets, Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, 15 August 2025

Rafael Payare conducts the OSM at Maison Symphonique, 15 August 2025. Antoine Saito for the OSM.

Many cultures believe that the world was created with sound.

“In the beginning was the word,” the Apostle John writes in the opening to his Biblical Gospel. Notably, it wasn’t nature’s noise that heralded all of Creation. It wasn’t a clap of thunder or an explosion. It was a human sound.

But neither was it a grunt or a cry. It was a word. And it wasn’t just any old word; it was the word. Word itself.

Words imply meaning. And thus, according to John, the beginning of the universe was also the beginning of language, frequency, harmony.

Christian Richer with Lowebrau, La Chapelle | Scénes Contemporaines, 2 August 2025

Christian Richer’s musical equipment setup at La Chapelle, 2 August 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

If we are to read any era by its music, then surely conflict and chaos must characterize the present one. There is no dominant set of aesthetic criteria to describe contemporary music as there has been in nearly every preceding generation.

We can listen back to almost any historical time and say with relative confidence that this style or that theme characterized its day’s music. Romantic, baroque; pop, punk, &c. Even during the so-called postmodern period, postmodernity exhibited some consistent defining characteristics: assemblage, palimpsest, irony.

We are living in an age when everything and nothing is true — facts are contested; falsehoods are simply data — and therefore everything and nothing characterizes our post-postmodern music. Music today is ambient in the truest sense — it is omnipresent, a constant hum that emerges to the fore only when it is observed, like a fridge that seems to start buzzing when you notice it.

In addition, today’s music is ambivalent, of multiple traditions, hybrid, non-binary. However, cultural production that advances in simultaneous directions does not imply a lack of direction. And the speed with which music manifests ex nihilo, almost spontaneously, indicates more about the present era than any aesthetic measures.

Forwards or backwards, we’re going nowhere fast.

VISIO & Orchestroll with Cecilia and Samuel Gougoux, Société des arts technologiques, 14 August 2025

Cecilia performs at the SAT, 14 August 2025. Photographed for NicheMTL.

They flutter behind you your possible pasts
Some bright-eyed and crazy, some frightened and lost
A warning to anyone still in command
Of their possible future to take care
—Roger Waters, “Your Possible Pasts”

There’s a common assumption, generally unchallenged, that the past is behind us and cannot be altered, whereas the future is in front of us and can. This might not be correct. I’m not just making some clever semantic argument here, either. I am, rather, talking about fundamental ways in which the past can be materially reformed, and the future is a foregone conclusion.

When you dwell on the past, it constitutes your future. Every morning is greeted with history. The past becomes the medium in which life is lived — like water for fish or air for us humans. If there is nothing that we can change about the past, then it is pointless to ruminate over it. And yet, the contemplative impulse exists. Why?

I claim that it’s because the past can be changed, has been changed, is changing constantly.

The further objects are away in space, the more slowly they appear to move. It’s called parallax — the apparent position of an object in relation to its line of sight. This also holds for objects in time. Our memories of things morph and mutate with each passing day, sometimes appearing clearer, sometimes disappearing completely.

The future, on the other hand, is something that the forces of capital would prefer to set in stone. “Futures” in financial terms, for instance, are standardized contracts that can be bought and sold.

Markets function on predictability. One way to reliably produce predictability is to induce instability. Therefore, anything that ensues following a period of disorder looks comparatively stable, in part because of the parallax effect. In this way, the past is broken, and the future is fixed.

If we repair the past, perhaps the future will again become unknowable.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider buying a yearbook and subscribing.

Cover image: Rafael Payare photographed by Antoine Saito for the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.

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999 Words

High Fidelity: notes on multiple Messiahs

He that hath ears to hear, let him hear. —Matthew 11:15

Faith is a word with a number of competing definitions.

Most commonly, we use it interchangeably with the word ‘belief,’ to describe our confidence in something intangible. These beliefs, too, can vary in significance.

We’re not certain, for example, of something as inconsequential as the metro arriving when it’s late — which in Montreal is often. We take it on faith.

