Vancouver Symphony Orchestra announces Riopelle Symphonique as part of centenary celebrations of the late great Canadian artist Jean Paul Riopelle
Presented by The Audain Foundation, the performance is a musical and visual odyssey through the artist’s masterpieces
Jean Paul Riopelle (1923-2002), Blizzard, 1954, oil on canvas, 95.5 x 125 cm. Private collection. ©Estate of Jean Paul Riopelle/SOCAN (2021).
The Audain Foundation presents Riopelle Symphonique in partnership with Vancouver Symphony Orchestra on April 20, 2024 at 8 pm at the Orpheum
THE VANCOUVER SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA, in partnership with GSI Musique and the Jean Paul Riopelle Foundation, has just announced it is joining the unprecedented celebrations marking the 100th anniversary of Jean Paul Riopelle with Riopelle Symphonique presented by The Audain Foundation.
Featuring original music by legendary singer-songwriter Serge Fiori and composer Blair Thomson, the concert brings together the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra and Vancouver Bach Choir, conducted by Adam Johnson on-stage at the Orpheum.
The concert will feature the works of Riopelle from key periods of his life, from his early days of experimentation in Montreal, his rise to fame in post-war France, and his passion for the Canadian North to the final chapter of his life and his return to his beloved Isle-aux-Grues on the St. Lawrence River.
The visual component will be accompanied by the VSO’s live performance of the original five-movement score and singing by the VBC. It takes place on April 20, 2024.
Riopelle (1923 to 2002) is one of Canada’s most prolific and revered artists. Born in Montreal, he studied at the École du Meuble de Montréal. There, he met painter Paul-Émile Borduas and the Automatistes. He was one of 16 artists who signed the 1948 Refus global (Total Refusal), an anti-establishment and anti-religious manifesto. Over the ensuing two decades, he lived and worked in France. He fell in with the Surrealists, meeting people like André Breton and Georges Duthuit, who were collectors of Indigenous North American art, including Inuit and First Nations masks. In the 1970s, back in Canada, Riopelle was drawn to the North, going on numerous hunting and fishing trips to places such as Nunavik and Nunavut with his friend Champlain Charest, a Quebec restaurateur and wine collector who owned a seaplane.
His work can be found in public collections around the world, including the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, Centre Pompidou in Paris, and Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. In 2019, the Jean Paul Riopelle Foundation was launched to preserve, promote, and disseminate his work and celebrate his legacy. (Michael Audain, who co-founded the Audain Art Museum with his wife, Yoshiko Karasawa, is the foundation’s visionary and one of its six founding members. The organization itself is the realization of Riopelle’s dream of communicating his world views and his passion for art; he also wanted to inspire the next generation of visual artists by giving them a space to explore, experiment, and collaborate.)
The local show follows a series of performances in Montreal and Quebec City.
“Riopelle Symphonique marks the VSO’s first truly immersive concert experience, elevating the masterpieces of Jean Paul Riopelle with orchestral music inspired directly by his visionary work,” Angela Elster, president and CEO of the VSO and VSO School of Music, says in a release. “This one-night only experience will provide Vancouver art lovers the rare opportunity to appreciate the outstanding breadth and detail of Riopelle’s body of work, augmented by the artistry of the VSO. We are grateful to The Audain Foundation for demonstrating creative leadership as Presenting Partner of the B.C. premiere of this groundbreaking collaboration.”
Basil Zarov (1905 (?)-1998), Jean Paul Riopelle outside of the Studio at Sainte-Marguerite-du-Lac-Masson with “La Défaite” in the distance, about 1976, black and white photograph. Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa. ©Estate of Jean Paul Riopelle/SOCAN (2021). Photo©Library and Archives Canada. Reproduced with the permission of Library and Archives Canada/Basil Zarov fonds/e011205146.
Last year, Whistler’s Audain Art Museum was the first gallery in the world to host the ambitious travelling exhibition of Riopelle outside of its birthplace at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
“The Riopelle centenary celebrations are in the very image of the artist himself: multidisciplinary, bold, and rich in experiences,” Audain, cofounder and chair of the Jean Paul Riopelle Foundation and chair of the Audain Foundation, says in a release. “We are delighted to partner with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra to present a musical journey highlighting the artist’s incredible life and career. A formidable legacy of the centenary, the concert will give audiences a chance to immerse themselves in Riopelle’s world and witness the great master’s power and energy.”
For Nicolas Lemieux, the show’s original creator and artistic director and CEO of GSI Musique, the musical homage to Riopelle was the “opportunity of a lifetime”. “But it is also a challenge whose full magnitude I had not quite grasped when I first began imagining Riopelle Symphonique five years ago,” Lemieux says. “To bring this mammoth undertaking to life, I was fortunate to be able to call upon the immense talents of Serge Fiori, the off-the-charts creativity of Blair Thomson and the extraordinary finesse of conductor Adam Johnson. Together, these artists succeeded in translating Riopelle’s sensitivity into music by immersing themselves fully in his work and approach.”
Composer and arranger Blair Thomson says he felt as if he was “transcribing a dream where, like a spirit, I inhabited both Riopelle’s inimitable aesthetic and fragments of Fiori’s music,” Thomson says. “For me, the musicians and singers are in this sense sculptors, using their bodies to bring to life the music that is my expression of the dream.”
Thomson says he sees the audience as an integral part of the creation of each movement. “It’s my hope that those who experience Riopelle Symphonique will feel the same sense of wonder, awe, uncertainty and purity of expression as I do when engaging with Riopelle’s work—that their reaction to the music will be deep and intuitive, much like mine when I see Riopelle’s paintings up close,” he says.
The show is 75 minutes long with no intermission.
The concert series follows the release of the Riopelle Symphonique album. It features a performance by the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal under conductor Adam Johnson, with vocals provided by the Chœurs des Petits Chanteurs de Laval under Philippe Ostiguy and the Temps Fort choir under Pascal Germain-Berardi. All tracks were recorded at the Maison symphonique in Montréal by Charles-Émile Beaudin and Richard Winquest. Riopelle Symphonique was produced by Thomson, Fiori, Charles-Émile Beaudin, and François Pilon. (The album is available at www.riopellesymphonique.com as a digital album, HD digital album, signature CD box set, and deluxe vinyl box set.)
More information is at vancouversymphony.com.
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