Critique – Virée classique – PAN M 360
Birds have made their nest at Place-des-Arts’ Espace culturel Georges-Émile Lapalme. Cellist Noémie Raymond-Friset, accompanied by pianist Zhenn-Li Cohen, introduced the first part of this hour-long concert prefiguring Rachmaninov’s Sonata for Cello and Piano. To open the concert, the two musicians performed Saint-Saëns’s Le Cygne with languorous, energetic and ethereal energy. With similar melodic lines and harmony, albeit more dramatic, they followed with Villa-Lobos’s Le Cygne noir, before concluding the first part of the concert with Pablo Casals’s Le chant des oiseaux, an arrangement of a Catalan folk song: a nostalgic lullaby. The pièce de résistance of the performance, Rachmaninov’s Sonata, contemporary with his famous piano concerto, was composed, as presented by Noémie Raymond-Friset, in the wake of a depression following the disastrous reception his first symphony had received. Sadness, anger, joy – all these raw emotions were put into the score by the composer, and were aptly translated by the duo of musicians through a rigorous, supple touch on the piano and expressive, energetic lines on the cello. We must salute Noémie Raymond-Fiset’s concentration in a performance setting less formal than that of concert halls, where the open aspect of the stage offers a slight distraction from the surrounding noise. At times, the setting made it difficult to appreciate the character of the piece, and we felt that the performers had to adjust the volume a few times. These minor details aside, the fine performance by Noémie Raymond-Friset and Zhenn-Li Cohen caught the eyes and ears of a hundred passers-by.