RCSSO, 19/02/2016

Berlioz : King Lear Overture
Debussy : La mer
Berlioz : Symphonie fantastique

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland Symphony Orchestra
Alpesh Chauhan

It's impossible to overstate the significance of Berlioz's music; when you put it in context, the scope of his imagination, and the brilliance of his orchestration is staggering.  The two works in tonight's concert date from 1831 and 1830 respectively.  Beethoven had died three years earlier, Schubert two, Schumann was barely 20 and writing only piano music as yet, Chopin had only just settled in Paris, Gounod was merely a promising student, Liszt was in transition between his career as a pianist and his career as a composer, Brahms and Saint-Saëns weren't even born and there was no one in the French musical establishment at that time to hold a candle to Berlioz for sheer inspiration.  Little wonder much of his music met with fairly generalised incomprehension.

Berlioz nourished a lifelong passion for Shakespeare, but his King Lear Overture is rather more redolent of Italy than of Shakespeare's "blasted heath".  Berlioz had been in the Villa Médicis in Rome, having finally won the coveted Prix de Rome, but on receiving word that his fiancée was engaged to another man, immediately made plans to shoot the pair of them, then himself, and rushed back to France.  By the time he reached Nice, he had cooled down enough to reconsider, and spent a few weeks there before returning to Rome, during which time he poured his extravagant reactions into composition and produced the Lear Overture.  It is, therefore, probably more a reflection on his own response to the play, its drama and its characters, than on the actual play itself.

If the Conservatoire's orchestra has one predominant flaw, it's in the strings, mostly the violins, though the lower strings are not exempt.  If I were discussing singers, I'd be talking about a lack of support for the voice, which leads to a tapering off of phrases in the wrong place, or an inability to get over the top of a note (particularly a high one) in order to centre it.  It's not a lack of volume, it's something like a lack of attention to tonal quality, so that the sound sometimes becomes thin and a little acid.  In Lear, one of the principal themes starts with this little flick upwards, and again and again, the violins simply didn't sound quite right as they hit that flick.  Rising phrases were a consistent problem for most of the evening, with a weakening of the tone at the top of the phrase.  Also, there was some blurring of the articulation, they weren't perfectly together, which made for some slightly messy points.  However, the winds and brass carried the Berlioz sound well.

The Debussy too had the right sound, cooler and subtler than the Berlioz, like the difference between watercolours and oil painting, even though here too the strings still had that tendency to thin out in the wrong places.  Particularly bad were the cellos as they began the second half of the first movement, with some very ugly intonation.  That was the worst of it, however, and to compensate, the horns were nicely orotund in their chorale leading into the coda of that movement, while the "Jeux de vagues" fairly sparkled.  The final movement was suitably stormy, though it didn't quite have the sense of majestic power the closing section should invoke.

The first two movements of the Symphonie fantastique were correct without any particular inspiration, but by the third, the strings seemed to finally have conquered their tonal difficulties, and Chauhan was taking a particularly Beethovenien approach to that movement.  It was certainly inspired by Beethoven's "Pastoral", and that was being made extremely evident, to very good effect.  The March growled and snapped, viciously triumphant, and the winds cackled beautifully for the Sabbath.  It has to be said that four kettle-drums, two bass drums and four percussionists playing the same simultaneously does rather tax the acoustics of the Conservatoire's very nice little concert hall to its limits.  When they were at it, full blast, you couldn't honestly hear very much else, but it was nevertheless exciting.

[Next : 20th February]