CMA Member Spotlight: A Montreal Milestone

This June, our neighbors to our north celebrate a major milestone: The 30th anniversary season of the Montreal Chamber Music Festival. Founded by cellist and conductor Denis Brott in 1995, the summer series has become one of the most renowned festivals across the North American musical landscape, presenting up-and-coming artists alongside established stars of the field. In time for the Festival’s 2025 kickoff June 7, Chamber Music America spoke with the humble and humorous Brott about his Festival’s beginnings and what keeps the magic going.

Congratulations on 30 years! Tell me about this milestone season and what you’re looking forward to especially.

It’ll be a true celebration. It’s hard to believe we actually got to this point—despite all kinds of challenges. As anyone who’s in the chamber music business knows, because of the form’s intimacy, it never pays for itself! It’s impossible because halls have to be small. So I’m pretty proud of the fact that we made it this far.

How did the Festival get its start?

I was in the Orford String Quartet in Toronto for a long time. And in 1989, I was offered a position at the conservatory here in Montreal—I taught cello and chamber music and conducted the string orchestra. But I quickly became lonely and wanted my friends around. I noticed Montreal didn’t have a chamber music festival, and I’d sort of cut my teeth on chamber music festivals. My love of chamber music had started at Marlboro Festival, when I was perhaps 20 years old with Rudolf Serkin, Felix Galimir, Izzy Cohen, and Alexander Schneider and his brother Mischa—all those guys!—and I was bitten by the bug. So the idea of passing that on, creating an environment with both a mentor-apprentice relationship, was very dear to my heart. I wanted established artists playing with the best of the young, up-and-comers. And in 1985, I seized an opportunity to build it.

At the time, the Mayor of Montreal was one of the few political figures who really loved the arts. He was head of the Botanical Gardens before his job as mayor, so he was sensitive to beauty. I made a deal with the mayor: if he helped me get started and supported the festival for three years, I’d return with my hat in hand. And that’s exactly what happened. With his help and support, we were able to wean ourselves off his support, and the festival has been going ever since.

You mentioned lots of celebrations this year.

Yes—every concert is a celebration of some kind or another – under the guise of our 30^th anniversary of course. But there’s also the 40th anniversary of the Musical Instrument Bank. There’s also a celebration of indigenous peoples, their music and artists. There are commissions—two world premieres! It’s all on our website, festivalmontreal.org.

I want to dig into your knack of fundraising. After your first three years, you weaned off mayoral support. What have you learned in the following 27 years?

That’s a loaded question! Because we don’t have enough money to hire a professional fundraiser, I’ve taken on that role. I’ve learned, however, that one thing goes a long way in raising money: passion. I find that executives tend to understand that chamber music is a team effort—the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. People get excited about the intimacy of the experience, the personalization of the experience, which is much different than an orchestra or opera. Of course, we’re always trying to find new ways to fund the festival. Before COVID, we had an annual gala that would net $60,000 or more. But since COVID, we haven’t held a gala. They seem to have gone out of fashion. Instead, we’ve moved to doing online auctions. And as a result of my own very severe experience with COVID, I started health and wellness concerts in hospitals and healthcare facilities. I wanted to give back to the doctors who saved my life, and the one way I could give back was to offer them music. So the festival developed a program in which we play in Montreal’s wonderful hospitals for patients and physicians, and concerts are even broadcast into rooms. It’s become very meaningful for me, and as a plus, we’ve been able to raise money for the program. I’ve learned it’s easier to raise money for things that are related to health than it is to raise money for music and the arts—similarly to raising money for education. Both are close to my heart, and I can speak about the initiatives with sincerity and love. There’s not a lot of magic to fundraising—it’s about passion, belief, and an indefatigable energy that keeps you going. What I have learned definitively is that it’s a 12-month job to make a 2-week festival.

What’s next?

I’m partnering with other festival presenters. For instance, Barry Shiffman of the Rockport Festival and I are collaborating to bring in an international ensemble. This idea of block-booking is the future of our industry. You get a few presenters to come on board with similar programming or artists. And in this non-competitive way, everybody wins. It helps cut costs by sharing overhead, and more is possible.

We also have an archive of 29 years of performances—and we’re putting them all into dedicated channels online. So there’ll be a Baroque channel, a festival classical channel, a romantic channel, contemporary channel—even a festival jazz channel. Jazz is an integral part of our festival. This presence on an international stage by way of the world wide web is a wonderful accomplishment for me. We can look back over these many years—and some of the performances are really…dare I say it… historic! So many amazing performers, even some who are no longer with us. We had some of the last performances of the Guarneri Quartet, and the last Canadian performance by the Emerson String Quartet. We’re talking about historic events, at least for me and chamber music lovers.

Montreal is quite a summer destination. Are you tracking tourists’ attendance?

Currently our tourist attendance is about 15%, which I think is good. That means hotel rooms for Montreal. This year we are able to avoid the Formula One car race, which takes place in capitals around the world—including Montreal. Unfortunately last year, this coincided with the festival, which meant absolute pandemonium. We can’t always fight it, but this year we got lucky. And sometimes, major tourist events like that can be helpful, when people who come here for one thing end up coming to a concert. June is a fantastic time to visit Montreal, and bringing in international artists who have followings elsewhere is a way to capitalize on tourist engagement, too.

What do you want audiences to walk away with after a concert?

The slogan of the festival is “Intimate experiences, unforgettable music.” That’s what we try to do. There’s no question that great music, no matter how often we hear it, remains unforgettable. I also like to let the audience in, in a limited way, on why we chose the programming. What’s special about the piece of music, and what should the audience listen for? When people leave, I want them to think “Wow, I’m glad I came tonight. It was worth getting off my couch.”

The Montreal Chamber Music Festival runs June 7 to 22. Visit festivalmontreal.org to learn more about the season and get tickets.