Increasing on the scale of importance, we can’t be positive that our plane won’t crash. But we have faith that it will land at its intended destination, and so we faithfully climb aboard. We can’t be sure that a romantic partner won’t betray us. We must believe that they’ll be faithful.

Perhaps a more apt synonym for faith might be ‘adherence.’ Audio culture proves instructive in this definition of fidelity. When we say, for instance, that a recording is ‘high-fidelity,’ what we mean is that it adheres faithfully to the original sound.

A pristine 180-gram vinyl spun on a hi-fi sound system may make us believe, if wishfully, that Miles Davis could be right there in the room. It accomplishes this because the record adheres precisely to the veritable timbre of Davis’s trumpet.

Or, we could say that this or that performance of the Messiah adheres more or less to Handel’s score and original libretto and therefore is more or less faithful.

Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Anna-Sophie Neher, and Emily D’Angelo perform Handel’s Messiah at Notre-Dame Basilica. François Goupil for Orchestre Métropolitain.

Likely few if any of us who listen to Miles Davis ever witnessed him play live. And nobody attending performances of the Messiah nowadays saw Handel. But we believe that these recordings and performances adhere to the original — that they are in one way or another faithful.

Three recent holiday season performances in Montreal of Handel’s Messiah espoused various degrees of what we might call fidelity. First, there was the Orchestre Metropolitain’s sober Messiah rendition conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin on December 11th at Notre-Dame Basilica. Then, there was the Orchestre Classique de Montréal’s solemn version which Roï Azoulay conducted in the crypt of Saint-Joseph’s Oratory on the 12th. And finally, there was two-time Juno winner Maestro Matthias Maute’s fast and loose iteration with Ensemble Caprice on 22 December at Maison Symphonique.

Each possessed their virtues. But the ultimate conundrum remains: was one Messiah most faithful to Handel’s initial idea? The answer to this riddle depends upon an assortment of factors.

First is the location. Since Handel’s Messiah is a work of Christian theology, it should probably be performed in a church. This rules out Maestro Maute’s version.

Then, the question becomes, in which church should it be performed? Notre-Dame Basilica was constructed in the Baroque style, nearer to Handel’s historical timeframe and aesthetic tradition. But because of its ornamental composition, the massive reverb of a larger auditorium like Notre-Dame’s muddies all of the score’s intricate notes. Plus, the Messiah is technically an oratorio, which logically demands an oratory. So, the crypt at Saint-Joseph’s emerges as the early frontrunner.

The Orchestre Classique de Montréal performs Handel’s Messiah in the crypt of St. Joseph’s Oratory. Brent Calis for the OCM.

The second factor is the performance itself. Although it has been adapted over the centuries for enormous orchestras and choirs, Handel wrote the Messiah for a decidedly modest, chamber-sized ensemble of only nine instruments: two trumpets, two oboes, two violins, viola, basso continuo, and timpani. The Orchestre Metropolitain comprises nearly 40 musicians, whereas the OCM and Ensemble Caprice are less numerous, producing a tighter, more focussed, and more faithful sound.

However, each of the three sections ought also to be performed in their entirety, without interruption. Ensemble Caprice took liberties with the compositional structure, omitting a handful of segments for brevity, and both the EC and the OCM’s audiences applauded after nearly every individual piece. Maestro Nézet-Séguin literally frowns upon ovations between refrains. So, the OM probably remained more faithful to Handel’s original intentions.

Another factor is how closely the performance sticks to the piece’s compositional spirit. Handel’s score was written in only 24 days, which some scholars interpreted as celestial inspiration, and others, including librettist Charles Jennens, regarded as careless haste. Either way, it is a work reflecting exuberant joy, revolving around the famous Hallelujah chorus, perhaps the best-known piece of western music ever written, and should be executed with equivalent boisterous enthusiasm.

Despite Nézet-Séguin’s irrepressible gusto, the Orchestre Metropolitain’s performance topped the running times at over three hours, a long show by any measure. Comparatively, the Ensemble Caprice’s concert sped by in under 80 minutes. The OCM’s rendition, however, moved at a lively and consistent pace and spanned a reasonable two and a half hours.

