The McGill Symphony Orchestra has enjoyed a unique relationship with the world-renowned Orchestre symphonique de Montréal for decades. It’s a bond that benefits both ensembles.
It was a nasty January morning in Montreal, the kind that made trumpeter David Koch wonder why he had moved from Michigan to study music in this windy, wintry city. He checked his email and found a timely reminder: an invitation to sit in as a substitute player for two concerts with the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, after just one term in the graduate performance program at McGill’s Schulich School of Music.
“That made my day right there,” Koch says. An added bonus was that he would be playing one of the OSM’s most anticipated programs of the year: the return engagement, after a 14-year absence, of former music director Charles Dutoit.
Koch had entered McGill on short notice last September, after learning that Richard Stoelzel, his teacher at Michigan’s Grand Valley State University, had been appointed head of the Schulich School’s brass studio. Koch applied late and arrived in Montreal in the fall not quite knowing what to expect, though well aware of the OSM and its close connection with the McGill Symphony Orchestra (MGSO).
He had played three concerts with the MGSO when Paul Merkelo, the OSM’s principal trumpet and an instructor at the Schulich School, invited him to sit in with the OSM for a program that included Stravinsky’s Petrushka. Stravinsky wrote the piece for an expanded trumpet section, and didn’t make things easy for the players. The first rehearsal was “nerve-wracking,” Koch says, though it could have been much tougher without the special prepping he received from the section principal.
“Paul made it a very comfortable experience for my first concert with a major orchestra, let alone one of the biggest concerts of the OSM season,” Koch says. “We spent a lesson working on the music, and he pointed out some spots that he thought might come up in rehearsal. He said Dutoit might single out the trumpets, and not to be afraid when that happened, just to play as I always do.”
Merkelo also briefed him on the etiquette of playing in a professional orchestra, most of which comes down to being as prepared and attentive as possible. That turned out to be especially important, Koch says, when working with a conductor who rehearses as quickly and efficiently as Dutoit. The young trumpeter also knew that the way he handled himself, in rehearsals as much as in the concerts, could determine whether he’d get another chance to play as a “sub” in the OSM. It’s an opportunity that’s much on the minds of MGSO members, who all know that many OSM members have passed through McGill’s orchestral ensemble.
A “stepping stone”
The OSM has firmly established itself as a world-class orchestra having won more than 50 national and international awards over the years, including two Grammys. Roughly one-third of the orchestra’s musicians are McGill graduates and 23 Schulich School instructors and professors are also full-time members of the OSM. The links between McGill and the OSM were highlighted earlier this year when two OSM recordings were among the five finalists for the Juno Award for Classical Album of the Year: Large Ensemble. One of those OSM albums featured Merkelo in a headlining role. The other CD, which won the Juno, prominently featured the OSM’s new organist-in-residence, Schulich graduate Jean-Willy Kunz, DMus’11.
“The MGSO is the stepping stone to the OSM,” says Catherine Gray, a violist who entered the Schulich School’s undergraduate performance program in September, after receiving a performance diploma from the Royal Conservatory of Music’s Glenn Gould School in Toronto. “There are quite a few MGSO alumni at the OSM, some of them only a few years older than I am.” Gray played a program with the OSM in November, and was asked to sub for the recent OSM tour of the U.S. as well, but declined because she would have had to miss too many classes.
“It’s one of the things that draws people to McGill, the close connection with the OSM,” says Jonathan Crow, BMus’98, a former OSM concertmaster who now holds the same position with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. “During my first week as a student at McGill, I had a sectional rehearsal with Richard Roberts,” then the leader of the OSM strings. “It’s kind of a big deal, having the concertmaster of the OSM leading your sectional rehearsal. You feel like you’re getting a real professional training,” Crow says.
His first performance with the OSM was actually a joint “side-by-side” concert with the MGSO, in which he, as concertmaster of the McGill ensemble, sat right next to Roberts. “Dutoit swooped in for one rehearsal, like a conquering hero, and immediately fixed all the problems,” Crow says. “That was our first experience, for probably most of the MGSO, with a real international conductor, and it was a real eye-opener.” He also found it revelatory to play Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7 with the MGSO, then to hear the OSM perform the same piece a few months later. “It’s incredible, that chance to hear great musicians doing what you’re being told to do.”
It’s possible to study your instrument with someone from a major orchestra in many places, Crow says, but at McGill, the concentration of talent from the big-league local orchestra is almost unique. “To have one orchestra that’s a major cultural export connected so specifically with one university is very unusual.” In New York, for instance, members of the New York Philharmonic are spread out through several competing schools.
