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Brighton Festival 2009 - Rimsky-Korsakov and Ravel: Sarah Connolly, mezzo-soprano, Brighton Festival Chorus, Orchestre National de Lorraine, Jacques Mercier cond, Brighton Festival in The Dome, 24.5.2009 (RA).

Rimsky-Korsakov, Scheherezade.
Ravel, Schéhérezade
Ravel, Daphnis and Chloé Suites 1&2.


Well, that's one way of rounding off a Brighton Festival: doing a kingly job with the concert programme presentation and then playing powerfully pictorial music that speaks for itself. The effect is pretty unequivocal.

Salman Rushdie asked leading questions about the Scheherezade scenario in the programme and Roger Nichols provided matchless notes on the music. There was full text of the exotic poetry set in the middle work of the evening, a much-recorded soloist well versed in song,  as well as opera; one of Britain’s top choruses and a visiting French orchestra exhibiting two items of home repertoire with sensuous vocals, and scenes from an imposing ballet score. All that the artistic director Jacques Mercier had to do with his Orchestre National de Lorraine, was get on and play out the Festival.

Rushdie's blunt observations and pertinent insights threw dark, salutory light on one of the cherished legends from his familiar area of oriental culture. It was a substantial and disturbing read. All the simmering words were there, French and English, from Tristan Klingsor’s  three Schéhérezade poems, which the young Ravel provocatively chose to set while at the Paris Conservatoire in 1903. The only miscalculation and disservice to the evening was that the Dome's dimmed  lighting prevented the audience from following the text, in order to tie in the astonishing sound pictures that the 27 year old Rave had painted behind the texts' feelings and imagery. Stepping in for Patricia Bardon, in a long, black halter-neck dress and a jade pashmina worn well off-the shoulder, Durham girl Sarah Connolly was a sultry paintbrush caressing Ravel’s exotic canvases.

The Brighton Festival Chorus were reuniting with Mercier, with whom they had won a Gallic recording award with Debussy’s Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien and the L’Orchestra National de L’Ile de France. No words were needed to crown the fresco, the composer’s own description, of highlights from Ravel’s Daphis and Chloé ballet score. Their vocalising  left the audience hallucinating Chloe’s timely rescue by Pan and her restoration to Daphnis’ devotion.

And what, then, did Mercier do for Rimsky Korsakov's version of the Scheherazade story? While he certainly pulled out the stops for Ravel, he might have uses one or two too many himself for the opening work.  With his silvery, flying Beatle mop of grey hair, spread fingers with no baton, and swirling postures, his sense of urgency in setting the scene ultimately produced screeching strings as the savagery of the Sultan wreaked its carnage and the sea swell tossed Sinbad’s ship. Valid effects? Or rough edges? It was hard to say.

Some of the marching seemed a little ragged in The Tale of the Kalender Prince, again with Mercier attacking the tempo vigorously. And after the strings gloriously announced The Young Prince and Princess, I thought Mercier’s concern with momentum denied his wind soloists space to weave their eagerly-awaited spells. This movement was sealed effectively though, by violin soloist Denis Clavier (odd name for a fiddler) whose important seductive solo was given room to evoke voluptuousness.

Clavier’s violin turned seemingly to alarm and fright in the finale and, almost as though Mercier had been waiting all along for this moment, the furious tempo was almost too much for the strings. But hey, this a live performance and the thrill was palpable when the percussion hurled the work to its zenith before M.Clavier lowered the curtain on it with real mystery and allure.

After the interval, Mercier and ONL were on home soil and their accompaniment to Miss Connolly was simply delicieuse. In Asia, the schooner did rock in the harbour, life or death was dispensed on a whim, assassins did smile. In La flûte enchantée, notes flew like kisses to the lover at the casement and hips lightly swayed in The Indifferent One.

Roger Nichols' programme note threw fascinating light on the unharmonious meeting of minds between the  Ballet Russes’ commissioning impressario Diaghilev, choreographer Fokine and composer Ravel in their collaboration on Daphnis and Chloé.  Diaghilev was about to reject it apparently until  Ravel’s expansive and distinctive scor, and his publisher Jacques Durand’s belief in it, suddenly made  listen and reverse his decision to scrap the whole thing.

A trumpeter then a horn player disappearing, not for comfort breaks, not in Parisian student protest, but to play offstage at the choir’s entry, added some mystique to  this peculiarly French music-making. I missed their return, so much else was happening amid the visual impact of  88 players now fully in harness with Mercier’s tempi — and earning them the encore of repeating the Bacchanale finale for a delighted audience.

Richard Amey


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