The Orchestre Metropolitain provided no information about the period of the instruments upon which its members performed. But the OCM was careful to publish a list in its programme notes about the provenance of each stringed instrument, including the age of their bows, and Maestro Maute went so far as to emphasize that Ensemble Caprice featured historically consistent instruments.

Ensemble Caprice performs Handel’s Messiah at Maison Symphonique. Tam Lan Truong for Ensemble Caprice.

Consequently, it’s difficult given the above criteria to judge which Messiah was indeed the best. If we gauge by the venue’s acoustics, the OCM at the oratory doubtless wins. But if we decide through adherence to the score, the OM’s note-for-note reproduction demonstrates superior fidelity. And if we factor in the oratorio’s energetic essence and attention to its epoch, Ensemble Caprice prevails.

Herein lies the metaphor: it seems that the problem is not the idea of Messianism, but the notion that we should adhere to only one. Is a multiplicity of Messiahs possible? As Rabbi Robert N. Levine suggests, could we be them?

The Abrahamic Jews supposed that a divine Messiah would unite their tribes and usher in a new post-sin consciousness. Jewish Christians 2000 years ago believed that Jesus of Nazareth was the guy. A few centuries later, Muslims thought that Jesus was satisfactory, but that Muhammad was the true and ultimate prophet.

If God created us in His image, then we each have the potential — and the responsibility — to be the Messiah we want to see in the world. That requires a higher fidelity.◼︎

Cover image: The vaulted ceiling at Montreal’s Notre-Dame Basilica. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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I’ll Be Your Mirror

Leon Louder, Feast, Rockinghorse, Unfulfillment + Stranger Ways Recordings (2024)

In Western society, there are five general characteristics of successful people: you can be tough, cool, smart, beautiful, or funny.

Some combinations are possible. For example, you can be both tough and cool. Or cool and beautiful.

But some categories are mutually exclusive. Although you can be funny and smart, it is nearly impossible to be both cool and funny.

Many characteristics can be cultivated; others are inborn. You can work out and get tougher. You can even study and get smarter. But you cannot fake being funnier.

The best comedians aren’t tough or beautiful — or even remarkably smart. Clever, perhaps. Intellectual, not so much.

The comedian Jerry Seinfeld believes that comedy is as close as we can come to justice. This is why I most admire naturally funny people. They generally have to survive on their sense of humour alone.

Good Sine, with Holobody, Owen Gilbride, and Vivian Li, Cyber Love Hotel, 4 August 2024

O God, make me poor enough, to love your diamond in the rough, or in my failure let me see, my greed raised to mystery.

—Leonard Cohen

We are prone to despise any system that doesn’t benefit us — and uphold those that do. The jerks that picked on you in school are no longer jerks now that you’re one of them and can pick the one you pick upon. Capitalism sucks until you start to make the big bucks.

It’s not that one system is virtuous and another system vicious. Systems are systemically corrupt.

The OM at the foot of Mount Royal, with Alexandra Stréliski, 6 August 2024

Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts the Orchestre Metropolitain at Parc Mount Royal, 6 August 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The place that my paternal grandfather came from is currently within the borders of Ukraine. But when he left, it was part of Poland.

Likewise, my maternal grandparents originate from a region that, although it is now in Russian-occupied Ukraine, at various times was Austro-Hungarian, Romanian, and a Soviet Socialist Republic.

The French in Quebec neglect to recognize that the territory in which they assume the God-given right to speak French at one time not too long ago was home to neither the French nor God. In 100 years, it is doubtful that French will be the dominant language here, if it is now.

Tour guides love to lead gaggles of sightseers around Old Montreal pointing out with inflated authority the city’s first fort, first chapel, first bank. But who was really here first? And before that?

How long does it take for you to live in a place before you can confidently claim that you’re from that place? And what happens if that place changes hands? Where are you from then?

