LSO, 19/08/2021

Ibert : Divertissement

Martinu : Jazz Suite

Strauss : Le bourgeois gentilhomme - Suite

London Symphony Orchestra

Sir Simon Rattle

A chamber-sized London Symphony Orchestra, with its Music Director Sir Simon Rattle brought a particularly light-hearted programme to their Edinburgh Festival concert tonight, firmly placed under the sign of humour, not to say outright frivolity,  They began with Jacques Ibert's Divertissement, arguably his best-known composition.  The music is drawn from incidental music to Eugène Labiche's The Italian Straw Hat, an immensely popular farce created in 1851 and still regularly staged in France to this day, which recounts the improbable adventures of young Fadinard on his wedding day, as he desperately searches all over Paris to replace a straw hat unfortunately eaten by his horse early that morning, and followed wherever he goes by his wedding party, all of whom are quite ignorant as to just why they are careering around in such a fashion, and just where they are at any given moment.  

Appropriately, apart from a couple of quite eerie nocturnal passages, the music is riotous, cock-eyed and raucously cheerful, and was delivered with gusto by the orchestra.  I will say that I felt the strings could have done with an extra desk in every section.  Although I think Rattle was using the designated orchestration of 3 violins, 2 violas, 2 cellos and 1 double-bass (I couldn't quite see everyone from where I was sitting) I found their sound rather thin compared to a very strong and clear wind section, and the percussion, which resonates particularly vividly in this marquee structure that is being used as a venue for the orchestral concerts.  

Martinu's Jazz Suite is almost exactly contemporaneous with the Divertissement.  At this point, Martinu, born in provincial Bohemia in 1910, had been resident in Paris for five years.  He would stay in France until 1940 when the war forced him to flee to the States, and during those years, his style became truly defined.  In the first years, however, up until, perhaps, 1930, he was experimenting with all the new styles of music he was discovering, and absorbing the music of his contemporaries, most notably Stravinsky, whose impact on Martinu is undeniable.  However, another very strong influence on Martinu at this time was jazz, newly arrived from America and a source of major fascination for a great many composers of the period.  The Jazz Suite is four short movements for just a dozen players (including a prominent part for the piano) in an angular, abrupt style in which the jazz elements appear as broken shards of mirror glinting in amongst the texture, echoes of itself rather than the whole thing.  You can recognise Martinu's imprint at times, but it's not the most characteristic of his pieces, and it does feel fragmentary.  The sudden conclusion feels almost incomplete, and the LSO could not dispel the uncertainty the work generated.

The 1912 project of Der Bürger als Edelmann was a translation of Molière's comedy Le bourgeois gentilhomme by Hoffmansthal, with incidental music by Strauss, including the divertissement - a short opera - M. Jourdain proposes to impress his would-be paramour Dorimène.  The project was a failure; the short opera became a 90-minute work by itself, and the play is not a short one in the first place.  Those of the audience there for the play were bored by the opera, those who were there for the music were bored by the play.  (I can only imagine there might have been a few who, like myself, would have been equally attracted by both, but clearly not in the majority).  However, the music that Strauss wrote, both for the opera (more on that next week) and the play, is some of his very finest, beyond all question.

In the five years or so after the dismal reception of the project, Strauss compiled the incidental music into a  suite, in so doing, continuing his evocation of the Baroque that he had begun in the composition of the incidental music.  He uses small forces similar to those that might have been in use in Molière's time (though with decidedly modern instruments, such as piano, or clarinet), and even appropriating some of Lully's music.  As in a Baroque suite, most of the movements are dances, some explicitly of the period, like a gavotte or a minuet, others, such as the extravagant polonaise of the tailors, very much not.  The music is elegant and joyous, smiling and tender, all orchestrated with Strauss's habitual brilliance, an exquisitely faceted jewel in Strauss's already dazzling output.  

All of this, and more, was lovingly rendered by the orchestra, alert to every nuance.  Strauss gives many individual orchestra members a chance to shine, all of which were seized with both hands by the relevant players who, unfortunately, I cannot name as there was no personnel list published, but who all distinguished themselves admirably.  Above all, however, there was an impression of immense love for the music, like a warm hug from a laughing friend, happy to share the moment, an instant to treasure indeed.

[Next : 25th August]