In her "Danse suppliante" near the end of the second part of the complete ballet music, Chloé expresses her sexuality through an english horn solo where the tempo shifts in every bar--oscillating from quarter note=72 in all the odd numbered bars to quarter note=100 in every even numbered bar. Forever young, Chloé turns 100 this year in Ravel's ballet Daphnis et Chloé, which was written for the 1912 season of the infamous Ballets Russe.
That is she turns 100 if, like me you know her through Ravel. If you know her from the Greek writer Longus she could easily be 1,900 years old, but Chloé hides her real age and will certainly never tell.
The French-Canadian conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who will become Music Director of the Philadelphia Orchestra in September, returned to Berlin to conduct this program with the Berliner Philharmoniker transmitted over the Digital Concert Hall. The program was centered on the complete ballet music for Daphnis et Chloé, which comprised the second half of the event.
Nézet-Séguin uses clean patterns that are energized and clear. This helped the orchestra focus the significant challenges in figuration that this work presents to ensembles. There are so many passages of liquid fast notes, particularly in the woodwinds, that it is easy for orchestras to drift in precision, or to sound like machines. Nézet-Séguin found the right cues, the right eye-contacts, the right smiles. This performance could easily become a study in ensemble coordination.
There were also whimsical moments that the digital concert hall allowed us to see, as well as hear. The huge hand-cranked wind machine was fun to watch in action. But so was the "human cellist capo:"
There is a moment in the Danse de Lycéion, at rehearsal [56], where Ravel asked the solo cellist to retune their G string to G-sharp momentarily so that a particular gesture can end on a natural D# harmonic. Instead of tuning, the solo cellist's stand mate reached over and pressed down the string so that no tuning was necessary. It worked. The whole thing was caught on camera. It was quite an entertaining surprise--thanks Digital Concert Hall! I wonder how common this technique is...do others play it this way? Let me know!
Ravel would have been partly inspired by the Nietzschean view of the Greeks in the "Birth of Tragedy;" the idea that prior to the age of Socratic reasoning that folks found ecstasy easily within the music of their lives. This performance brought the dancing and quickly spirited side of this work to the surface.
The concert began with Luciano Berio's "Sequenza IXa for clarinet" played by the awesome clarinetist Walter Seyfarth. Sayfarth brought out the electronica atmosphere of this completely analog work for solo clarinet. He made multiphonics sound like feedback from Woodstock. In the meditative opening segment he worked with the color of each sustained pitch, and in the conversational development he played crisp and frisky.
Sequenza IXa is a work that ends in its own form of hallucinatory ecstasy with seven loud and piercing A-flats amid quiet incantations. It was an ending that made the Romeo & Juliet Fantasy Overture, which followed it to complete the first half of the program, sound different as it ended. Tchaikovsky closed the work in B major with the sound of harps implying a realm beyond death in which the lovers would be united.
Heard after Berio, the contrast in metaphysics was powerful. I have to admit that after Berio, I was surprised to hear the fateful sword thrust that felled Romeo as an Ab instead of a G#, as notated. Good programming changes our ears.
Saturday, June 16, 2012
