War and Peace in Aix-en-Provence

Perhaps it was more by chance than design that major works by Shostakovich, whose 50th anniversary of his death occurs this year, featured prominently two nights running as Renaud Capuçon’s Festival de Pâques entered its final weekend. Either way, following a Thursday night Tenth Symphony from the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Friday night saw Gautier Capuçon join forces with Pierre Bleuse to perform the First Cello Concerto, completed in 1959 for Mstislav Rostropovich. Bleuse was at the helm of his 2021-founded Orchestre du Festival Pablo Casals of young musicians from that festival’s academy.

No settling-in moments from Capuçon after swiftly striding onstage. Instantly head down and cutting straight into his cello upon contact with his chair, Bleuse and the orchestra right with him, and then...what playing. A sharply clipped and mechanistic sound world – virtuosically so, from orchestra and soloist – faithful to the score’s lightness but giving not an inch to jocularity; Capuçon’s bleakly horror-stricken lines winding their tension tighter and tighter. Bleuse looked for all the world, with arched back and arms spectrally raised, wrists ticking downwards, like some spider of death. The movement’s eventual concluding chord – a split-second, guillotine-speed punch with instant cut-off – had the power to suck the air out of the room.

This was equally music to knock the air out of a person. It was also theatre (uncontrivedly so), heightened now as finally Capuçon unfolded himself from his cello, rested back and looked heavily upwards, as Bleuse ushered his players into their slowly searching, eerily floating, nocturne-cum-funeral-march – itself most memorable for when whispering celesta found and locked with Capuçon’s harmonics for the pair to float onwards through a duet of harrowingly perfect tonal matching and line-catching. Silence hung heavy over Capuçon’s cadenza until, as it gathered in dangerous speed and violence, he suddenly let rip a spontaneous growl of anger towards his instrument; and a second soon after the orchestra’s similarly violent, razor-sharp, virtuosically superglued re-entry, as their charged Allegro non troppo powered inexorably towards its final bang. How on earth had such supreme chamber playing been achieved by an orchestra whose average age is 23, that spends but a few weeks together each year? In that moment, who cared? Tumultuous applause. Capuçon and Bleuse, longstanding friends, leapt to embrace – before a softly sombre, significance-weighted encore: Pablo Casals’ haunting musical plea for world peace, his arrangement of the traditional Catalan song, Le Chant des oiseaux.

Then after menace and mourning, the tonic: a light, bright, dancingly spring-fresh Schubert “Great” C major Ninth Symphony, its bucolic qualities further heightened by Bleuse’s unusual orchestral layout which had the woodwinds seated at the front in a semi-circle around him – its players radiating soloistic pep in response – and strings behind, the two double basses tucked into the centre of the brass. This is a symphony so long that it wasn’t until the early 20th century that it was habitually performed uncut. Add how large Schubert the Lieder writer looms in its many loopings back to identical material. It takes a conductor with a bottomless bag of new ideas for the interest not to sag – and with Bleuse and his musicians the fresh twists of colour, texture, emphasis, tempo and articulation kept coming with kaleidoscopic variety, speed and unflagging energy. Add satisfyingly fulsome brass and, while no second half could eclipse what we’d had in the first, it punched as high, while providing balm the soul. There was no further encore. None was needed.

Charlotte's press trip was funded by the Festival de Pâques d'Aix-en-Provence