‘Orchestre symphonique de Montréal’

Marie-Nicole Lemieux, who won the 2000 Queen Elisabeth Competition, knows Wagner’s Wesendonck Lieder particularly well, having recorded them on an award-winning album. This evening, she will be performing the German composer’s masterpiece, in which he expresses his passion for Mathilde Wesendock. Another highlight of the evening is Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka. This composition and The Rite of Spring, also by Stravinsky, as well as Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and Debussy’s Jeux, will also be performed this evening. They break with the romantic tradition, heralding the advent of modernism. Kent Nagano invites us to experience this musical moment, during which romanticism developed, reaching both its peak and its limits, and exhausting the scope of its possibilities. It paradoxically gave rise to the most iconic renaissance in music, casting off the shackles of the strict framework of tonality.