[Document média: P_0885]
Photo

Poster created by Frédéric Back for presenting the 1954 season.

Credit: Frédéric Back, 1957

The Concert Hour

Weekly or biweekly music program
Broadcast from 1954 to 1966 by Radio-Canada and occasionally CBC
Average running time: 1 hour
Announcer: Henri Bergeron
Producers: Pierre Mercure, Gabriel Charpentier, Noël Gauvin, Françoys Bernier, Jean-Yves Landry, Pierre Morin, Guy Parent, etc.
Set designers: Claude Jasmin, Robert Prévost, Jean-Claude Rinfret, etc.
Costume designers: Solange Legendre, Richard Lorain, Claudette Picard, André Vaillancourt, etc.
Graphic artist: Frédéric Back

Synopsis

Operas, operettas, symphonies, concertos, ballets, etc. In the course of 207 programs over 13 seasons, L'Heure du concert presented some 300 musical or choreographical works, either in their entirety or as excerpts. Broadcast live until the introduction of pre-recording on videotape, these programs were produced by Pierre Mercure and Gabriel Charpentier, both multidisciplinary artists and composers, the pianist and conductor Françoys Bernier, and a number of other highly talented people.

A pioneering program

While helping to build the reputation of the Radio-Canada television network, L'Heure du concert gave the Canadian public a chance to discover rarely produced masterpieces from the classical music repertoire. It also served as a springboard for young artists of the likes of opera directors Paul Buissonneau and Irving Guttman, choreographers Ludmilla Chiriaeff, Françoise Riopelle and Jeanne Renaud, musicians Glenn Gould and Jon Vickers, and conductors Roland Leduc, Alexander Brott and Wilfrid Pelletier. Almost 14,000 artists contributed to these music programs, many of which were illustrated in various ways by Frédéric Back.

Comments

In these early years of television, when everything had to be invented from scratch, Frédéric Back created ingenious live animation for the sequences he illustrated. When L'Heure du concert presented excerpts from a work, announcer Henri Bergeron would introduce them and provide some context by describing the preceding scenes, depicted in a series of drawings done by Frédéric Back. Sometimes Back would illustrate Bergeron's introduction, but more often he would devise various ways to enliven the programs by illustrating the score or the lyrics. With a rigour that became legendary, he would systematically research his subjects in order to provide audiences with the most authentic possible reflection of the places and periods evoked in each work. He usually had only a week to complete his creations, which he would fine-tune during rehearsals on the day leading up to the evening's concert.

A one-man band

Frédéric Back used whatever media he could to vary the style of his illustrations and make them more dynamic. As can be seen in Prince Igor, he would design scenery with amazing perspectives that would allow a stationary camera to both pan over it and focus in on certain details. In The Four Seasons, shots of the dancers were superimposed over his hand-drawn sets, which he animated by means of movable parts. For Scaramouche, he developed the technique of paper cut-outs and 2-D puppets cut out of sheet metal, animated live in perfect time to the music in a sequence lasting over eight minutes. For Fête et parade, the inspiration for his acclaimed animated short Taratata, he invented a system of simple visual effects that created the illusion of movement for his hand-drawn characters.