RSNO, 09/03/2024

Ravel : Une barque sur l'océan

Mel Bonis : Trois femmes de légende

Debussy : La mer

Royal Scottish National Orchestra

Thomas Søndergård

The evening began somewhat chaotically.  The programmed soloist, Catriona Morison, who was due to sing Chausson's Poème de l'Amour et de la Mer, having just managed to get through it in Edinburgh the previous evening, had to declare forfeit for tonight.  The orchestra's excellent principal flute, Katherine Bryan, was prepared to step up to the plate with a virtuoso showpiece on themes from Bizet's Carmen, but also had to withdraw due to ill health.  This left the orchestra with the second flute moving up to first flute, a replacement second being found at 7.00 p.m. for a 7.30 start, and no soloist for the evening.  So we got a shortened concert, of the purely orchestral works originally programmed, now reordered.

The evening began with Ravel's own orchestration of the third of his Miroirs, "Une barque sur l'océan".  While Søndergård drew beautiful, filigree detail from the orchestra, that was also the problem with the piece, at least to my liking.  Ravel is such an extraordinary orchestrator, his command of orchestral colour and detail is meticulous, and he needs no help to reveal the details.  What the conductor has to do is to put the piece in focus, so that the audience is perceiving the work from exactly the right 'distance' so to speak, and can take in its full brilliance.  Tonight, Søndergård brought us in too close, it was like having your nose on a pointillist painting, able to perceive every nuance of colour, but not getting the overall shape.  It was lovely, but it lacked cohesion.

Any regular listener to BBC Radio 3 will be fairly familiar with the name of Mel Bonis by now, after the last few years, and of all her works that now get intermittent airings, the Femmes de légende are probably the most often heard, whether in the original piano form, or in the orchestration of three of this set of seven pieces.  They're attractive works, evocative and poetic.  They were not conceived as a whole in piano form, but apparently the orchestrations are not by Bonis herself, and are uncredited.  Whoever it was has drawn heavily from Debussy, who was four years Bonis's junior, and studied alongside her at the Paris Conservatoire, and Debussy from his earlier periods at that.  It's difficult to know just when this music dates from; from what I can see, all of Bonis's work was published posthumously, so the opus numbers may or may not be an accurate indicator of compositional date.  If they are, then the three pieces date from between 1912 and 1937 when she died.  It is therefore difficult to tell how appropriate this lush, quite heady orchestration is in relation to what Bonis might have effected herself.  

The problem is, of course, putting this version of Femmes de légende up directly alongside the master himself.  Ten bars of La mer, and Debussy's blazing originality takes no quarter; whatever Bonis's qualities, and she certainly has them, it's not that easy to remember her music when heard in the shade of one of Debussy's greatest orchestral scores.  In addition, here, Søndergård was getting it exactly right.  Debussy benefits from unpacking his detail, from teasing out the complex subtleties of his orchestra to let the design show in full, and everything that was too close, too finicky in the Ravel here bloomed with warmth and light.  This was an excellent rendition of La mer, worth the price of admission, and the upset to the programme, all by itself.

[Next : 21st March]