Auckland Philharmonia’s concert featured Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloe and Saint-Saens’ Egyptian Concerto.
Pianist Javier Perianes and conductor Jun Markl delivered a performance marked by fluency and alignment.
Ravel’s piece showcased cinematic flair, with the orchestra illuminating its symphonic weight and vivid storytelling.
It was the perfect pairing. The Auckland Philharmonia’s Daphnis et Chloe concert coupled Ravel’s complete ballet with Saint-Saens’ Egyptian Concerto, two works that define the quintessential elegance and urbanity of the French esprit.
Pianist Javier Perianes and conductor Jun Markl were totally in alignment with the brittle andbrilliant Saint-Saens.
Page after page floated by, buoyed by the unerring fluency that one would expect from a composer who once claimed that he wrote music as naturally as apples fall from trees.
Perianes unfurled billowing waves of semiquaver sparkle, occasionally melting into more romantic moods, during which both orchestra and conductor were totally at one with the pianist’s supple rubato.
A hint of American cakewalk didn’t go unnoticed in the uber-lively finale, while the central movement effectively explored darker, more dramatic territory, bringing in Spanish, African and other exotic elements.
An Albeniz encore took us to Seville, the Spanish pianist framing its evocative middle section with the most infectious dance imaginable.
Spanish pianist Javier Perianes brought elegance to Saint-Saens' concerto. Photo / Marco Borggreve
Ravel’s complete music for Daphnis et Chloe marked a very special achievement for Auckland Philharmonia and its musicians. Inspired by maestro Markl, they illuminated one of the 20th century’s monumental scores with cinematic flair.
It was impossible not to submit to just under an hour of Ravel’s orchestral wizardry, realising, too, as melodies and themes reoccurred, that this is indeed a score of symphonic weight.
From an opening page in which one can almost hear a curtain lifting, we were taken through the love story of a young shepherd and his nymph.
Scored with the precision of a master painter, Daphnis et Chloe offered a host of piquant solos, chamber music sighs and dances of almost Stravinskian wildness, not to mention the sonorous wordless voices of Sydney Philharmonia Choirs.
While one can sit back and sink into this splendid soundscape, I suspect that surtitles projecting the ballet’s detailed stage directions would not have gone amiss.
How else might one realise that a sinuous pairing of clarinets is introducing the voluptuous dance of the temptress Lyceion?
