Soprano Sonya Yoncheva, Montreal Symphony Orchestra, conductor Rafael Payare - Music box, March 18th, 2024

A disc released by the Dutch label Pentatone on March 15th, 2024: works by Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler, recorded by the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, conducted by its new music director, Rafael Payare. The guest star of these recordings is Bulgarian soprano Sonya Yoncheva, the soloist of Mahler's five songs on verses by Friedrich Ruckert.

Rafael Payare - here's a name that has appeared sporadically in Radio România Muzical broadcasts, especially in productions coming through the European Broadcasting Union. The Venezuelan Rafael Payare is now 44 and a product of El Sistema - the famous music education system organized by Jose Antonio Abreu, with whom Payare also began studying conducting at the age of 24. He previously studied the French horn, and is also a horn player in Venezuela's Simon Bolivar Orchestra. Rafael Payare has assisted some big names: Claudio Abbado, Daniel Barenboim, Lorin Maazel. He began his international career with the Ulster Orchestra in 2013; in 2018 he first conducted the San Diego and Montreal Orchestras, where he currently has permanent contracts.

Rafael Payare's collaboration with Pentatone began in 2023 with the publication of Gustav Mahler's Fifth Symphony. A year later, here is a new album including music by Mahler, but also by Richard Strauss, this symphonic poem with such an illustrative title, A Hero's Life, where we see the qualities of this Venezuelan conductor expressed very clearly: exuberance, freshness, clarity in construction, the power to convey passion to those who listen to him. These are qualities common to conductors who come from Venezuela, perhaps with a stronger intellectual nuance in the case of Rafael Payare and his vision of Richard Strauss's symphonic poem A Hero's Life.

The Pentatone label presents the pairing of the two works on this surprising album: A Hero's Life, along with Gustav Mahler's melancholy 5 songs on verses by Friedrich Ruckert. But I don't find it surprising, rather welcome, to have two works written in practically the same period - A Hero's Life in 1898 and the songs in 1901. In addition, let us remember that the previous album recorded by Rafael Payare included Gustav Mahler's Fifth Symphony - and the songs on verses by Friedrich Ruckert are intimately linked to this symphony written in exactly the same period of 1901 -1902. We find links not only at the ideational level, but also thematically musically, as you will discover on this disc.

Le fin de siècle in music that sure, expresses other feelings, however, not so distant, in fact. Strauss's hero, to be sure, struggles, shines, but ultimately chooses, philosophically, to withdraw from the world; Mahler paints the meditative man, who, too, speaks in the verses of the fifth song of being lost to the world.

And it is precisely this fifth and final song of this Mahler cycle that I also found the best realized musically. For Sonya Yoncheva, a redoubtable opera singer of our times, it is a debut in Mahler's scores; better German pronunciation would perhaps have been desirable, as would a mastery of the vocality implied by these songs. Only in this, his fifth, does he achieve that ineffability demanded by the score as a whole, in all its aesthetic and technical achievement.