History is comprised of a series of replacements, none of them great. We are here today and gone tomorrow, when someone else will take our place. If times get tough, we can leave, or stay and fight and work to remake the place to our own liking.

We come from dirt, and to dirt we will return. In between, we garden.

Nick Bodoin, Akermus, 8 August 2024

Attendees gather at Akermus, 8 August 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Who is as the wise man? and who knoweth the interpretation of a thing? a man’s wisdom maketh his face to shine, and the boldness of his face shall be changed.

—Ecclesiastes 8:1

I think everybody should like everybody.

—Andy Warhol

When you first look at a person’s face, for an instant, you are looking back at your own reflection. We cannot help the reactions we experience when looking into other people’s faces. Attraction and revulsion, recognition and disregard, all at once.

I’m sure the Germans have a word for that perfect balance one feels between beauty and terror, awe and fright.

They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. The exercise, then, is to behold yourself as beautiful. Then, an unsightly face can never be seen.

Echoes IX, with Fiza, Xon, Sonic Malice, and Philippe-Aubert Gauthier, Ateliers Belleville, 3 August 2024

Sonic Malice perform at Ateliers Belleville 3 August 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

On 9 August 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb, its second and last to date, on Nagasaki, Japan, bringing World War II to its savage conclusion.

Just past midnight on 9 August 1969, Charles “Tex” Watson, Susan Atkins, Linda Kasabian, and Patricia Krenwinkel, known collectively as “the Manson Family,” took the lives of celebrity hairdresser Jay Sebring, the coffee heiress Abigail Folger, her lover Wojciech Frykowski, houseguest Steven Parent, and the film actress Sharon Tate at a Benedict Canyon mansion located at 10050 Cielo Drive, closing out a decade known for peace and love with mayhem and murder.

On 9 August 1988, Wayne Gretzky, the hockey player nicknamed “the Great One,” was traded from the Edmonton Oilers to the Los Angeles Kings, ending an era during which Edmonton was regarded nationally as “the City of Champions.”

And on 9 August 2004, I relocated permanently from Edmonton to Montreal to attend the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia University.

Reflecting on the past 20 years residing here, the city has changed almost as drastically as if it had endured a war, or a killing spree. Entire neighbourhoods like the Old Port and Griffintown have been redeveloped beyond recognition; the provincial government presently in power has slashed funding for arts and cultural activities. Of course, the Coronavirus crisis and its broad and sprawling effects on society weren’t good for anybody.

And yet a sense of solidarity has coalesced in areas like Pointe-Saint-Charles and the Garment District, where artist-run centres such as Bâtiment 7 and Ateliers Belleville have stepped in to serve underrepresented creative communities. Though Montreal hasn’t won an Oscar for Best International film since The Barbarian Invasions in 2003, or a Stanley Cup since a decade earlier, the city continues to be a magnet for excellence in art, academia, music, movies, and sport.

I like to think of the talented expats who decamp here as human transfer payments, replenishing Montreal’s perennially bereft coffers with cultural wealth.◼︎

Thank you for inviting NicheMTL to your thing. Please get in touch at the about page.

NicheMTL is Montreal’s independent not-for-profit source for this city’s most niche arts and culture. If you love what you’re reading, please consider subscribing.

Cover image: Listeners gather at the foot of Mount Royal to hear the Orchestre Metropolitain perform, 6 August 2024. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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Shock & Awe

François Le Roux, Le Bal masqué and L’Histoire du Soldat, Bourgie Hall, 18 April 2024

François Le Roux performs at Bourgie Hall. Photographed for NicheMTL.

The Reuters News Agency photographer Mohammed Salem this week won the World Press Photo award for his snapshot of a Palestinian woman, Inas Abu Maamar, cradling the lifeless corpse of her 5-year-old niece, Saly, who reportedly was killed in an Israeli airstrike at Nasser hospital in Southern Gaza last October.

On the surface, it’s an aesthetically appealing image.

The cold and rigid textures of white marble and yellow sandstone behind the pair of women contrast their bodily figures, draped in blue, brown, and white textiles.

