Le Concert des Nations must be the most celebrated ensemble of its type. Founded by Jordi Savall and Montserrat Figueras in 1989 to create an orchestra of period instruments to play repertoire from the Baroque and later, and directed from the outset by Savall, Le Concert des Nations has musicians mostly from Latin countries, all specialists on period instruments. The group’s name is from François Couperin’s Les Nations, and the chamber music of that era is their core expertise. This was exquisitely demonstrated here by several such works, including Couperin’s own Plainte pour les Violes from Les Goûts réunis, the sweetly sorrowing viols of Phillipe Pierlot and Savall himself giving this noble lament an intimate feeling.
The two pieces from Couperin’s compatriot and contemporary Marin Marais, L’Arabesque and the Sonnerie de Sainte Geneviève du Mont were contrasted: the first short and dirge-like, the soft-voiced instruments rather lost in the considerable scale of this imposing church; the second, involving all the players, making more impact. Jean-Baptiste Lully, supreme court musician of the “Sun King”, provided the most courtly sounds. Even his Marche pour la cérémonie des Turcs was more courteous than lively, while his La Pompe funèbre, following Couperin’s Plainte in Savall’s cleverly sequenced design, was a stately cortège holding its head high at some royal obsequy.
But the presiding genius at the Festival Ravel is another French (and Basque) composer from a much later era, and Le Concert des Nations designed a programme in that spirit, engaging in various ways with the music of Maurice Ravel. Not such a stretch it seemed, for Ravel loved the earlier music of his country, and was the composer of course of Le Tombeau de Couperin in homage to the beauties of the Baroque French keyboard suite.
Thus there were four arrangements, each by Savall, of the music of Ravel for the period instruments of his group. Three of these four were songs, sung beautifully by soprano Núria Rial. Her light and instantly attractive timbre was captivating, such that one sensed the engagement levels of this large audience increase whenever she sang, which fortunately was quite regularly. Her first appearance was for that other “Magic Flute”, Ravel’s La Flûte enchantée from Shéhérazade. Rial is a specialist in early music so perhaps has never had the opportunity to sing this as part of Ravel’s song cycle, but she made the piece sound as if she had recently discovered it.
There followed a pair of fine Jewish songs, a lovely Sephardic traditional romance La rosa enflorece, and the great traditional Kaddish (Prayer for the dead) from Ravel’s Deux mélodies hébraïques, Rial keening intensely as if beside a fresh graveside. Later, Cypriot songs and dances, one with all the players happily joining in the vocal ‘tra-la-las’, preceded an arrangement of Ravel’s Chanson de la mariée from the Cinq Mélodies populaires grecques. That was lively yet light, with accompaniment from just guitar and harp.
The highlight though was the best of these Ravel arrangements, a remarkable transformation of the Pavane pour une infante défunte. Adding a prefatory drumbeat, Savall deployed his old instruments in such a way that the work became both a third valid version between the familiar ones for piano and for orchestra, and an old Pavan reclaimed from its Renaissance dance origins. Played with quintessential Ravelian tendresse, the tempo was not so slow as to provoke the wrathful shade of the great Maurice, who when on earth would tell sluggish performers, “It’s the Infanta that’s dead, not the music”! But he surely rested content, celebrated so superbly well in his birthplace.
Roy's press trip was funded by the Festival Ravel
