Tribute
An emotional tribute to a hero
The General: A Tribute to Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire
The OSM Orchestra and Chorus
Kent Nagano, conductor
Colm Feore, narrator
Christiane Oelze, soprano
At Place des Arts in Montreal
on Tuesday
When Roméo Dallaire, retired lieutenant-general of the Canadian Forces, rose in his box in the second tier of Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier to acknowledge the welcoming remarks of l'Orchestre symphonique de Montréal's general manager, Madeleine Careau, there was a flurry of warm applause from the audience that soon became a standing ovation.
At the end of the evening when the final notes of Beethoven's Opferlied dissolved on the lines "Can we still recognize the pure, the uncorrupted hand to guide more human ages dawning?" the audience repeated the surge from warm and respectful applause to full ovation. The appreciation and regard shown to Canada's once beleaguered general who bore helpless witness to the Rwandan slaughter was full and genuine. Throughout the performance, he watched the stage intently and when it was his turn to join conductor Kent Nagano, narrator Colm Feore, soprano Christiane Oelze, he was clearly moved and seemingly embarrassed by this homage from the OSM.
Instead of the usual "bravos," there were the occasional bursts of "On vous aime Général Dallaire" and, more simply, "Roméo."
The reworking of selections from Beethoven's Egmont, composed for Goethe's epic work of a tragic nobleman/soldier who leads an ineffective rebellion against Spanish tyranny in the Netherlands, to honour Dallaire is a touching and lovely idea. Writer and critic Paul Griffiths certainly had a daunting task in marrying a wretchedly 20th-century narrative to an early romantic musical aesthetic.
His text is tremendously moving, sparse and effective. Feore's narration was sublime -- though his microphone pickup could have had more resonance for the hall -- and Oelze sang beautifully. In fact, from a performance standpoint, the Homage portion of the program was pretty near close to perfect. Nagano and Griffiths chose from among the Egmont pieces and added excerpts from Koenig Stephan, op. 117, and incidental music from Leonore Prohaska, composed in 1815. The strings of the orchestra were rich and lush through the famous Egmont overture, compensating for a somewhat less than inspired reading of Beethoven's curious Second Symphony that opened the program.
But as effective and genuinely moving as it all was, there was something a little disconcerting and perhaps, in the long run, unfixable in this mix. The ideals of the Romantic rebellion that we all recognize in so much of Beethoven's music, particularly the music draped around heroics are, to a 21st-century ear, at a disconnect to the spate of genocidal atrocities that were supposed to have ended in May of 1945 but regrettably have marked almost every decade since. Griffiths, inspired by Dallaire's own narrative, doesn't shy away from the hell that opened -- "But no, here death was not noble," Feore spoke over the funeral march from Leonore Prohaska. But Beethoven is aural nobility -- we hear unsullied notions of bravery in almost every note, it raises that noble human flag. "To inhuman behaviour came the inhuman response," we hear Feore speak a little later.
The gnawing response is that Griffiths's largely masterful text -- it sadly affixes guilt to inanimate and unnamed "machines" -- deserves a more searing, contemporary score. One that would better capture what Hannah Arendt referred to in her posthumously published essay Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship: "I think we shall have to admit that there exist extreme situations in which responsibility for the world, which is primarily political, cannot be assumed because political responsibility always presupposes a minimum of political power. . . . It is precisely in this admission of one's own impotence that a last remnant of strength and even power can still be preserved even under desperate conditions."
We understand this, which is why Roméo Dallaire is a hero. It's not clear that Beethoven's heroic scheme would admit as much.
From the Globe & Mail
The General: A Tribute to Lieutenant-General Roméo Dallaire
The OSM Orchestra and Chorus
Kent Nagano, conductor
Colm Feore, narrator
Christiane Oelze, soprano
At Place des Arts in Montreal
on Tuesday
When Roméo Dallaire, retired lieutenant-general of the Canadian Forces, rose in his box in the second tier of Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier to acknowledge the welcoming remarks of l'Orchestre symphonique de Montréal's general manager, Madeleine Careau, there was a flurry of warm applause from the audience that soon became a standing ovation.
At the end of the evening when the final notes of Beethoven's Opferlied dissolved on the lines "Can we still recognize the pure, the uncorrupted hand to guide more human ages dawning?" the audience repeated the surge from warm and respectful applause to full ovation. The appreciation and regard shown to Canada's once beleaguered general who bore helpless witness to the Rwandan slaughter was full and genuine. Throughout the performance, he watched the stage intently and when it was his turn to join conductor Kent Nagano, narrator Colm Feore, soprano Christiane Oelze, he was clearly moved and seemingly embarrassed by this homage from the OSM.
Instead of the usual "bravos," there were the occasional bursts of "On vous aime Général Dallaire" and, more simply, "Roméo."
The reworking of selections from Beethoven's Egmont, composed for Goethe's epic work of a tragic nobleman/soldier who leads an ineffective rebellion against Spanish tyranny in the Netherlands, to honour Dallaire is a touching and lovely idea. Writer and critic Paul Griffiths certainly had a daunting task in marrying a wretchedly 20th-century narrative to an early romantic musical aesthetic.
His text is tremendously moving, sparse and effective. Feore's narration was sublime -- though his microphone pickup could have had more resonance for the hall -- and Oelze sang beautifully. In fact, from a performance standpoint, the Homage portion of the program was pretty near close to perfect. Nagano and Griffiths chose from among the Egmont pieces and added excerpts from Koenig Stephan, op. 117, and incidental music from Leonore Prohaska, composed in 1815. The strings of the orchestra were rich and lush through the famous Egmont overture, compensating for a somewhat less than inspired reading of Beethoven's curious Second Symphony that opened the program.
But as effective and genuinely moving as it all was, there was something a little disconcerting and perhaps, in the long run, unfixable in this mix. The ideals of the Romantic rebellion that we all recognize in so much of Beethoven's music, particularly the music draped around heroics are, to a 21st-century ear, at a disconnect to the spate of genocidal atrocities that were supposed to have ended in May of 1945 but regrettably have marked almost every decade since. Griffiths, inspired by Dallaire's own narrative, doesn't shy away from the hell that opened -- "But no, here death was not noble," Feore spoke over the funeral march from Leonore Prohaska. But Beethoven is aural nobility -- we hear unsullied notions of bravery in almost every note, it raises that noble human flag. "To inhuman behaviour came the inhuman response," we hear Feore speak a little later.
The gnawing response is that Griffiths's largely masterful text -- it sadly affixes guilt to inanimate and unnamed "machines" -- deserves a more searing, contemporary score. One that would better capture what Hannah Arendt referred to in her posthumously published essay Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship: "I think we shall have to admit that there exist extreme situations in which responsibility for the world, which is primarily political, cannot be assumed because political responsibility always presupposes a minimum of political power. . . . It is precisely in this admission of one's own impotence that a last remnant of strength and even power can still be preserved even under desperate conditions."
We understand this, which is why Roméo Dallaire is a hero. It's not clear that Beethoven's heroic scheme would admit as much.
From the Globe & Mail