From the Artistic Director of the Festival de Lanaudière 2024, Renaud Loranger
“Each new edition of our fast-approaching Festival brings that bracing feeling of new promise: as the warm season awakens, there is a sense of beginning a bright new chapter. Perhaps inevitably, this exhilaration also comes with a distant but persistent feeling of instability. Our world’s bewildering and all too distressing conflicts, the state of events that show us an increasingly fragmented world, the loss of connection between human beings—to all this, we answer with the vital power of art and its own promise of boundless renewal.
A centrepiece of the summer at Lanaudière, the presentation of Aida —one of the most iconic operas—with Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Orchestre Métropolitain and a world-class vocal cast, takes on a supercharged dimension. Beyond its story of fratricide that spawns conflict between two nations, of racial enmity, this opera is Verdi’s commentary on war itself, on senseless belligerence as a time-worn vehicle of collective self-determination, whose outcome is never short of utter horror and tragedy. We cannot fail to understand this against a backdrop of brutal conflicts that continue to devastate the Middle East and parts of Eastern Europe, as well many catastrophes less visible to us, amid which people of the world suffer acute violence.
In contrast to this drama that resonates all too well with current geopolitics, Shakespeare’s realm of fantasy, enchantingly reconfigured in Purcell’s The Fairy Queen , performed by Les Arts Florissants and the Jardin des Voix, will mark both William Christie’s 80th birthday and the conclusion of his ensembles’ three-year residency with the Festival. This work’s message is glaring and vital: over life’s many obstacles, over its elemental chaos, love invariably prevails!
The Festival’s opening concert, led by Nicolas Ellis and the Orchestre de l’Agora, sets the stage with Holst’s spectacular The Planets, like a suite of interlocutors who show us the role and place of humanity in the universe, what our species can do and should do, and what limits it should not overstep—an eminently moral and ethical vision. Strauss’ Zarathustra, and Wagner’s Valkyrie, who is but the younger sister of Antigone, and Beethoven’s evocation of the myth of Prometheus, all explore similar avenues. This shining constellation will feature the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal and Rafael Payare in the customary leading role.
This year again, the Festival de Lanaudière 2024 strikes up a dialogue with several compelling artists of international stature—breakthrough talents and world-renowned guiding lights alike—including Matthias Goerne, Anne Sofie von Otter, and the distinguished Fribourg Baroque Orchestra, all three of whom pay us the honour of a rare North American appearance. This forthcoming season will once more see Lanaudière become a meeting ground for major global figures in music, several of whom will take to our stage for the very first time, among them Angel Blue, Ambrogio Maestri, SeokJong Baek, Alexandros Stavrakakis … and following them, an entire cast of some of the world’s most sought-after singers of the Verdian repertoire, the celebrated Quatuor Diotima, and pianist Yoav Levanon, in a double feature marking his Canadian debut. As anticipated, some Festival regulars will also return to the delight of our public, including Les Violons du Roy and Jonathan Cohen, Bernard Labadie—dearly missed after a lengthy absence—Les Grands Ballets, Marc-André Hamelin, Mathieu Lussier, Kerson Leong, and Charles Richard-Hamelin.
In the wake of the Second World War, France’s first Minister of Cultural Affairs, André Malraux had the mandate to implement a vision of society reconsolidated and rehumanized through culture, at a time when civilization seemed to have lost all direction, all transcendence, all overarching value. Such ideals still hold true today; we will make them ours and reaffirm them in the Festival’s five-week span. It will be an invincible communion with others and an irrepressible surge of humanity.”