Love at first downbeat
Robert Everett-Green - The Globe and Mail
February 14, 2010

Orchestras adore Montreal conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin. Next month he brings the Rotterdam Philharmonic to perform in Canada

.It’s one of your first times together, and you really like each other. You decide to record the whole encounter, not just for yourselves, but so you can show the whole world that this connection is smoking hot.

No, I’m not describing the latest viral video of someone’s intimate indiscretions. I’m talking about conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s first recording sessions with the Rotterdam Philharmonic, the celebrated Dutch orchestra the Canadian conductor took over as music director in 2008.

“It was actually our first date after I was announced,” he said by phone, referring to the sessions for a recent album of music by Ravel (on EMI Classics). “Our relationship then was pretty much love at first sight. This recording is a document of that.”

Nézet-Séguin has done a lot more dating since then, with some very prestigious partners. In December, he made his Metropolitan Opera debut, not with a single fly-in performance (as would often be the case for a 34-year-old newcomer), but for the entire run of a new production of Carmen. By the time he left town, he had a commitment from the Met’s general manager Peter Gelb for four more operas over the next several years.

Earlier that month, Nézet-Séguin flew into Philadelphia for a second program with the Philadelphia Orchestra, which appears to be in the final stages of selecting a new music director. It’s an open secret that Nézet-Séguin is on the short list of contenders.

No doubt about it, the classical world has gone a bit bonkers over this amiable Montrealer in the past year. His appearances in London (where he became associate conductor of the London Philharmonic in 2008) have been rapturously received by that city’s numerous music critics. When he reached New York in August for his local debut, the New York Times ran a huge feature about his career’s rapid ascent - and he wasn’t at the Met or the Philharmonic, but with the Mostly Mozart Festival’s relatively modest pick-up orchestra. Under the headline “A Canadian Whirlwind Hits Town,” Matthew Gurewitsch accurately remarked: “Mr. Nézet-Séguin is a much greater celebrity in London and Rotterdam than he is at home.”

That may change soon, after the four Canadian dates on a North American tour designed to show off what Nézet-Séguin and the Rotterdam Phil have been up to since their intense recording date with Ravel. Expectations have been spiked by that disc’s high quality, which many reviewers (myself included) find comparable to the terrific albums of French music made by Charles Dutoit and l’Orchestre symphonique de Montréal during their heyday. The Ravel album was just the start; though in Nézet-Séguin’s view, it took a year after that for orchestra and conductor to figure each other out.

“The beginning of the second season is the real beginning,” Nézet-Séguin said. “We’ve been working hard, and I really think there are no secrets between us now. If I were to record those Ravel works with them now, it would probably sound quite different.”

His two tour programs (both of which will be heard at New York’s Lincoln Centre on Feb. 17 and 18) play to his strengths in French, German and contemporary repertoire, while tracing links between them. For dates in Quebec City and Montreal, he’s conducting the Brahms Violin Concerto (with soloist Viktoria Mullova), Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra and a recent piece by Dutch composer Theo Verbey. For Ottawa and Toronto, he’s doing Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben, Ravel’s Concerto for Piano Left Hand (with Jean-Yves Thibaudet) and Olivier Messiaen’s Les Offrandes Oublieux.

“It’s a very early Messiaen piece, and very touching,” said Nézet-Séguin, of Les Offrandes. “I was interested in seeing the connection not just with Ravel, but with Strauss, through the lyricism.”

He’s happy to connect the dots between pieces he loves no matter what the stakes. When he returned to Philadelphia for his second audition program in December, he might have been expected to offer something to flatter the tastes of orchestra and patrons; instead, he conducted Cesar Franck’s rarely heard Symphony in D, and Orion, a piece by the late great Montreal composer Claude Vivier.

Nézet-Séguin had a big act to follow in Rotterdam, where he took over from the larger-than-life Velery Gergiev, one of the most exciting conductors in the world. But Gergiev’s eminence and other commitments, especially to the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra in St. Petersburg, left the Dutch orchestra feeling a bit as if they had been left in the shade.

You might expect that feeling to be overtaking l’Orchestre Métropolitain de Grand Montreal, where Nézet-Séguin has been music director for 10 years. But he has already conducted three of the orchestra’s eight programs this season, and has two more to come, culminating in Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 in June. The international star remains a loyal home-town boy.

Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Rotterdam Philharmonic play the Grand Theatre in Quebec City on Feb. 20, Montreal’s Place des Arts on Feb. 21, the National Arts Centre in Ottawa on Feb. 23, and Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall on Feb. 24.

Robert Everett-Green