One of the themes defended by the Printemps des arts festival in Monte-Carlo, which ended on April 2, concerned North America. Case Scaglione, the musical director of the Orchester national d’Ile-de-France, forced to postpone his debut with the Monte-Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra for health reasons, has been replaced by Lio Kuokman, conductor 41-year-old orchestra with a youthful look, which was the revelation of the evening. Born in Macao on June 5, 1981, the Chinese won second prize in Paris in 2014 as well as the Audience Prize at the Evgeny Svetlanov International Competition. Since 2020, his stays in France have multiplied, from La Folle Journée de Nantes in 2020 to the symphonic phalanxes of Marseille and Toulon, passing by the Orchester national du Capitole.
From the imperceptible raising of the maestro’s baton, one can only admire the mastery with which The Unanswered Question by Charles Ives (1874-1954), the sensual balancing of a carpet of strings coloring itself according to changing harmonies while two groups of winds disseminated in the room try to challenge the implacable continuum. The trumpet will eventually wear out, the strings will fall silent, leaving the enigma intact.
bloated orchestra
Quite different is the atmosphere that presides over the world creation ofAntigone by François Meïmoun (born in 1979), to whom the composer and director of the festival, Bruno Mantovani, commissioned this melodrama for narrator and orchestra. A plethoric orchestra armed with brass and percussion, oracular text: the daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta has returned to Thebes to face Creon’s ban and give a burial to her brother Polynice. Powerful, eruptive music, saturated with flashes, bursts and lightning, big crushed chords, sets a cosmogonic decor. Then silence. The voice of actor Laurent Stocker lets go: “That little sound of death again…” Solos of cello, trombone, volleys of bells or virtuoso lines of piano, alternate with shattering tutti. The actor speaks, sings, vociferates, belches, along this initiatory journey, from which new life will be born. A spectacular work, which sometimes borders on emphasis, saved by the absolute sincerity and committed direction of Lio Kuokman.
The concert will end with the rare and monumental Symphony no 3 by Aaron Copland (1900-1990). An invigorating score, an edifying contribution to the “great american symphony”, the four movements of which seem to be nourished and exalted by their own euphoria. The conductor gives this pharaonic monument a magnificent coherence, galvanizing a Monte-Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra at the height of the heroic trajectory defined by Copland, whose Fanfare from the Commun Manwritten at the time of the entry of the United States into the Second World War, will be transcended in a last movement which transforms “the common man” into a hero.
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