Prom 61: Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra/ Jansons, Royal Albert Hall, London
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Your support makes all the difference.The opening clarinet solo of Sibelius’ 1st Symphony is among the loneliest and chilliest sounds we have in music.
Heard first over a rolling pedal-point in timpani, it surveys uninhabited frozen wastes as far as the eye can see. As far as the ear can hear it can be a rather different matter with insensitive coughers, as here, seemingly oblivious to its gripping evocation of solitude. Still, the concentration of a great orchestra knows no distraction and the Royal Concertgebouw’s principal clarinet took his sound away to barely a whisper pulling focus away from the distractions and deep into Sibelius’ barren wilderness.
Mariss Jansons’ reading of the symphony was strange but compelling. The strangeness came from unusually spacious, even deliberate, tempi and in the first movement from phrasings which favoured smooth contours over edge and impulse. Allegro energico it was not; craggy it was not. And yet this deliberation laid bare the innards of the music in ways I had not heard before with all those startling anomalies in scoring and harmony thrown into unusually high relief. There was a cool beauty about it. Exceptional woodwind playing was at the heart of very open textures while the finale’s great string oration evolved like something that Jansons and his players never wanted to let go of.
Higher temperatures were experienced after the interval. Indeed you could grow orchids in the hothouse of Henri Duparc’s orchestral songs. Magdalena Kozena arrived appropriately attired in shimmering pre-Raphaelite garb, its light-catching gold seemingly picked out by the orchestra’s busy harp and celeste writing. To say that these songs - the stuff of dreams and perfumes of the night – are voluptuous would be to understate their far-reaching effect. I’m not sure that Kozena had the sound of them in her voice. Her French was oddly unidiomatic and the word colour - an intrinsic part of those swooning vocal lines - was vague and unvaried. Her singing is always dramatically charged but here it felt like a stretch too far for what is essentially a lyric voice.
What followed – Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé – Suite No.2 – was pretty much perfection. From the sensuous wafting of the Royal Concertgebouw’s fabulous woodwind choir to the cumulative effect of the fevered final dance achieved through Jansons’ subtle gradations of its huge waves of sound – this was the kind of performance you didn’t so much listen to but basked in.
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