Midsummer Night's Dream Suite - Mendelssohn
Piano Concerto No 2 - Beethoven
Pelleas and Melisande Suite - Faure
Bolero - Ravel
The Stuttgart Philharmonic Orchestra, founded in 1924, has been under the conductorship of Jorg-Peter Weigle since 1995. Neither are well-known in this part of the world - the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, Radio Orchestra and Bach Collegium all have higher profiles on CD.
Friday's concert certainly didn't conform to textbook expectations for a provincial German orchestra in a mixed, French and German programme.
The five movements from the music for A Midsummer Night's Dream had too much of the routine about them, seriously short of the magical atmosphere which makes Men delssohn's achievement so special. The matter-of-fact style proved far more accommodating in Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 2, with Barry Douglas a generally sympathetic, gentle-spirited soloist.
Ravel's Bolero, beginning from virtual inaudibility, was crafted, as it should be, as a finely-graded crescendo, showing many sections of the orchestra in a much more favourable light than the Mendelssohn did, although there was unwelcome stiffness in the saxophone playing, and the trumpets faulted at the important temporary shift into E major.
The revelation, however, was the Faure. Apart from the famous Sicilienne, the music Faure provided for Maeterlinck's Pelleas et Melisande can easily sound pallid. Weigle and his players, however, managed to activate its inner tension, weighting the minor collisions of the harmony so that the tender melodic lines never became overburdened. I don't think I've ever heard the Prelude, in particular, sound as thoroughly appealing as it did here.
