In the week before Bastille Day, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra went all-out on things Gallic. Not only was the repertoire for this programme exclusively French, but so too were the visiting conductor and the soloist. Stéphane Denève, who occupied the podium, has recorded three discs of the music of his compatriot, Guillaume Connesson, and it was the latter’s Flamenschrift that opened the concert. This ten-minute showpiece is a portrait of Beethoven the man, and it certainly exhibited the German composer’s characteristic phrasal construction and motivic repetition. The orchestra revelled in the furious passagework of the beginning and the final thrilling intensification, but the more lush moments in between were also beautifully characterised by solo woodwinds.
Olivier Latry has been a soloist with the Sydney Symphony before, but not since the major renovation of the concert hall, and aside from the improvements to the acoustics, it was pleasing to see that the sound baffles hanging above the stage were capable of being swiftly raised after each item to allow the audience to see and applaud him.
As soloist in Poulenc’s Organ Concerto in G minor, Latry demonstrated the range of colours the instrument is capable of, from the snarling fortissimo opening to the sweet, almost Vivaldi-esque E minor slow movement. When organ and strings first played together, the latter were rather overshadowed (they did not sound underpowered when playing by themselves), but the balance thereafter was generally fine.
Latry’s encore was perfectly chosen, an arrangement of the Aquarium movement from Saint-Säens’ Carnival of the Animals, delectably registered to capture the mysterious, liquid timbres of the original.
For a certain generation of Australians, the main theme of Saint-Saëns’ Symphony no. 3 in C minor will forever be associated with the film Babe. The journey to the arrival of this fully fledged theme is a lengthy one, of course, even if it is there in embryo in the minor key from the opening pages. Under Denève the SSO delivered a taut Allegro moderato section, with its textural echoes of Schubert’s Unfinished, and a moving Poco adagio (which Saint-Saëns joined directly to the Allegro moderato, creating a composite two-part first movement). The diaphanous dialogue between first and second violins as the slow theme was varied was beautifully done. The Scherzo which begins the second, again bipartite, movement was tightly played, with the Trio sounding even more brilliant.
And then comes the most famous organ interruption in symphonic literature: that redemptive C major chord that ushers in that Babe theme in all its anthemic glory. Coordination between organ and orchestra was not always perfectly managed here; at times the lag between strings and organ in supposedly unison statements of the theme was quite noticeable. Nonetheless, it all built to a thrilling peroration and was deservedly cheered to the rafters... or rather, the organ loft.
