Firebird Suite - Stravinsky
Temenos with Mermaids and Angels - Peter Maxwell Davies
Pictures at an Exhibition - Mussorgsky/Ravel
The BBC Philharmonic under Yan Pascal Tortelier opened their concert at the NCH last night with the suite Stravinsky prepared in 1945 from his earliest great ballet score, The Firebird. It's about 10 minutes longer than the more popular 1919 suite, and is said to have been the composer's favourite version, retaining all of the Firebird music that he still really liked in maturity. Tortelier steered a course more steady than excitable, missing in the process something of the mystery and magic that rightly belongs to this music.
Peter Maxwell Davies, who has a long-standing association with the BBCPO, conducted the premiere of his flute concerto, Temenos with Mermaids and Angels, with Richard Davis as soloist. It's a masterly, dry piece, melodically direct and instrumentally astute, but using a harmonic vocabulary that remained oddly untensioned. It was strange to hear so much finely-judged writing and well-calculated incident simply failing to connect.
There was no shortage of connection in Tortelier's handling of the Mussorgsky/Ravel Pictures. Here he pulled off the unusual feat of retaining a fidelity of spirit to Mussorgsky's piano original, while conveying Ravel's orchestration as a clearly 20th-century sympathetic overlay. The speeds were fast but unforced, the dramatic tension high, the instrumental balances fresh, the vitality exhilarating. The single encore, Chabrier's irrepressible Joy euse Marche, done with irresistible panache, showed the spirit of the orchestra in even more flattering light.