When Crow was a McGill student, the influence of so many teachers from the OSM made itself felt not just at the individual level, he says, but in the notion of orchestral sound that the students absorbed from their mentors. “By virtue of having all of those OSM teachers at school, and all of us playing in orchestra together, we got this idea of a transparent sound, slightly less aggressive and more European than many North American orchestras,” Crow says. The OSM sound, renowned throughout the world, affected the sound of the MGSO, which made it all the easier for very talented McGill students to find their way into the OSM.
An orchestral education
As a student orchestra, the MGSO has a much more rapid turnover than any professional group. “I have about 30 per cent newcomers almost every year,” says Alexis Hauser, who has been the orchestra’s music director for the past 14 years. “There are quite a number of first-year students. They are usually very advanced technically, but many haven’t played regularly with an orchestra.” Some of what they need to know comes through full rehearsals, but there’s also an enormous amount to be gleaned from smaller, more focused section rehearsals, many of them led by OSM players.
“When I was a student at McGill, the sectionals were usually led by Tom Williams or Denise Lupien, both of whom were at one point members of the OSM,” says Alexander Read, BMus’09, GrDipMusic’12, who is now principal of the OSM’s second violins and a regular sectional coach for the MGSO. “They each taught us many things about ensemble playing. They worked on intonation, articulation, balance, and leading effectively [for the principal players], and on creating a unified sound with character and energy. They also gave us strategies for fingerings and bowings, and efficient methods for learning difficult passages. I try my best to pass along their knowledge, and also what I’ve learned myself as an orchestral player.”
Placements of students in the orchestra are done mainly by the performance faculty, who also decide how and when to rotate people within sections during the season. Sometimes that’s for balance, though often – especially in the winds – it’s meant to give as many people as possible a chance to take both a leading and a supporting role. Hauser is in charge of programming, which means making the most of a limited number of programs – just six per academic year – to expose students to a broad range of challenges.
“The repertoire has to reflect the whole spectrum, from classical to contemporary repertoire,” he explains. There are also at least three concerto competition winners to accommodate, a spotlight occasion for a renowned international composer such as Kaija Saariaho or Wolfgang Rihm, and a concert with choir if possible. Hauser’s choices are ambitious: the MGSO has performed demanding works such as Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 and Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé Suite No. 2, and performed Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 for a performance at Toronto’s Koerner Hall last November.
Each program is repeated once, giving the players what Hauser calls a ”priceless” opportunity to revisit what went well and what could be done better. Every concert is recorded and videotaped for live streaming by graduate students and faculty of the sound recording and music technology programs, including associate professor Martha de Francisco, a former Philips Classics producer who has recorded many top-flight orchestras, including the OSM.
It remains a big leap from playing in a student orchestra, even an excellent one, to coping with the pace and daily discipline of working full-time in a professional ensemble. “At university, you’ve got maybe six weeks to prepare a program,” says Jonathan Crow. “With a professional orchestra, you may have six hours.” But having continual guidance from teachers who live in that professional world at Maison symphonique makes a huge difference, and has smoothed the path for many MGSO players.
David Koch eventually did have his close-up with Charles Dutoit, when the conductor singled out the trumpets while rehearsing Petrushka. Koch says that being prepped on that possibility by Paul Merkelo helped take the jitters out of it, and allowed him play his best. Another topic from his lessons came home to him in a new way when Koch realized how much of fitting into the OSM brass section came down to finding the right kind of attack for each note.
“In order to match the rest of the brass and just be heard within the orchestra, I found that the front of the note had to be much crisper,” he says. “Paul and I had worked on that in lessons, giving a very clean front to every note. But actually playing in the orchestra, hearing him do that and getting feedback from the hall, was really important. I got a higher sense of how the front of the note defines the sound.”
After the concerts, Koch had a debriefing with Merkelo during the first quarter-hour of his next lesson. “He told me what he liked in what I had done, and what he thought I could do better,” Koch says. That’s what teachers always do in lessons, though this time it was also the section principal talking to him, as to a junior colleague, explaining what he could improve to be more successful in the milieu in which he wants to spend his professional life. That’s not something you can ever get from a book, or even from a fine teacher in a good university that doesn’t have a vital link with a major symphony orchestra.
Robert Everett-Green is a feature writer with The Globe and Mail and a former professional musician. A National Magazine Award winner, he currently focuses on arts and culture in Montreal.
