Two Orchestras, One Symphony
Jacques Hétu (1938-2010)
Symphony No 5, Op 81 (2009)
Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, National Arts Centre Orchestra, Orchestre Symphonique de Québec/Alexander Shelley
rec. 2024, Southam Hall, National Arts Centre, Ottawa, Canada
Analekta AN 2 8890 [46]

Jacques Hétu, an important figure on the Canadian musical scene, composed in almost every genre, but chamber works and symphonic music are the backbone of his varied output. The Symphony No 5, Op 81 was his last major work; in 2009, he also wrote the Intermezzo. Op 80 for guitar and the Trio for Oboe, Violin and Piano, Op 82. He did not live to hear the Symphony performed, but he had written programme notes, probably meant to accompany the premiere in March 2010. I found the notes, included in the booklet, of great use in preparing this review.

The Symphony is scored for chorus – used in the long fourth movement – and orchestra. The text for the finale is Paul Eluard’s poem Liberté written during the WWII; Eluard was active in the Resistance. The typed text, signed pseudonymously, was circulated in France. Later, RAF planes dropped it all over France. (Liberté also forms the final movement of Francis Poulenc’s large-scale cantata for double choir Figure humaine completed in 1943; it was first performed in English by the BBC at the liberation in 1945, and soon afterwards in French in Brussels in 1946 and in Paris in 1947).

Hétu’s Fifth Symphony is in four movements, more or less along the traditional pattern. The overall narration roughly adheres to the chronology of the time when the poem was written: a nondescript Prologue which depicts the carefree atmosphere of more peaceful times, L’invasion, L’occupation and the choral finale Liberté.

The prologue begins in the depths of the orchestra. Its main theme slowly unfolds into a more animated and varied central section. The music ebbs and flows, and eventually disappears in the distance. The second movement L’invasion, the symphony’s scherzo, erupts brutally with music full of anger that is briefly becalmed before an abridged restatement of the opening. L’occupation is a sort of funeral march which, as Hétu writes, “proceeds slowly, in a supplicating manner”, culminating in a forceful tutti. “Unison strings then lead to an expressive motif that will become the subject of a series of developments while accelerating.” A short-lived calmer episode in the winds precedes a shortened restatement of the funeral march before a last cry of anguish yields to defiant silence.

The choral finale Liberté is the longest, most developed movement. Eluard’s poem in the Symphony is elaborated as a long litany in nineteen of its twenty-one stanzas; each ends with the verse J’écris ton nom [I write your name]. Hétu structured the poem into three main sections, and each stanza is treated as a short dramatic picture. That allows for some pleasantly varied musical settings. The initial stanzas are reminiscences of childhood (“On my schoolboy’s copybooks / On my desk and on the trees / On sand and snow / I write your name”). The second section begins with evocation of night (“On the lamp that kindles / On the lamp that dies / On my houses joined / I write your name”), tenderness, sensuality and hope that yields to despair. The final section begins assertively with renewed hope (“On health returned / On vanished risk / On hope without remembrance / I write your name”). The last stanza reaches the goal (“And by the power of a word / I begin my life again / I was born to know you / To name you / Liberty”). The music asserts itself and “surges forth like a victory march”, and it is hard-won.

Jacques Hétu’s Symphony No 5 is a big-boned, large-scale, ambitious, generous work, urgently pleading for a better world. This mighty, gripping piece of music cries out to be heard, especially in our troubled times. The performance, carefully and lovingly prepared, gets a committed and poignant reading by all concerned. This definitely is a great piece that cannot be ignored.

Hubert Culot

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