SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Ravel, Mozart, Lindberg: Imogen Cooper (piano), RSNO Chorus, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Stéphane Denève (conductor), Usher Hall, Edinburgh, 19.11.2010 (SRT)

Ravel: Le Tombeau de Couperin

Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 20

Lindberg: Graffiti

 

I’ve said before that Ravel’s Tombeau de Couperin works best in its original piano version. I stick to that, but tonight’s RSNO performance went further than most others to helping change my mind. Ravel’s charming pastiche of baroque dance works because of its inherent lightness of touch, but Ravel also wrote it as a memorial to the friends he lost in the Great War so there also has to be a hint of darkness lying beneath. Happily we got both tonight. The Prelude was gossamer-light as the melody bounced around the orchestra, but the central section of the Menuet carried playing of remarkable intensity from the strings, suggesting some unresolved tragedy below the surface. With such graceful orchestral playing and the chamber orchestra textures the suite even sounded more convincingly baroque than its piano original, helped by conducting that was undeniably French in style. Only the finale felt a bit heavy at times due to the pacing of its outer sections.

 

The reduced forces remained for Mozart’s D minor concerto, but they were joined by Imogen Cooper, riding high after her remarkable sequence of Schubert recordings from the Wigmore Hall. There is an extraordinary poetry to Cooper’s playing, even in the countless little ornamentations that enliven her interpretation, always furthering the musical argument and never for mere show. She seemed entirely at one with the orchestra, especially in the creeping, sinister opening of the first movement and the piano’s swirling comment on it. Her playing hints at depths of feeling that go way beyond the notes, nowhere more so than in the gorgeous slow movement, at once tender and regretful in the outer sections but dark and stormy in the central section. Denève also stirred the orchestra into playing of real violence at the opening of the finale, which then turned all at once into a broad smile for the final pages.

 

Ten out of 10 continued tonight with what was, for me, the most successful work in the series so far. Magnus Linderg’s Graffiti is a large scale choral work setting fragments of Latin graffiti found in the ruins of Pompeii. Some are very mundane (announcements of upcoming entertainments), some are suggestive (“Lucky men, farewell!”) and some are downright obscene! The connection between the words and the music is fairly tenuous, though: Lindberg uses them as a jumping off point for a comment on the sheer variety of life, both ancient and modern. The writing, for a large orchestra used sparingly, is broadly tonal and there are plenty of motives that the ear picks up in the course of the work. The choral texture, too, is fairly clear despite the large scale. The dark opening, for example, with colourful mumblings from the contra-bassoon, builds in a crescendo, becoming higher and louder, to prepare for the chorus’ first entry, an incongruously portentous plea for the return of a stolen pot! There are virtuosic instrumental interludes and, close to the end, a long-held unison D-natural that may well stand for Vesuvius itself as after it comes the most dissonant writing in the work, concerning death and the impermanence of human life. Lindberg’s inspirations include Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, and I could hear a lot of Les Noces in it too. It’s good to think that the large-scale choral cantata still has life in it, but fundamentally Graffiti is a well structured, original idea with lots of good tunes and some powerful effects. It’s already a work I would like to hear again.

Simon Thompson