An afternoon concert with a popular programme deserves a full house and that is what greeted the Philharmonia’s leader Zsolt Tihamér-Visontay as he came on to the platform. Thereafter he did not get to do as much leading as usual, since the four French masterpieces to be performed so often favour the woodwinds and horns, as soloists and in various combinations. For this programme, Samuel Coles, the outstanding Principal Flute, made the first musical sound we heard, as he opened, with great poetry and finesse, Debussy’s Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune.
Pierre Boulez saw this as the first modern piece, asserting "the flute of the faun brought new breath to the art of music". But how do you revolutionise late 19th century-orchestral music, with its bloated Strauss and Mahlerian orchestra? One way is to lower the voice, soften the tone, blur the colours – and go back to Schubert’s orchestra, or nearly. Ok, we are in France so we need a couple of harps, plus a pair of antique cymbals.
Illustrating the dreams of a faun on a hot afternoon requires pastel shades, subtle dynamics and a feeling for rhythm in which the bar lines melt away. Debussy’s score provides the instructions to the players, but this work in particular leaves players and conductor much to do if it is to cast its spell. Pablo Heras-Casado had the measure of the Prélude’s ebb and flow, gave his excellent players room to play, and was rewarded with several fine solos. Ideally there might have been more passionate urgency at the climax, when Eros enters in the form of the soaring violins over ecstatic duplets from the woodwinds but, that apart, this was a completely satisfying account of an elusive piece.
In Ravel's Piano Concerto in G major, Pierre-Laurent Aimard did not indulge the jazz-inflected parts of the outer movements in the way we hear from many pianists. A pupil of Yvonne Loriod, who also worked in his youth with Messiaen and Boulez, would start perhaps with a fresh analytical view of the score, not with the performing tradition. In the first movement this resulted in a pedestrian opening, but things soon improved. The endless melody of the central Adagio assai cost the composer much labour to get right, but in Aimard’s hands it sounded inevitable, its steady pulse perfectly poised, the great theme exquisitely phrased and imbued with quintessential Ravelian tendresse. There were magnificent solos too from the flute once again and especially Jill Crowther on cor anglais, who apparently never took a breath in the long reprise. In the finale, Aimard’s rock steady tempo and rhythm paid cumulative dividends, growing inexorably to an exciting denouement.