And yet another feature strikes the viewer on a more subliminal level: there is very little humanity to this photographic record of apparently human suffering.

The only hint we get of the subjects’ earthy identity is a snatch of Maamar’s hand emerging from her sleeve, gently caressing Saly’s enshrouded head. Otherwise, there is nearly no humanness evident in any recognizable corporeal features — an inverse, say, of the iconic Pulitzer Prize-winning image that The Associated Press photographer Nick Ut captured of Phan Thi Kim Phúc running naked and screaming down Route 1 near Trang Bang immediately following an American napalm attack on South Vietnam in 1972.

In Ut’s historic image, the horrors of war were laid bare in black and white, visceral, and unmistakable. With Salem’s more current photo, everything that’s terrible about genocide is concealed, abstracted, wrapped up literally as if mummified. It’s an image sanitized of pain that invites viewers at once to look and to not really see.

During the Vietnam War, it was customary in the U.S. not to show dead soldiers’ bodies in the media. Visible suffering was a duty for the other side to bear.

But through the proliferation of shocking media images amidst wars in Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, Afghanistan, and Syria, the west no doubt fell victim to what the cultural theorist Susan Sontag in her book Regarding the Pain of Others defined “desensitizing horror.”

We’re frankly exhausted with looking at destruction and death. When there’s nothing else to look at, an image as enigmatic as Maamar’s requires an act of interpretation, forcing viewers to participate in discerning its true meaning.

Ensemble Urbain, Créations, Collectif MTL, 14 April 2024

Anita Pari and Joshua Morris perform at Collectif MTL. Photographed for NicheMTL.

How we signify internal pain entails a more symbolic vocabulary of representation. At a recent post-classical recital hosted by Ensemble Urbain, the composer and doctoral candidate Anita Pari chose to translate her own lived experience with mental health through music.

In a piece called “Escape for Cello and Piano,” Pari and accompanist Joshua Morris communicated sonically the experience of “persistent intrusive thoughts” — a phenomenon that everybody can experience, regardless of medical diagnosis or clinical disorder.

Ordering sound is one way to restructure any situation in which we find ourselves out of control. That’s why music — and art, more broadly — is such a successful therapeutic form, which we should consider before reaching for pharmaceuticals or other easy fixes.

Pari’s composition didn’t come off too conceptual, either; it wasn’t, so to speak, just a “one-note” performance. I found myself both aesthetically pleased as a listener, and emotionally moved as a person empathetic to those who find this life a struggle. What a wonderful place to put disordered energy.

Anybody who attempts to bring order into this world is going to scrape up against chaos. Anyone who tries to shine a light through darkness will inevitably cast a shadow.

Nary a Fang with Elizabeth Lima, No Hay Banda & Innovations en concert, La Sala Rossa, 15 April 2024

Jennifer Thiessen performs with Nary a Fang at La Sala Rossa. Photographed for NicheMTL.

Not to disparage “one-note” performances, the experimental quartet Nary a Fang delivered a transcendent concert at La Sala Rossa last Monday, revolving around miniscule microtonal variations on a single frequency. Like listening to a piano being tuned, it becomes evident that an infinite number of notes exist between notes — that one is many, and many is one.

With this realization, it’s impossible not to be fulfilled by a drone that ostensibly never changes. When we find whatever it is we’re looking for — in sound as in life — there is no more “more” to find.

The Spanish kabbalist Shem Țob ibn Shem Țob wrote in his Sermon on Wa-Yeħi in the 1480s:

“Those who love money can never have enough of it. But the reward that comes to those who engage in Torah and commandments will fully satisfy them, for this goodness spreads like the water of a brook. Just as the sunlight can illuminate the entire world without diminishing, so the goodness of the world to come will not diminish, no matter how many share in it.”

The Philadelphia Orchestra, Maison Symphonique, 19 April 2024

Yannick Nézet-Seguin conducts The Philadelphia Orchestra. François Goupil for the Orchestre Métropolitain.

A good conductor takes command of an orchestra, which is prerequisite. A great conductor can regulate the crowd with a wave of his hand.

