As always, the 2024 LacMus Festival musical menu conflates two elements—a main thread, peeping out here and there in the program, and some anniversary tributes. The thread is the Belle époque, an era which, in retrospect, fully deserves its name. During those years, Europe experienced a relative balance of political powers, thus ensuring a few decades of peace and prosperity. Of course, this was made possible by the triumph of colonialism, providing low-cost goods from the rest of the world, by now subjugated, or soon waiting to be. That very sense of peace and prosperity finds its musical equivalent in the quiet bourgeois dimension we can feel in most of period production. The music of the Belle époque hardly hosts heroic gestures or grandiose visions: rather, intimacy, private feelings, and minor daily events are predominant, combined with a fascination for technical progress—that anxiety-charged quest for the “new” that was spreading, together with electric bulbs and the telephone, in the form of daring harmonies and increased orchestration resources. Even the import of colonial goods finds its exact musical equivalent in those bland hints at the exotic — “Oriental” hip shakings, chinoiseries, syncopated rhythms — which were then taken as fascinating glimpses of distant worlds and still draw our attention today, only for the opposite reason—their disarming naivety.
There is no dearth of anniversaries in 2024. One got the lion’s share in the LacMus program—the death centennial of Gabriel Fauré, this sort of noble father of the Belle époque, Ravel’s revered teacher, and a restless forerunner of that very tonal instability that was to spread in European music after him, until it turned into a devastating earthquake, tearing down all solid musical foundations. In the same year 1924, Giacomo Puccini passed away as well. He needs no special celebrations, as he is constantly being performed and listened to worldwide. However, this may be a welcome chance to discover some of his rarities, which place him squarely in the Belle époque climate. A lesser known deadline is the 150th anniversary of Reynaldo Hahn, the French-Venezuelan composer, who fully took part in the fin de siècle cultural climate, was then considered in the same ranks as Debussy and Ravel, but was abruptly forgotten after World War II, having been buried by the avant-garde fury. Today, he might be reconsidered in a more balanced perspective. An exact peer of Hahn’s is Arnold Schoenberg, whose youthful art songs are the most Belle époque creations one can imagine; and yet another is the English composer, Gustav Holst, whose Planets never stopped orbiting in the symphonic repertoire, while the rest of his production has fallen into oblivion.
Finally, a single title reminds us of Luigi Nono’s centennial. As it happens, the chosen piece, Sofferte onde serene, had been penned for Maurizio Pollini, who left us while this program was being put together. Hopefully, the performance of that masterful composition is a welcome opportunity to remember both men.