NCH, Dublin
Debussy– Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune. Stravinsky– Symphony in C. Firebird.
THE CURRENT financial quagmire, and specifically the Irish banking crisis, has found commentator after commentator mouthing phrases such as “It is what it is”, and “We are where we are”.
The phrases came to mind, with an altogether different import, at the National Concert Hall on Saturday, when the London Symphony Orchestra offered a programme of Debussy and Stravinsky under Valery Gergiev.
Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune is a 19th-century work (it was premièred in 1894) which leans decidedly into the 20th century. It’s even been proposed as the piece from which the start of 20th-century music might reasonably be charted.
Gergiev and his players’ achievement on Saturday was to make Debussy’s creation sound every bit itself, sensually luxuriant in a softly rounded way, but also utterly precise.
Every line seemed both to glow from within as well as being carefully lit from without.
It was just the sort of performance to make you feel that there was nothing else in music to match it. It was what it was, as pure as it could be imagined.
Gergiev and the LSO brought the same kind of sharpness of view to Stravinsky's tartly intricate Symphony in C, and to the earlier, altogether more extravagant Firebirdballet. This, the first of the composer's collaborations with the great impresario Diaghilev, is an unashamedly romantic score, which the composer later seemed to want to distance himself from.
The best-known parts of the ballet are those that appear in the 1919 concert suite, and in the concert hall the full score can sound as if the less familiar passages are rather too full of padding, wonderful, ear-tickling padding, but padding nonetheless.
That’s not how Gergiev sees the piece. In his performance, every smallest gesture contributed to essential atmosphere or narrative drive. His was that rarest of things, a performance of the full ballet that kept his listeners consistently on the edges of their seats.
