Chamber Music in Sainte-Pétronille: 40th Anniversary Season

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For the past 40 years, the community of Sainte-Pétronille, located on the western tip of Île d’Orléans, has hosted an annual summer concert series in the village’s ancestral church, which seats no more than 300.

In the early 1980s, a group of volunteer musicians and music lovers identified the hilly landscape and century-old chapel, with its unique acoustics, as the ideal setting for intimate chamber-music concerts. In the summer of 1983, Musique de chambre à Sainte-Pétronille was officially born, with Martin Lee-Gosselin as its founding president. Today, the organization has produced over 140 concerts, featuring 250 musicians from a dozen countries, including some international celebrities.

This year, the festival will highlight local musicians, says Marc Roussel, who has been artistic director since 2017, adding that the 40th anniversary concert will “obviously” be very personal. Events will take place on Thursday evenings from June to August, and will feature award-winning musicians in all six performances, which promise to be full of musical discoveries.

For the 40th anniversary concert on June 29, Roussel will be joined by local musicians: pianists Anne-Marie Bernard and Maxim Bernard, soprano Guylaine Girard, and guitarist Jérôme Ducharme. They will perform works by Rameau, Schubert, Côté-Giguère, Brouwer, and Schumann. The festival organizers, says Roussel, are pleased to have convinced pianist Michel Franck to play a rare solo recital the following week, which promises to be one of the most memorable musical events of the summer. His program will include Scarlatti, Beethoven, Schubert and Chopin. In the final week of July, the pianist couple Jean-Michel Dubé and Rosemarie Duval-Laplante will perform works by Fauré, Gershwin, André Mathieu and Ravel.

In August, the Trio Hochelaga, consisting of award-winning musicians Anne Robert, Dominic Beauséjour-Ostiguy and Dantonio Pisano, will present a program featuring works by Beethoven, Novák and Mendelssohn. Ensemble Renouveau, featuring cellist Simon Desbiens, violinist Jessy Dubé, pianist Bruce Gaulin and sopranos Carole-Anne Roussel and Évelyne Larochelle, will set the church on fire Aug. 17, with a performance of repertoire ranging from chamber music, to folk music, to opera. Finally, cellist Cameron Crozman, named “Canada’s next big cello star” by CBC Music, and sought-after pianist Meagan Milatz will perform the closing concert of the festival’s 40th season.