While directing The Philadelphia Orchestra, his American charge, Yannick Nézet-Séguin after the first movement of Florence Price’s 4th Symphony on Friday night at Maison Symphonique gently and successfully instructed the sold-out audience to kindly hold their applause until the end of the piece.

It was a simple gesture, a subtle manual motion made without even turning around. But subtlety is most effective in a righteous demand for respect.

Is it possible that force isn’t the best way to overcome an army?

Wanda Koop, Who Owns the Moon, Musée des beaux-arts, until 4 August 2024

Left: Wanda Koop, Objects of Interest — Panel 4, 2023 and Objects of Interest — Panel 2, 2023. Right: a patron inspects Black Sea Portal — Luminous Silver, 2023. Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery. ©️ Wanda Koop. Photographed for NicheMTL.

In preparation for painting, Wanda Koop lies on her back with eyes closed, often for hours, envisioning what each new piece should look like. Before a brush touches canvas, she has already formed a clear mental image of what the work will be.

“I love feeling that I’m always seeing everything in technicolour,” Koop told me at the press conference for her Musée des beaux-arts exhibition.

“It’s one of those shows where you should come by yourself and be quiet — like looking at the moon,” Koop suggests. “The eclipse is something that I speak to in my work. It’s something bigger than us.”◼︎

Cover image: Wanda Koop, Ukrainian Quartet — Power Plant, 2023, Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery. ©️ Wanda Koop. Photographed for NicheMTL.

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All Dressed

Le Concert Champêtre: in conversation with Naomi Woo

Back before there were iPods and Airpods, CDs, cassette tapes, and shellac, the only way to hear music would have been to hear musicians playing it. And before there were synthesizers and samplers and computers capable of making any sound under the sun, there were orchestras.

Music is such an ambient part of everyday life that it’s easy to take for granted how exceptional it is to hear sound organized in such forms that seem conventional now, but were in no way predetermined. There is no natural law that decreed stringed instruments, that blew wind through wood and brass, or drummed drums and crashed cymbals in ecstatic crescendos.

“An orchestra really is like an instrument,” says pianist and conductor Naomi Woo, who this summer begins an artistic collaboration with the Orchestre Metropolitain, following a two-year mentorship under superstar conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

Woo launches her OM partnership at the podium of three free en plein air concerts taking place in Montreal’s outer niches between July 5th and 12th. As a keyboardist first, it’s fitting that Woo might view the orchestra as one big instrument, “that consists,” she explains, “of dozens or hundreds of other instruments that can make so many sounds and colours and ideas.”

Woo began her musical training at age four as a pianist. She was captivated with an upright piano at home and begged her parents for lessons. But they thought she was too young, having not started grade school. A musician friend of the family encouraged a change of heart.

“This musician said, oh no, she’s four, she’s far too old,” Woo recalls. “My really earliest memories of music were just the joy of discovery. I really loved discovering all of the sounds and colours that the piano could make. And when I discovered the orchestra, that was a whole new journey of discovering this instrument.”

Woo was one of the first participants in a new mentorship programme for young conductors developed by the Orchestre Metropolitain and Maestro Nézet-Séguin. The programme’s aim is to immerse conductors not only in the orchestra’s musical side, but also in its administrative, promotional, educational, and community outreach work, providing a holistic view of a functioning symphony’s machinery.

Woo quickly fell in love with the Orchestre Metropolitain. “It has such an incredible enthusiasm, an incredible life,” she says of this unique collective instrument. “It’s an orchestra that’s constantly pushing the boundaries of the repertoire, showing audiences new things. They’re not afraid to riff. And those riffs have paid off. We’ve got audiences into the concert hall, and into the outdoors, as well. It’s really exciting to see that.”

The park performances in July are Woo’s unique chance to take the Orchestre Metropolitain into outlying neighbourhoods — and to audiences who, for whatever reasons, might not regularly attend Maison Symphonique.

