FAZIL RAISES THE ROOF
CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★★
In 1928 Ravel visited America for a four month-long concert tour and a party was held in his honour in New York. There’s a photograph of the occasion with Ravel at the piano surrounded by admirers who are all looking at the society photographer’s camera. Except for one young man who gazes downward intently, eyes focused on Ravel’s hands on the keyboard – it’s George Gershwin. Set on composing “serious” music the young American asked Ravel to give him composition lessons. Ravel looked thoughtful and asked Gershwin, the toast of Broadway and writer of million-sellers like ‘Fascinating Rhythm’ and ‘Someone to Watch over Me’, how much he had earned in the last year. Gershwin told him. Ravel smiled and said he had nothing to teach him. But Ravel learned something from George and jazz music, Gershwin played him ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ and took him to see Duke Ellington perform at the Cotton Club.
Ravel lapped it up and the results are distilled in his Piano Concerto in G major which received a tremendous performance combining ferocious drive, delicacy, wit and absolutely essential jazz swing, from soloist Fazil Say. It begins with a crack of the whip (literally) and we’re off, Say leading the charge with the CBSO under Kazuki Yamada revelling in the melange of blues and jazz, clarinet and trumpets to the fore. The Adagio assai was magical, Say musing solo in Ravel’s gentle melancholy melody, the “wrong” blue notes making it even more poignant, Oliver Janes’ clarinet and Rachael Pankhurst’s cor anglais applied sensitively-played musical balm. Like a dreamer shaking off his reverie the breakneck presto finale erupts, Say as master of the madcap proceedings. An eruption of enthusiastic applause followed but even that was exceeded when Say gave the most dazzling, delightful and outrageously funny encore I’ve ever heard, his own composition ‘Jazz Fantasy On Mozart’. It starts with the first few bars of Mozart’s ‘Rondo Alla turca’ but then… imagine the rest interpreted by Chico Marx and Eric – “I’m playing all the right notes but not necessarily in the right order” – Morecambe and you’ll get the idea. A total knockout and all done in 86 seconds. The secret of the ideal encore – leaving the audience wanting more.
Ravel’s music is the perfect fit for Yamada’s conducting style with its colourful, and masterly, orchestration, dance rhythms, exuberance and pictorial extravagance. Purists will insist on hearing the full score of Ravel’s ballet ‘Daphnis et Chloé’ but the majority will be happy with the two three-movement Suites Ravel extracted from it which we heard here, a ‘greatest hits’ compilation. The atmospheric opening ‘Nocturne’ was all shivering strings and whistling wind machine, the restrained ‘Interlude’ erupting into the riotous ‘Danse guerrière’ Yamada letting the CBSO brass and percussion off the leash. The ‘Lever de jour’ unfolded into a magnificent blossom of sound, with the celebratory ‘Danse générale’ s fitting climax.
With a lugubriously funny face, like his countryman Jacques Tati, Francis Poulenc was the clown of the young French composers group Les Six. There was always a serious side to him and it emerged after the death of his close friend Christian Bérard which inspired the composition of Poulenc’s ‘Stabat Mater’. Poulenc’s music has the virtue of brevity and the work’s thirteen sections take just half an hour. The CBSO Choir was joined by the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra Chorus, the connection being CBSO Chorus Director Simon Halsey who works with the Australian chorus on annual visits to their home country. The conjoined forces looked impressive in the choir stalls and sounded so too, traversing the work’s emotional extremes. It begins and ends quietly (‘Très calme’) as befits a work of lamentation, but grief can be angry too and erupts in the second movement (‘Très violent’) with the joint Chorus vehement in their depiction of anguish. Australian soprano Eleanor Lyons sang raptly in her three featured movements and Yamada ensured that the CBSO’s restrained contribution meshed perfectly with the choruses’ work. The evening was a feast of fine French music.
Norman Stinchcombe