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Berlioz, Debussy, Dvořák: Philippe Cassard (piano), BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Thierry Fischer (conductor), Brangwyn Hall, Swansea 6.3.2009 (GPu)

Berlioz, Overture, ‘Les francs-juges’
Debussy, Fantaisie for Piano and Orchestra
Dvořák, Symphony No.8


Of late, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales seems never to fall below a high standard of intelligent and technically accomplished music making and occasionally it reaches considerable heights of inspiration. In this well planned programme their playing was perhaps at the level of high competence rather than the exceptionally inspired, but there can’t have been many (if any) members of the audience who regretted the way they had spent their evening.

The evening began with two French works which have more than a little in common; both are early works (though both were later revised) written when the composers were in their twenties; both composers won the Prix de Rome; both works offer evidence of their composers’ already well-developed imaginative ear for orchestral colour. The final work (not itself under-endowed with rich orchestral colours) was, by way of contrast, the wholly mature work of a composer approaching fifty; and, with a neat symmetry, it was written in 1889, the very year in which Debussy began to write his Fantaisie for Piano and Orchestra.

Les francs-juges was never staged, and most of the music has now been lost (some of it apparently destroyed by Berlioz himself). But there was good stuff in this early work – the March to the Scaffold in the Symphonie fantastique and the second movement of the Symphonie funèbre et triomphale both had their origins in this aborted opera. The only music to have an enduring life in its own right is the overture; the initial writing of the piece is the subject of an amusing anecdote in Chapter 13 of Berlioz’s Memoirs (quoted in the translation by David Cairns):

At the time I knew so little of the mechanism of certain instruments that, having written the trombone passage in D flat major in the introduction to the Francs juges, I was struck by a sudden fear that it might prove extremely difficult to play, and I nervously took it to show one of the trombone players at the Opéra. His answer completely set my mind at rest. ‘On the contrary.’ He said. ‘D flat is a particularly good key for the trombone; you can count on the passage having a splendid effect.’

I was so elated that I went home with my head in the clouds and, not looking where I was going, twisted my ankle. I get a pain in my foot whenever I hear the piece. Others, perhaps, get a pain in the head.

There were no headaches for listeners to this incisive performance of the overture. The nervous intensity of the music, its rapid transitions of mood, tempo and dynamic, was very well articulated by Thierry Fischer; the strings luxuriated in some of Berlioz’s melting phrases, while the brass section revelled in the opportunities provided, not least in the blaze of colour which closes the work. The performance as a whole benefited from the precisely explosive percussion of Steve Barnard, whose contributions to the work of the Orchestra in recent years have been of very great value. A fine, attention-grabbing opening to the evening.

Debussy’s Fantaisie for Piano and Orchestra has an odd history. It was composed between October 1889 and April 1890 (and then revised in 1909), at a time when, it would be fair to say, Debussy had yet to find a fully personal musical idiom. Echoes of d’Indy are evident in the work; a performance of the first movement was planned for 21 April 1890 – to be conducted by d’Indy – but Debussy withdrew the work at rehearsal. Though there appear to have been plans for performances in both 1893 and 1896, the work wasn’t actually given a public performance until November 1819 (the year after Debussy’s death) in London – with Cortot, no less, as soloist. Though it may be true that Debussy didn’t (as was previously believed) disown the work, its history surely suggests that Debussy was not perhaps entirely satisfied with the work. And, to tell the truth, listening to the work – whether recorded or live – increases one’s suspicions in this regard. There are some attractive things here – not least in the central slow movement (Lento e molto espressivo) – but there is a somewhat diffuse, even desultory, quality to the work taken whole. In general the more languorous the music is, the more successful it is. Some of the busier and noisier climaxes sound  more than a little factitious. For all that, Philippe Cassard (a pianist with a properly high reputation in Debussy, having recorded all the solo piano works) and Thierry Fischer put as good a case as might be made for the work – Cassard’s work at the keyboard was both agile and expressive, his understanding of the work’s rhythms and harmonic language everywhere evident. There were perhaps moments when the strings of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales might ideally have achieved a more shimmering quality, but for the most part their work was sympathetic and, under Fischer’s direction, well integrated with Cassard. For all the hard work of all involved, I was not, I fear, moved to change the view of the work I already had – that it is relatively slight.

That (“slight”) is not an adjective that could ever be applied to the masterpiece which closed the concert – Dvořák’s Symphony No.8 in G major. This is the work of a composer entirely in control of his medium, but by no means excessively set in his ways, a composer, indeed full of the adventurousness of youth. The Eighth symphony is the first of Dvořák’s works in the genre to break away comprehensively from the Brahmsian model to which he had previously adhered. This is very clear in the first movement, with its fragmented and harmonically ambiguous manoeuvres. Thierry Fischer’s reading here was full of vivacious energy, responding to the seemingly inexhaustible fertility of Dvořák’s inventiveness; individual sections of the orchestra impressed (notably the cellos, the flutes and the other woodwinds) but most impressive of all was the splendid integration of the orchestral sound as a whole. Fischer’s alternations of drive and relaxation articulated the shapes and patterns of this splendid  movement quite delightfully. Nor was there any loss of focus in the dreamily tender opening of the adagio, an opening full of an assuming quality of affection, without undue emphasis but insistent and strong. Fischer drew from the opening, in winningly organic fashion, a striking and passionate brass climax, the tympani punctuating matters with meticulous power. This is music of high confidence and assurance and it was played and conducted with appropriate certainty.

The reprisal of materials from earlier passages in the movement was effected with clarity and subtlety and there was a real pleasure to be had from the way in which Fischer returned orchestra and hearers to the same almost dreamy mood in which it had begun. The waltz-like third movement began with enchanting fluidity of rhythm and phrase, and in the trio section Fischer seemed thoroughly at home with the odd metrical effects as flutes and oboes are accompanied by the strings. The coda was truly molto vivace, setting up a lovely contrast with the hushed close of the movement. In the finale the opening trumpet fanfare was attractively played, more than a mere exercise in power, and Fischer’s conducting clarified much in the ensuing movement’s somewhat intricate structure of air and variations (which has elements of sonata form about it) and articulated alike the rhapsodic tenderness, the playfulness and the controlled and furious energy implicit in the score. The excitement of the triumphant coda was both resolution and release. A fine performance of a major work and definitely the highlight of the evening.

Glyn Pursglove


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