Prom 60: Henze, Shostakovitch  Orchestre National de France/ Kurt Masur, Royal Albert Hall 29.08. 2006 (LF)

 

 

 

 

 

I have not been reviewing this year’s season of BBC Proms from the Royal Albert Hall but I am prompted to offer my impressions of the Orchestre National de France’s cherishable performance of Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony after reading somewhat dismissive comments by other commentators, for it struck me as something special. The BBC repeat broadcast of this concert will be a little later than has been customary throughout the earlier part of the series, so you can catch it yourself on air in a couple of weeks if my impressions intrigue you.

 

I had not known quite what to expect from France’s first orchestra directed by a leading exponent of the German tradition. Yet in the event it was a remarkable evening, the orchestra playing with memorable eloquence. It was a strangely planned programme, whose curious imbalance was presumably responsible for the goodly proportion of empty stalls seats that can be seen on the accompanying photograph, though the Arena Promenade was packed. The first half barely ran 25 minutes and consisted of the London premiere of Five Messages for the Queen of Sheba, the suite from Hans Werner Henze’s latest opera The Hoopoo. Here the orchestra found much in the delicate textures and unusual sonorities, the specially imported saxophones being much in evidence, though the more aggressive and rhythmic passages I need to hear again over the air to focus.

 

The second part consisted of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony and for me it was in this that the orchestra came into their own, for the performance of this notoriously bombastic work was remarkable for the delicacy of much of the detail, the clean focus of writing which in other performances becomes merely grandiloquent and hectoring. The eloquent tone of the massed strings in their long cantilenas, even more the burnished violas when they responded, the clean crisp playing of the brass and the tremendous flute solo by the orchestra’s first flute Philippe Pierlot: this was distinguished playing.

 

This was not the agonised interpretation of a Russian orchestra, nor the slam-bam of some others, and so I suppose in the last analysis it lacked the last ounce of decibels.  Shostakovich’s crusty old dinosaur was given a new and unexpectedly elegant surface by a remarkably stylish orchestra under inspired direction: a small revelation. 

Lewis Foreman        

 

See Colin Clarke's review here