DCist Goes to the Symphony
Yundi Li
Li paired the Ravel with Prokofiev's second concerto on his most recent disc, where it provided an elegant Gallic coolness to the fiery pyrotechnics of the Russian work. With the NSO, he was most satisfying in the dreamy solo parts, where there was a detached gauziness and diaphanous trills. In the fast sections, the orchestra seemed disjointed, not always keeping in lockstep with the soloist. While the first movement has its Gershwin-esque blue notes, the second movement has been imitated countless times by arrangers of melancholy French songs, like those of Jacques Brel. Li's performance had an often impatient quality, as he often drove his part ahead of the orchestra.
The French theme was introduced in the overture part of the program, the U.S. premiere of Pascal Dusapin's Apex, Solo No. 3 for Orchestra. Dusapin is a leading voice in Europe, where his new opera on the Faust legend made quite an impression in 2006, and his music is becoming known on this side of the Atlantic. Guest conductor Emmanuel Krivine led the premiere of Apex with the Orchestre national de Lyon in 1995, and he is to be commended for bringing it to Washington. The work's main theme is announced in the opening bars, a pulse on the timpani smudged by ominous growls from low brass, strings, and stentorian contrabassoon. Much of the piece consists of the gentle crystallization and amassing of static harmonic structures, with the crow-like croaks of muted low brass and other sounds as rhythmic punctuation, as well as gliding string clusters like the whine of jet engines. It was evocative, an effect piece of subtle color shifts, but without much to give the listener an intelligible overall shape.
Krivine's slippery beat caused some confusion in the Dusapin, and in the Ravel as well, but he had clearly built a consensus among the musicians as far as his ideas about Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique. Given the conductor's promising recordings of other 19th-century symphonies by Mendelssohn and Dvořák, with La Chambre Philharmonique, it was no surprise that the Berlioz was the best work of the evening. The programmatic composer's obsession with his beloved, represented in the first movement, was extremely agitated, shifting gears at times erratically, while the second was a smooth and carefree waltz, assured if an edge too fast. The pastoral third movement had fine English horn and off-stage oboe solos, as well as the tense sounds of distant thunder in the timpani parts near the end. Most of the fire, however, came from the hallucinatory fourth and fifth movements, a brisk and tuba-rific March to the Scaffold and a rhythmically tight and cackling Witches' Sabbath.
This week the NSO will play only one performance, on Saturday (January 31, 8 p.m.), with André Previn conducting a concert for his own 80th birthday, featuring violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter playing his Concerto for Violin and Double Bass.