ONCT, 18/09/2016

Beethoven : Piano Concerto No. 5 "Emperor" (Christian Zacharais, piano)
Berlioz : Symphonie fantastique

Orchestre National du Capitole de Toulouse
Tugan Sokhiev

The ONCT is one of the principal French provincial orchestras.  Like many of the major provincial orchestras here, it doubles up as the orchestra for the main opera/ballet company of the region; the Capitole Theatre is their principal venue for stage performances, but the orchestra enjoys a separate venue for their concert season, a striking hexagonal structure that once served as a market hall for cereals trade, hence its name, the Halle aux Grains.

The orchestra is hardly an unknown entity to me, they have a substantial discography, much of it with the conductor who really put them on the musical map, Michel Plasson.  This season is their 10th with the current music director, the Russian Tugan Sokhiev, and it's the first time I've heard them play live, in concert as opposed to for the stage, in a very long time.  What struck me from the outset was a kind of softness to their sound, something a little old-fashioned in some respects, that took me back to recordings from the 50s.  In the Beethoven, with relatively compact forces, the brass and winds were extremely discreet, almost too much so, and I could not help but feel that there was something of a lack of incisiveness to the playing.

Yet it was an approach that suited Christian Zacharias's interpretation, for this was not an "Emperor" striding in authoritatively.  To call it tentative would be a mistake, there was nothing uncertain about the playing.  However, Zacharias seemed more in questing mode, almost improvisatory, by which I do not mean that he was altering the written text, but rather that there was an exploratory quality to it, as if the piano was discovering the path(s) ahead at every moment, in an "Oh, this looks intriguing, what happens if I go this way?" spirit.  It was an interesting reading, and particularly effective for the meditative slow movement, but in the end, left me slightly dissatisfied with the overall impression, a little too restrained emotionally.

For the Berlioz, the orchestra doubled in volume in the brass and winds, and added the significant array of percussion required for the Symphonie fantastique.  There was an immediate difference in presence for the winds, and the horns in particular made a marked contribution to the whole.  However, some quirk of acoustic in the hall gave me problems in the second movement, in that apart from the opening flourish, the harps seemed almost inaudible to me.  Normally, a harp (never mind two) can be picked out relatively easily, the nature of its timbre allowing it to be readily identified, and I've heard this piece often enough to know that they are the distinctive feature of this movement.  In addition, I was sitting on their side of the platform, and they were in plain sight.  Yet I had great difficulty picking them out from the mass of the orchestra after the introduction of the waltz, even though the acoustic is perfectly satisfactory otherwise - I'm still trying to figure that one out!

The main problem with this performance, however, was the overall interpretation.  While there were some very strong sections - the first movement was excellent, in particular - Sokhiev did not seem able to impart the full development of the piece, from dream to nightmare, the gradual darkening of the mood, the progressive distortion of the image of the beloved from the tender palpitations of the first movement to the cackling caricature of the last.  The arc of vision was not present, each movement was an individual item rather than a piece of a greater whole, so that once again, as with the Beethoven, the end result was a lingering feeling of slight disappointment.

[Next : 27th September]