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Laval, November 14, 2022 – The spouse and kids of Gilbert Patenaude remorse to announce his demise on November 13, 2022 on the Cité de la santé de Laval.
Born in Montreal within the Rosemont district, he grew up in Outremont the place he realized music as a soprano with the Clerics of Saint-Viateur, then piano and organ on the Vincent-d’Indy Faculty. He then pursued most of his musical coaching on the Conservatoire de musique du Québec in Montreal. On the advice of Raymond Daveluy, he turned the primary lay musical director of the Petits Chanteurs du Mont-Royal, a place that he held for 38 years, and which was directly pedagogical, musical and liturgical.
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Gilbert Patenaude additionally taught on the Cégep de Saint-Laurent and on the Vincent-d’Indy faculty, contributing to the coaching of 1000’s of younger musicians. He directed the Chœur Vaudreuil-Soulanges, the Théâtre d’artwork lyrique de Laval and was the founding conductor of a number of ensembles together with the Orchestre symphonique de Laval, Les Chantres musiciens, Les Voix d’Elles, Les Filles de l’Île and the Chœur Enharmonique.
He leaves an necessary physique of labor together with operas, orchestral music, chamber music, a number of vocal works and 1000’s of harmonizations, preparations and orchestrations.
He obtained the 2018 Tribute Award from the Conseil québécois de la musique and a Medal of the Nationwide Meeting in 2022.
Gilbert Patenaude was the topic of two articles within the print version of La Scena Musicale. Under are the textual content as a tribute.
Gilbert Patenaude, Man of Music – Opus Tribute Award
by Dominic Trudel – revealed in La Scena Musicale on March 28, 2019
Final February, the Opus Tribute Award from the Conseil québécois de la musique (CQM) went to Gilbert Patenaude in recognition of an extended profession. He’s recognized for his dedication to choral singing, significantly because the director, for 38 years, of Les Petits Chanteurs du Mont-Royal. It’s with dedication and rigour that he has taken on a demanding pedagogical and musical load that features, along with educating, greater than 80 annual performances, spiritual companies and different occasions. His achievements with younger singers embody no fewer than 23 worldwide excursions and a dozen recordings. He has skilled greater than a thousand boys, addressing an immense repertoire starting from Gregorian to modern music, from the nice polyphonic works of the Renaissance to folksong.
The choir director has additionally achieved a lot with Les Troubadours de Terre des Hommes, the Vaudreuil-Soulanges Choir, Les Voix d’Elles, Les Filles de l’Île et Le Chœur Enharmonique. He nonetheless manages the lads’s choir Les Chantres musiciens, which he based in 1992.
Regardless of having been initiated to music early by the clerics of Saint-Viateur, then on the Vincent-d’Indy Faculty, Gilbert Patenaude was destined for a profession in social work. With out finishing his research in social sciences, he discovered his first job as a music instructor in Matagani, north of Abitibi. When he returned to Montreal three years later, it was to review on the Conservatoire, together with conducting, singing and musical evaluation within the courses of Remus Tzincoca, Pierre Mollet and Gilles Tremblay.
Photograph : Guillaume Morin
Patenaude can also be a composer whose vary of works contains choral music, chamber music, opera, musical tales and songs for voice and piano along with a whole lot of preparations. Searching for a steadiness between prosody and music, the composer tends to transcend pure technical show. As evidenced by his operas Chevalier de Lorimier (1992), Marguerite Bourgeoys: Troyes Ville-Marie (1996) or his adaptation of the Little Prince of Saint-Exupery (2002), his essential supply of inspiration is humanity in historical past. Poetry-loving, he units Émile Nelligan, Alfred Desrochers, Gérald Godin, Roland Giguère, Gaston Miron, Gatien Lapointe and plenty of others to music. His music additionally illustrates many texts by his companion Thérèse Tousignant.
Dedicated to his group, he was additionally the founding conductor of the Laval Symphony Orchestra (1984-1986) and inventive director of the Théâtre d’Artwork Lyrique de Laval (1986-1994).
Pedagogue, choral and orchestra conductor, inventive director, composer, arranger, Patenaude is a musician certainly, completely invested in his artwork. He has transmitted to multiple technology the style and appreciation of music.
