Critiques

The young Québecois conductor Jacques Lacombe, who took over as music director last fall, led with a confident, swinging beat, showing a particularly keen ear in Fauré‘s “Pelléas et Mélisande” Suite.

“He [Tan Dun] sounds like a conductor,” Lacombe says. “A conductor must be able to hear with his eyes when he reads a score, and see with his ears when he’s on the podium. The ‘Water Concerto’ is scored more or less conventionally for a classical orchestra, with winds, brass, tympani, harp, percussion, and strings.” Still, special techniques are called for: winds and brasses must produce sliding pitches; mouthpieces of wind instruments are used by themselves as an instrument; trumpeters make percussion sounds by beating their mouthpieces.