Festival Classica 2025: From Keith Jarret to Abbey Road

Advertisement / Publicité

This page is also available in / Cette page est également disponible en: Francais (French)

Marc Boucher, founder and artistic director of Festival Classica, is a man with wide open ears. “An artistic director,” he says, “should listen to a lot of music. …I even listen to heavy metal.” The diversity of Boucher’s musical taste is reflected in Festival Classica’s programming. This year, performances include symphonic arrangements of Beatles songs, newly composed tangos for cello and bandoneon (a concertina-like instrument), as well as a variety of classical and contemporary operas.

Past editions of Festival Classica took place in Montreal as well as in the Montérégie region of Quebec. This year, the Montérégie region will be prioritized. The sole offering in Montreal will be the festival’s benefit concert at Place des Arts, an operatic adaptation of Michael Berger’s musical, Starmania.

Prioritizing Local Talent

Photo: Jeremy Dion

While Festival Classica has been putting on concerts since 2010, they didn’t always prioritize hiring local talent. “Before, we hired more foreign artists, but we progressively decided to hire artists from Quebec and Canada,” says Boucher. On the one hand, Boucher explains that the difficulty of making a living as an artist today motivates him to hire more locally. But this in no way entails an artistic compromise. “The talent here is incredible,” he says.

Cellist Stéphane Tétreault is one local star who has been performing with Festival Classica since the beginning. Boucher explains that he first invited Tétreault to perform the Bach cello suites, and invited him back, 10 years later, to perform an entirely different repertoire: tango suites. Boucher originally came up with the idea on a trip to the Magdalen Islands in 2019. There, he met bandoneon player Denis Plante and asked him to write a series of tango suites for bandoneon and cello. “I wanted something that wasn’t the usual Piazzola,” he says. This year, Plante and Tétreault will play tango music by Piazzola, Villoldo, and Pugliese, but the bulk of the Stradivatango concert will consist of Plante’s own compositions.

Tétreault will also perform as part of a string quartet in Keith Jarret’s The Köln Concert. Like Stradivatango, Boucher came up with the idea for this concert rather serendipitously. He was driving to Quebec and listening to the original recording of The Köln Concert, a legendary improvised performance by jazz pianist Keith Jarret at the opera house in Cologne, Germany. While Boucher was listening to the album, he noted the date of its recording: Jan. 24, 1975. Quickly, he did the math. “This year is the 50th anniversary! Since I love this music, I decided to order the score right away.”

Boucher wanted to commemorate the anniversary of this iconic recording. “If I had hired a pianist,” he says, “it wouldn’t have been the same.” Jarret’s album is unique; the magic of this improvised recording—the best-selling solo-piano album of all time—could not be surpassed. So, Boucher decided on a different approach. Taking his inspiration from Bernard Labadie’s arrangement of Bach’s Goldberg Variations for strings and continuo, Boucher decided to commission François Vallières to arrange Keith Jarret’s jazz album for string quartet.

A New Way of Listening

For people who don’t usually listen to classical music, Boucher explains that hearing non-classical music performed on orchestral instruments is a great way to become acquainted with its signature tones and timbres. Every year, Festival Classica puts on a symphonic version of an iconic classic rock album. Ten years ago, Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon was performed outside, at Longueuil’s Parc de la Cité. Boucher was in the crowd that night. While the solo violin was performing, he overheard a young girl exclaim to her dad that she wanted to learn that instrument. When people are inspired as that girl was that night, “we have accomplished our goal,” says Boucher.

This year, The Beatles’ Abbey Road will be given the symphonic treatment. Boucher discovered the Abbey Road Concerto via a critique in Le Devoir. “Christopher Huss wrote a very favourable review of the album, so I decided to order it. Right away, I knew I wanted to put it in a concert.” Abbey Road Concerto is a unique arrangement by Israeli-American violinist and composer Guy Braunstein. Each song on the album is arranged with vibrant orchestration and a rich harmonic palette. Braunstein’s performance features the kind of difficult double-stops and variegated bowing techniques that are found in the most virtuosic of classical cadenzas.

This is one of the only concerts in the festival to feature a non-local musician. Braunstein himself will perform his own Abbey Road Concerto with Alain Trudel leading Orchestre symphonique de Trois-Rivières in two suites of beloved Beatles songs.

For Boucher, symphonic versions of Pink Floyd and the Beatles are only the beginning. With his ears tuned to all sorts of music, he sees limitless possibilities for symphonic adaptations of different styles. “I dream of having Jacob Collier perform with orchestra. I dream of having a symphonic version of The Dirty Loops, of Sophia Stephens, of Joni Mitchell,” he says.