Gilbert Patenaude: The Maestro Retires
by Julie Vovan – revealed in La Scena Musicaleon
Gilbert Patenaude
After 38 years as inventive director of the Petits Chanteurs du Mont-Royal, Maestro Gilbert Patenaude is able to retire. What sort of musical and pedagogical legacy is he leaving?
In 1978, Patenaude turned the primary lay musical director of the Petits Chanteurs. Within the 60 years since its founding, the choir’s main mission has been to supply musical accompaniment for the spiritual companies at Saint Joseph’s Oratory. Patenaude’s arrival was a change of tempo for the younger singers. He took on the inventive route and musical coaching, and nonetheless had time to compose his personal items, together with three operas.
Only a few months after he was employed, Maestro Patenaude and the Petits Chanteurs carried out a Christmas live performance with none aside from Luciano Pavarotti. The choir conductor needed to direct the imposing soloist in addition to the choir, all of the whereas coping with the legacies of his predecessors, nonetheless recent within the singers’ recollections. But when the live performance with Pavarotti was an necessary second within the historical past of the Petits Chanteurs, the necessary second for Gilles Patenaude himself was a Petits Chanteurs live performance in Wales. This system included Max Reger’s Mein Odem ist schwach, a piece for 4 blended voices. An viewers member admitted to Patenaude that even the native universities couldn’t carry out the rating, because it was so tough. “I might die tomorrow, figuring out I’ve heard probably the most stunning music,” stated the admiring viewers member.
Patenaude summarizes his philosophy thus: one must be engaged in all the pieces one does, and all the time within the service of others. He needed to ascertain a sure rigour and devotion to his work, a sure ethic and know-how. For instance, it was necessary to ascertain a relaxed ambiance throughout rehearsals in an effort to guarantee a job effectively achieved. The conductor usually started rehearsals by citing this rule. He appears to have succeeded in educating his philosophy: with a smile, he remembers that many of the messages that he receives from former college students are from those that had been probably the most boisterous. These alumni now admit that the maestro was proper, they usually’re grateful to have picked up his philosophy.
“It’s not simple to make a bunch of younger folks perceive the significance of singing in a sacred place just like the Oratory,” says Fr. Claude Grou, rector at Saint Joseph’s Oratory. “With rigour and endurance, Mr. Patenaude has for a few years instilled all of the younger singers with this respect for the sacred.” The Petits Chanteurs are successfully all the time current for Sunday mass. Faith “is the deal of a lifetime,” says Patenaude. He due to this fact averted imposing on college students’ religious growth, even when, for him, his Christian religion is his precedence. The maestro insists moderately that singers “do it for individuals who come to mass.”
Thus, “95% of singers are there for mass and different companies on the Oratory,” states Patenaude, regardless of their sometimes-diverse spiritual beliefs. The singers are certainly diligent. The younger singers not too long ago advised him that certainly one of their favorite performances was The Stations of the Cross, for which the music contains many sacred works. The choir usually performs items taken from the secular repertoire, particularly in style music.
How does the maestro achieve coaching younger singers? The truth that he’s a layperson performs an necessary position: his expertise as a father or mother has helped him to know and direct his college students. The rigorous choice course of throughout auditions is actually useful: the Grasp requires that college students exhibit a certain quantity of self-discipline. However the truth stays that the choirmaster knew set up a extreme and demanding ambiance, with the only real purpose of manufacturing useful music. He admits that when he started, he indulged his humour, however he rapidly realized that it was eroding self-discipline and modified his method. It appears to have been efficient: he remembers that in the course of the entr’acte of 1 live performance, he heard his singers stress-free and speaking about nothing however music amongst themselves. It will likely be understood that Maestro Patendaude knew transmit by osmosis his ardour for music.
For him, one “have to be a musician initially” in an effort to be a creative director. However his precedence is his religion, and his involvement with the Petits Chanteurs and Saint Joseph’s Oratory is not any shock. For him, music is extra necessary than the monetary side or the glory. In 1978, he accepted the place not for the cash or the standing, however as a result of it supplied him the chance to serve others. Fittingly, his three favorite books are, he says, “the Bible, Jean Lafontaine’s Fables, and The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.” All his beliefs may be discovered there, they usually’ve actually influenced his trajectory to turn into choirmaster of the Petits Chanteurs. After his final tour of the American northeast along with his choir, Maestro Patenaude will retire in July. He bequeaths his college students his ardour for music, and particularly his nice power and his values.
Translation: Rebecca Anne Clark
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