Lili Boulanger
Pie Jesu
Gabriel Fauré
Requiem
Pelleas and Melisande – suite
Lili Boulanger
Vieille prière bouddhique
Maurice Ravel
Daphnis and Chloe – Suite No. 2
Golda Schultz
soprano
Laurence Kilsby
tenor
Jacques Imbrailo
baritone
BBC Symphony Chorus
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Stéphane Denève
conductor
Reviewed by: Ates Orga
Reviewed: 4 September, 2024
Venue: Royal Albert Hall
If Klaus Mäkelä’s Debussy/Stravinsky/Berlioz with the Orchestre de Paris the night before was a premier cru Parisien libation [https://www.classicalsource.com/prom/prom-58-debussy-stravinsky-berlioz-orchestre-de-paris-with-klaus-makela/] this early evening Prom from Stéphane Denève was an absorbingly premier cru Français celebration. I first came across him back in 1996 during our Naxos production of Debussy’s Pélleas et Mélisande in Lille. Fresh from the Paris Conservatoire he was assisting Jean-Claude Casadesus, having been spotted by Solti and been repetiteur pianist of the Orchestre de Paris Chorus, working with the likes of Bychkov, Giulini, Rostropovich and Sawallisch. A wild-haired visionary young man, consumed with music and learning, impassioned and vibrant, determined in his vocation, no obstacle unconquerable. Formerly principal conductor of the Royal Scottish National, making his Proms debut with them in 2006, he’s these days music director of the St Louis Symphony in Missouri, Slatkin’s old stamping ground.
The programme book Q & A got several of his core values across. “Right now, I’m speaking [English] with a certain accent. I believe something similar happens when we’re making music … if you’re French, you kind of perform French music without an accent”. “I always study the score the good old way – at the piano: playing it, analysing it, admiring it … The more you study the piece, the more you inhabit it and the more you belong to it … It’s comforting to just be at the service of the music … assuming that the score is right – that what’s written is really what the composer dreamt.” Reminding us that Ravel and Lili Boulanger (whose death in March 1918 aged twenty-four was, no question, “one of music’s greatest losses”) were protégés of Fauré, albeit some years apart, explained the singularly Golden Age aesthetic of this concert, aromatising thirty years of Third Republic France from the mid-1880s to the First World War.
Receiving their Prom premieres, Boulanger’s Pie Jesu (her deathbed swansong, 1918 from earlier sketches, dictated and dedicated to her older sister Nadia) and Vieille prière bouddhique (1914-17) impacted indelibly, glowingly wrought and spiritually searching in their handling of medium and text. For voice, harp, organ and string quartet, Pie Jesu (“Merciful Jesus, give them everlasting rest”) traces a brief, anguished, delicate journey, ascending from minorial chromatics to a ‘white light’ Amen in Mixolydian G. With multiple violins enveloping violas and the Albert Hall organ ‘wine dark’ subterranean in character (Richard Pearce), Golda Schultz weaved a near-improvised delirium from the key change Lent, notwithstanding her vibrato here and there occluding purity of pitch and tone (contrasting Bernadette Greevy’s October 1968 Croydon recording with Nadia and the BBC Symphony [BBC Legends] or Isabelle Sabrié’s at the 1993 Festival d’Auvers-sur-Oise [Marco Polo]): ‘très calme et clair … sans couleur’ says the music. Controlling the audience admirably, Denève ensured a devout, atmospherically extended silence at the end. “Daily prayer for the whole universe” – “Let everything that breathes … be able to move freely, each in the path that is their destiny” – Vieille prière bouddhique for tenor, chorus and large orchestra (1914-17), sets a French translation of an old Buddhist text, evoking repetitive images and orientalisms, opulent timbres and solo arabesques, recline and climax, that sense of wonderment gazing upon the heavens circling into focus between dusk and dawn. With the room backlit in rose-pink, Laurence Kilsby impressed, Denève structuring a reading emotionally sensitive to such issues as the caution in the posthumously published score: “the four repeated notes [a recurrent motif from the onset: tenuto, grave, simple] must always be slightly lengthened without slackening the general movement, the melodic and verbal inflexions having to determine the rhythmic nuances which customary notation has not permitted to be more precisely indicated”.
Substance of the measured first half, tolling the centenary of his passing, was Fauré’s Requiem (the enlarged, enriched 1900 concert version), left to quietly, unsentimentally, impart its message – “a joyful delivery, a yearning for the happiness of the beyond, rather than as a distressing passing on” – the final ‘In paradisum’ eternally suspended, the harmonic balance between choir, strings and organ acutely judged, heartbeat fading into the stillness of a lunga pausa. Standing in for the indisposed Thomas Mole, Schultz’s South African compatriot Jacques Imbrailo struck a distinguished stance, his ‘Libera me’ floating across the hall with ethereal clarity.
Fauré’s music to Maeterlinck’s symbolist play Pelleas and Melisande was written for an 1898 London staging “steeped in pre-Raphaelite sensibility … full of ‘golds and liquid greens’” (Jessica Duchen), the four-movement 1901/12 suite quintessentialising for Denève all the sensuality and poetics, the fine-grained linearity, of a composer long steeped in the sonics of organs and choirs, its “very special mood [having much] to do with shadows and mystery”. To conclude, a brilliantly virtuosic, temporally fluid, exactingly negotiated account of Ravel’s 1912 ‘symphonic fragments’ from Daphnis and Chloe, complete with rarely heard wordless choral interpolations. Fabulous playing from the BBC SO, Daniel Pailthorpe’s supple, silver edged flute solo in the central Pantomime standing out. The mounting walls of sound (including eight percussionists plus timpani) and spiralling crescendos of the General Dance took rejoicing to searing, pounding levels of bacchanalian exhilaration.