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When Bernard Labadie arrived in December 2015 for his last engagement with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, he was making just his second public appearance anywhere since putting his career on hold for 18 months.
The then 52-year-old French-Canadian maestro was not just fortunate to be back on the podium, but he was also lucky to alive after a debilitating battle with cancer. “Almost against all odds, it did work out,” he said at the time.
A little more than seven years later, Labadie will return to the CSO for a set of performances on March 30 and April 1 and 4, with a March 31 concert at Wheaton College. Though his health continues to be good over all, he is still dealing with what he calls “collateral damage” from the illness, such as a past and upcoming hip replacement. “These are all late gifts from cancer, all related to the medication that I took,” he said. “It never leaves you completely, but the vision, the spirit remains the same — that I’m still alive and still able to work and enjoy the things that I like to enjoy. So I feel every bit as blessed as the last time we spoke about it.”
Labadie will celebrate his 60th birthday during his stay in Chicago, the day before his first rehearsal. “I will be in Chicago already,” he said. “I will have arrived from Scotland two days before.”
For that prior engagement, he is set to lead the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and Chorus in a program titled Handel: Music for the Royals, which, coincidentally, is taking place just a few months before the coronation of Great Britain’s latest king, Charles III. (Labadie is repeating the line-up a bit later with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s and again in Canada.) “We will look like the biggest opportunists on earth,” he said, “but these programs were planned three years ago. It’s a complete fluke.”
Although Labadie’s schedule is not yet as full as it was before the COVID-19 pandemic, he remains busy. In March 2022, the Orchestra of St. Luke’s extended his original four-year contract as principal conductor through 2024-25, when he will oversee the celebration of the respected New York orchestra’s 50th anniversary. He also leads two programs each season with La Chapelle de Québec, a choir that he founded in 1985 in Québec City, where he has lived all his life. In 2022-2023, he fills out his activities with guest-conducting dates with groups like the Cleveland Orchestra, Handel & Haydn Society, Montreal Symphony, Berlin Radio Symphony and Orchestre National de Lyon.
For his return to the CSO, the early-music specialist will lead the kind of program for which he is best known: late Baroque and Classical-era works from the 18th century by Boccherini, Vivaldi and Mozart. The two middle selections on the program, featuring Spanish guitarist Pablo Sáinz-Villegas as soloist, were already set when he was engaged: Vivaldi’s Guitar Concerto in D Major, RV 93 (originally written for lute), and Boccherini’s Fandango from the Guitar Quintet No. 4 in D Major.
The latter will be performed for the first time by the CSO. The challenge, Labadie said, was to find an orchestral piece that would fit on the first part of the program, and he chose Boccherini’s Symphony No. 26 in C Minor.
“It’s actually a kind of sturm und drang-style symphony by Boccherini — very dramatic,” Labadie said. “Which, of course, connects with the fandango, but it was also kind of a pre-vision of the Mozart symphony that we are performing on the second half.”
That concluding work is the Symphony No. 40 in G Minor, K. 550, which the conductor said has the same sturm und drang influence in a later guise. “For me, the program is really held together by these two symphonic pieces in minor keys with highly dramatic content,” he said. And they pair well with what he called the “two little guitar gems.”
Even though the CSO performs on modern instruments, Labadie will nonetheless bring a historically informed sensibility to his approach to these works. “That’s what I do for a living,” he said. “Orchestras that invite me are willing to go down that the path. Otherwise, there’s no point to have me and have the Chicago Symphony play this repertoire the way they would have played it under [former music director Georg] Solti 40 years ago. So, yeah, I will definitely bring my own signature. At the same time, the purpose has never been and never will be to try to turn the Chicago Symphony into a period-instrument band.”
For Labadie, a historically informed tack primarily centers on texture and articulation. “Textures will be more transparent,” he said. “It’s not about heft, it’s not about weight. It’s more about having a sound that allows us to hear through the music, to hear through transparency how the music is built and look at it from a different angle. So the sound cannot be thick. It has to be pliable.”
Such transparency then allows the conductor to focus on articulation, which he called “the absolute essence of this music.” The idea is not to re-create the past but to use every bit of knowledge that is available about how this music was written, performed and received to shape a fresh way of performing it for contemporary audiences.
“We have a very limited time to do it,” Labadie said of applying his approach with the CSO. “I know how flexible they are and how far they can go. And by and large, they’re willing to do it, and, of course, with an orchestra like that, the sky’s the limit, because there’s not really any technical limitations. And every time I’ve worked with them, I’ve been surprised and delighted by how far they are able to go in terms of changing their way of playing.”