“They’re really special concerts,” Woo says, “because they take place in communities, they take place outdoors, they are free for anyone to come to — with food, with families — and have a really wonderful experience. This is a great opportunity for me to visit some new neighbourhoods, to get to know some new people, to get a feel for who this orchestra is really for, which in my mind is everyone. And to top things off, we’re performing some pretty exceptional music.”

“There’s the feeling of experiencing an orchestra live,” says Woo, “which is different than a recording, simply because of the physics.”

Woo tells me that the pandemic shifted her perspective on the real value and cultural meaning both of performing and experiencing music live. “I have a vivid memory of watching a movie,” she recalls. “It must have been in May or June of 2020. And in the movie there was a scene where there were people at a concert. It wasn’t an emotional scene in the movie at all, but I burst into tears. And I hadn’t realized how much I missed it. And that feeling — I vowed in that moment to not take it for granted.”

Woo and I talk awhile about that lost-and-found feeling of coming through the lockdown’s looking glass, of regaining what was missed, and that unmistakable sensation of hearing anew.

“There’s two things,” Woo elaborates: “There’s the feeling of experiencing an orchestra live, which is different than a recording, simply because of the physics. Because the sound waves made by the instrumentalists are transferring through the air and into your body. That’s how we hear sound: it’s waves; it’s touch; it’s something tangible and physical. Those sound waves are different when they’re coming out of tubas and oboes and violas and double basses compared to when they’re coming out of speakers. That’s just a physical fact of science. So that’s one thing, and that’s so powerful. And then there’s the feeling of being together as an audience. You might know when you have a CD that thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of people also own that CD. But it is different when you have all gathered together to share in an experience. It’s incomparable. I feel really lucky that I get to be a part of it every day.”

Woo’s enthusiasm for this city is equally infectious. She confesses a love for the local independent music scene, particularly some of Montreal’s more boundary-pushing composers. “I actually wrote a chapter of my PhD about Nicole Lizée,” says Woo. “I’m a really, really big fan of her work. Music is one of the ways I understand the world. So listening to and getting to know local music and artists is a way that I can understand the people and the spaces around me.”

The Orchestre Metropolitain’s Alfresco concerts are Montreal’s opportunity to get to know Woo, too, to hear symphonic music beyond a concert hall, and to feel the actual physical sound vibrations that only an orchestra can offer. For Woo, it’s about making connections.

“I think Montreal has a real vibrance, artistically. The linguistic and cultural diversity of the city makes for a unique kind of cultural engagement, and unique possibilities for bridging divides, bridging gaps between people.”◼︎

The OM Alfresco with Naomi Woo runs 5-12 July 2023.

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Shame

The Canadian Grand Prix

I had a bad dad.

One lesson my dad did teach me, though — and quite by accident — is how to spot other bad dads and people who had them. What kinds of bad dads? Weinstein bad? Epstein bad? Frankenstein bad? D: All of the steins. Nicole Spector and I were friends on Twitter.

This is why I so despise the F1 weekend in Montreal, I realized. It is a concentrated convergence of grand pricks in wrinkled suits that descend like bad dads upon this otherwise fair city, drinking whisky, smoking cigars, banging hookers, burning rubber, and all right around Father’s Day. This year it’s as if they were astrologically aligned. I shouldn’t take it personally. But I do.

Another lesson I learned later in life was from a film called Shame, directed by Steve McQueen. The British Black filmmaker/photographer, not the White American movie star/race car driver. I sympathize with Michael Fassbinder’s character because we are about the same age, if not the same shoe size. And also because of the brutality of addiction to tame trauma that the story portrays. It’s sex for Fassbinder’s Brandon, but it could be anything: whisky, cigars, rubber.

The family trauma is never revealed in the film. But Sissy, Brandon’s sister, played by Carey Mulligan, indicates its dark sexual nature. She reminds her brother in a moving line of dialogue: just because we come from a bad place does not make us bad people.

So this Father’s Day, if you had a bad dad, I see you. And if you had a good dad — or no dad — be glad. Because unless you’re Roger fucking Waters, coming up dadless is decidedly the better draw.

