Saturday was a woodwind-led French evening with the Hong Kong Sinfonietta. Works by two French composers bookended Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto in A major in which the soloist was also French; and woodwinds featured prominently in all three. The performances, alas, lacked some inspiration, although Ravel's ballet Ma Mère l’Oye proved a worthy highlight.
Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune is musical animation of a poem by his friend Mallarmé about a faun’s recollection of his dreamy exploits seducing nymphs. Ethereal woodwinds floating on a bed of fluid string support weave a collage of sensual encounters into a phantasmagoria of shifting and ambiguous tonality, nay atonality. Leonard Bernstein considered the work important enough to devote a good part of one Norton Lecture expounding its musical and structural ingenuity.
The flute that kicked off proceedings on Saturday was hardly lilting and flighty enough, and the orchestral rendering came up short in depicting the ethereal and sultry atmosphere of Mallarmé's poem. The hazy and mysterious world of a mythological humanoid’s amorous adventures inspired neither curiosity nor otherworldliness in conductor Yip Wing-sie's reading. The strings and harps conjured up a good sense of fluidity and languor, but the woodwinds couldn’t deliver the necessary frolicsome merriment. A century on, the use of a tritone has become blasé and no longer elicits discomfort, but that should be no excuse for blandness and lack of spontaneity.
Clarinettist Raphaël Sévère’s musical credentials are impeccable, having been admitted to the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique de Paris at the age of 14 and obtained the master’s degree with high honours at 19. Winner of numerous prizes and competitions, he last appeared in Hong Kong playing the Weber concerto with the Sinfonietta. Nor is he a stranger to the Mozart concerto, having performed it with the Macao Youth Symphony Orchestra at age 11 for the 250th anniversary of the composer’s birthday. His virtuosity on the instrument was loud and clear. The octave leaps, deep dive into the lower register, and sudden twists and turns were no challenge to his technical competence, shining in particular in the ebullient Rondo finale. The orchestra, on the other hand, was a little flaccid, at times sounding as if they were dialling it in. His rapport with the ensemble was good. Yet as the last purely instrumental work Mozart completed, its maturity in language and expression is perhaps beyond the composer’s age. Neither orchestra nor soloist captured the subtle and elusive streak of prescient melancholy below the veneer of lustre and cheer.