PRESS

"[At this year's Montreal Chamber Music Festival], the most intriguing – and successful [program] – was Van Gogh's Ear, a title suggesting both the best-known fact about the artist's tragic life (his self-disfigurement) and his relatively little-known proclivity for music. The theatrical presentation with sets, lights, costumes and musicians was anchored by the superb Quebec actor Simon Fortin in the role of Van Gogh. Fortin's script was created by Eve Wolf, co-artistic director of the New York-based Ensemble for the Romantic Century. Wolf based her text on the letters from Vincent to his brother Theo – heart-rending accounts of the painter's successes and failures (mostly the latter), hope and despair, exaltation and depression. Of particular interest was the importance of sound in Van Gogh's visual world: the concept of his brush going between his fingers 'as a bow would on a violin', and his attempts at piano lessons for the purpose of learning about tone color. Fortin, alternating his delivery between eloquently articulated English and French, stole the show with his engaging, at times mesmerizing, performance. Interspersed with Fortin's lines were songs and movements drawn from chamber works by French contemporaries of the artist (Debussy, Fauré, Chausson, Franck)... Wolf's text closed with a memorable line: 'We feel that this thing [art] is greater than we are, and that its life is of longer duration than ours.' (Strad Magazine, September 2006).