Bourgie Hall presents

A Garden in Venice with Maurice Steger

Maurice Steger is back to dazzle us with a program of concertos by 18th-century Venetian masters, with Vivaldi at the forefront. This concert also features a fascinating work by Japanese composer Toshio Hosokawa, who likens his own music to calligraphy, each note “painted on the canvas of silence.”

Artists
Les Violons du Roy

Les Violons du Roy takes its name from the celebrated court orchestra of the French kings. It was founded in 1984 by Bernard Labadie, now styled founding conductor, and continues under music director Jonathan Cohen to explore the nearly boundless repertoire of music for chamber orchestra in performances matched as closely as possible to the period of each work’s composition. Its minimum fifteen-member complement plays modern instruments, albeit with period bows for Baroque and Classical music, and its interpretations are deeply informed by the latest research on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century performance practice. The repertoire of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries receives similar attention and figures regularly on the orchestra’s programs.

Maurice Steger, recorder and conductor

It is not surprising that he is called “Paganini”, “wizard”, “the world’s leading recorder player” or an “electrifying and inspiring conductor”. In order to live up to such high expectations, one requires not only astonishing technique, but also charisma, intellect, and a special sensitivity for the music. Maurice Steger has been proving all of this to his audiences, inspiring with his intense tone and unstoppable energy in various concert formats all over the world.

As a soloist, conductor, or both at once, he regularly performs with the top period instrument ensembles, such as the Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, La Cetra Baroque Orchestra Basel, Venice Baroque Orchestra, The English Concert, Il Pomo d’oro or I Barocchisti. He also performs with leading modern orche­stras such as the Zurich Chamber Orchestra, the Frankfurt Radio Symphony, the Canadian Violons du Roy, the Munich Chamber Orchestra, the Musikkollegium Winterthur and the NDR Radiophilharmonie. It always astonishes that all these orchestras sound transformed after a period of work: sonically sensitive and individual, always historically informed, and playfully expressive in the here and now.

His commitment to musical education is also extremely important to him: besides the directorship of the Gstaad Baroque Academy at the Menuhin Festival Gstaad, which he took over in 2013 in addition to diverse master classes, he invented the character of Tino Flautino in order to encourage young children to playfully engage with classical music. The recorder playing Tino Flautino is a children’s hero in Steger’s home country, Switzerland, and the musician now presents his latest adventure with the tomcat Leo Leonardo in many countries and languages.

Through his own unending thirst for knowledge, he succeeds time and again in showing how much there is still to be discovered about Baroque music.

One sometimes wonders where Maurice Steger finds all the energy with which he has helped the recorder to make a comeback, as Arte recently presented in a documentary The Recorder: A Comeback.

But when you see how much love for the recorder, the music, and the audience he demonstrates in each of his many projects, it becomes clear that Maurice Steger is carved from the same special material as his beloved instrument.

Program
ALBINONI Concerto a cinque in G major, Op. 10, No. 4
LOCATELLI Concerto Grosso in C minor, Op. 1, No. 11
Toshio HOSOKAWA Two movements of Singing Garden in Venice for Baroque orchestra
Benedetto MARCELLO Concerto a cinque in F major,  Op. 1, No. 4
VIVALDI Concerto for Two Violins and Cello in D minor, Op. 3,  No. 11, RV 565
Violin Concerto, RV 375 (transcr.  for recorder)
Concertos for recorder Op. 10, Nos. 2 “La Notte”  and 3 “Il Gardellino”

Friday, October 21, 2022 at 7:30pm
To purchase your tickets visit: www.mbam.qc.ca/en/bourgie-hall/