Ky with HRT and Genital Shame, La Sotterenea, 1 June 2023

There are such things as evil spirits. They can inhabit anyone. One of the most common and overlooked ways that this happens is alcohol.

Recently at a show celebrating the album launch of the Montreal artist Ky, an extremely intoxicated man wandered into La Sotterenea. There was simply no security to stop him. His visage was grizzled from drink and life on the street. His behaviour reflected no vestige of autonomy. He bounced around the room like a pinball, alternately asking patrons for change, and scanning the floor for anything of value.

I was worried for a moment that he may accost someone, possibly me, and an altercation might ensue. But fortunately, or unfortunately, depending upon your perspective, there was exactly nothing for this lost soul in the basement of La Sotterenea. And so he simply ascended the stairs and was spat back out into the night.

There was once a human there. Though his body is now animated entirely by a poison colloquially called spirits. This man was not in good spirits. That is, good spirits did not possess the man.

The Montreal Museum of Illusions

There is, though, some light still left in the world. One place it’s found is in that innocent sense of childlike astonishment at optical illusions. I will never forget a New Years Eve party I attended one year where a group of friends brought their kids. There happened to be a book of optical illusions on the coffee table, and Mrs. Doubtfire couldn’t have made a better babysitter.

The Museum of Illusions, newly opened in Old Montreal, is just such a place. It’s a welcome addition to a previously derelict stretch of St. Antoine, and an excellent way to entertain the whole family when visiting Montreal, or just coming in to the city from the suburbs at the weekend. Ironically, the illusory brings us back in touch with life’s important, real things.

Orchestre Metropolitain, Symphonic Explorations, Maison Symphonique, 11 June 2023

Lately the authorities have been testing the REM network. And one problem I don’t think they anticipated is how loud the things are. It’s a ghostly noise, too, those empty cars gliding back and forth on elevated tracks.

I identified a similar sound in Keiko Devaux’s newest piece, which premiered triumphantly at the Orchestre Metropolitain’s Season Finale concert, and was conducted with gusto by our superstar maestro, the pride of Montreal, Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

Echoes of technology often crop up in contemporary music — cell phone static is big these days — and perhaps it’s where it’s best dealt with. Devaux’s signature glissando, more subdued now, emulates that constant velocity motivating modern life, smearing cacophony into harmony.

Go Baroque! Montreal Chamber Music Festival, Bourgie Hall, 12 June 2023

The kids used to have a phrase: pics or it didn’t happen. So the photographic evidence presented below proves that the sordid tale that is about to unfold is one hundred percent true.

I was greatly looking forward to a performance by the cellist Elinor Frey at Bourgie Hall as part of the Montreal Chamber Music Festival. And I was in awe of Frey and her quartet of assembled musicians pouring their combined lifetimes of practice into producing this beautiful music. Likely never before in three hundred years had it been played so exquisitely, and in such a setting.

It was about three quarters into the evening that I noticed the couple sitting to my left, a man in a blue collared shirt and a woman wearing a black cocktail dress. I noticed because the woman emitted a giggle following one of the pieces and I wondered what struck her as particularly funny.

In part because something like this just happened at the L.A. Philharmonic, and also because I just wrote about it, I realized what was transpiring. It wasn’t a screaming full body orgasm. But the man’s hands were undoubtedly in the woman’s lap, and hers in his. Through their clothes, they were “manually operating.”

You can’t make this stuff up. And of course it has to find me.

I didn’t know what to do. I immediately felt embarrassment at being subjected to this immensely intimate act in public. So I reached for my water bottle and was about to literally pour cold water on the pair. But I also didn’t want to interrupt the concert. So I reached for my camera instead. The images are blurry because of circumstance, but what they depict is clear.

I don’t follow the world of pornography because of the aforementioned. But I wonder if there is some sinister version of a Tik Tok challenge weaselling its way through the dark web, egging on this sort of exhibitionism. If so, it should be unequivocally named and shamed.

If you’re feeling amorous, especially at a Chamber Music festival, get a room.◼︎

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