Paris orchestras make “La Rentrée”:
September
2005 (FC)
The return from French
vacation, called La Rentrée has all the major Paris orchestras presenting
their season opening concerts, one after the other. It is an
exhilarating and tiring week for music fans and a test of sitzfleisch for critics as the orchestras,
packed together cheek to jowl, strain for attention from Tuesday
through Thursday, September 13 -15.
The good news straight
away is that the major venue for three of the four orchestras,
the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, has had an acoustic make-over.
Over the summer, they took up the carpet, installed parquet
floors and made other adjustments, increasing the reverberation
time and warming the notoriously dry acoustics.
First orchestra off
the block is American conductor John Nelson’s Ensemble Orchestra
de Paris, whose work at the Théâtre
des Champs-Elysées on Tuesday was a firm indication of how well
this less-than-full size orchestra has profited from his tenure.
A pleasing program included a world premier of the Symphony
No. 2 .by the young French composer, Régis
Campo, a Mozart concerto and Richard Strauss’ witty, engaging
music for the Moliere play, Le Bourgeois
Gentilhomme.
The Campo work, pleasant
and rhythmically apt, is not likely, however, to become part
of the standard repertory. The memory that lingers is the pale,
stern profile of that old lion of the piano, Aldo Ciccolini.
Playing the Concerto No. 23, his immobile face could have been
carved on Mount Rushmore, the only sign of life being an almost
imperceptible smile when his fingers dealt with the occasional
Mozartian whimsy. His shaping of a
musical phrase unfolds with an inevitable perfection of a grand
artist.
Would that were true
of the next night’s star. Lang Lang,
still in his 20s, banged his way through the Piano Concerto
No. 2 of Rachmaninov, with the Orchestre
de Paris at the Theater Mogador, making it more of a tawdry
showpiece than it need be. Why musical director Christoph Eschenbach decided to
include this work on the same program with the imposing Mahler
5th Symphony is anyone’s
guess.
His familiar way of
conducting - razor sharp and relentlessly bright - might not
please some Mahlerites who prefer old-style lingering and plenty of heavy
breathing. But the orchestra can make a mighty sound when asked
and, unlike young Lang Lang, Eschenbach
has a clear idea of what he wants to achieve. Grumpy critics
may quibble over a few imprecise attacks and lack of detail
in some ensemble passages, but the force of Eschenbach’s
baton sweeps all before and leaves audiences cheering at the
end.
There was no imprecision
in evidence back at the Théâtre des
Champs-Elysées on Thursday. Kurt Masur,
now in his fifth year as music director of the Orchestre
National de France, has honed his orchestra into a high-performance
engine, perhaps the best in France. Another Fifth Symphony,
this time Prokofiev’s, is the bread and butter of Masur’s
repertory and was played with glorious assurance and finesse.
The likely reason Debussy’s
La Mer
and Ravel’s Bolero
were on the program is due to an imminent European tour by this
band. Many countries are under the misapprehension that French
orchestras frequently program and play French music, clearly
not the case. Fearing definitive performances might be anticipated,
some of the orchestra’s musicians gamely went in search of some
of the original brass instruments used by orchestras in Debussy
and Ravel’s time, adding interesting
new sounds in these familiar works. Whether Kurt Masur
is the right conductor to deliver a “French” reading of these
two works is open to discussion but the works were performed
with uncommon attention to detail and a minimum of perfumed
languor. The Bolero,
a worn cliché for many, was here a masterpiece of controlled
intensity with a blazing finale.
Last Friday night was
still another Fifth Symphony (Beethoven) and another Mozart
23rd by the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio
France under their music director, Myung-Wung
Chung. Your surfeited reporter, however, did not budge for that.
Maybe another time.
Frank Cadenhead
