Montreal Museum, Orchestra Present Chamber Music Series

The five chamber music concerts will all feature members of the OSM and will take place early on Friday evenings. Each will be preceded at 5 p.m. by a guided tour of the associated exhibition or facet of the Museum’s collection. The hour-long concerts will start at 6.30 p.m. All of the musical events of the 2007-2008 season will take place in the intimate setting of the Glass Court of the Jean-Noël Desmarais Pavilion.

As each programme has been chosen to highlight a concurrent exhibition, different musical styles will take the spotlight throughout the series. From the French baroque to contemporary Cuban music, from Mozart to Debussy, from string quartets to wind quintets, the five following concerts are occasions not to be missed.

• October 5, 2007

This concert, which is tied to the exhibition The Artistic Heritage of the Montreal Sulpicians, will include great works of French baroque chamber music.

• November 16, 2007

As part of e-art: New Technologies and Contemporary Art – Ten Years of Accomplishments by the Daniel Langlois Foundation, string quartets by Joseph Haydn and Béla Bartók and wind quintets by Anton Reicha and Paul Hindemith will illustrate the development of these two genres and of instrumental technique.

• March 21, 2008

For the concert accompanying the exhibition ¡Cuba! Art and History from 1868 to Today, contemporary Cuban music by composers Paquito de Rivera and Yalil Guerra will be performed along with Claude Debussy’s String Quartet.

• May 2, 2008

This programme, illustrating the MMFA’s collection of nineteenth-century art, consists of one of the masterpieces of the chamber music canon, the Octet for Clarinet, Horn, Bassoon and Strings in F Majorby Franz Schubert.

• May 16, 2008

Conceived to accompany the MMFA’s collection of Canadian art, this concert includes pieces by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, R. Murray Schafer, Claude Vivier and André Prévost, as well as the premier of three short pieces commissioned by the OSM from three Canadian composers.

This series of five chamber music concerts is an initiative of Maestro Kent Nagano, artistic director of the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal, in collaboration with the director of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Nathalie Bondil. -- www.mmfa.qc.ca