Reviewed by: David M. Rice
Reviewed: 11 July, 2025
Venue: Tanglewood, Massachusetts
This early evening concert was the first of many on this summer’s Tanglewood schedule to include music of Maurice Ravel in commemoration of the one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of his birth. Mezzo-soprano Eve Gigliotti and members of the BSO performed three Ravel works and one by Gabriel Fauré.
In Ravel’s ‘Chansons madécasses’ (Songs of Madagascar), Gigliotti was accompanied by Elizabeth Klein on flute and piccolo, Mickey Katz on cello, and Benjamin Hochman on piano. Gigliotti’s deep, lush voice and expressive phrasing were well suited to the exotic nature of Ravel’s setting of texts by Évariste de Parny, a native of the French colony of Réunion, an island in the Indian Ocean over 400 miles from Madagascar. Two love songs — the rather erotic ‘Nahandove’ and the more languorous ‘Il est douce de se coucher’ (It is Good to Lie Down) — bookend ‘Méfiez-vous des blancs’ (Beware the White Men), a powerful expression of Parny’s opposition to colonialism and slavery. Hochman ‘s ostinato figures in the first song and Klein’s solo introduction to the third were particularly noteworthy.
Julianne Lee, the BSO’s principal second violin, joined Hochman for Ravel’s short but sweet ‘Pièce en forme de Habanera’, after which Katz gave a moving rendition of ‘Kaddish’ from Ravel’s Deux Mélodies hébraique, supported by Hochman’s rather spare accompaniment.
The concert concluded with a passionate performance of Gabriel Fauré’s Piano Quartet No. 2 in G-minor, Op.45, for which Lee, Katz and Hochman were joined by violist Rebecca Gitter, whose instrument sang out gorgeously in many lyrical passages.