To describe Wednesday's City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra concert as an evening of contrasts would be an understatement. This applies as much to the actual music as to the performance. Take Poulenc’s Stabat Mater – the only tongue-in-cheek setting of this text ever composed? That, at least, seemed to be the primary question posed in Kazuki Yamada’s transparent reading of the work. His uncharacteristically low-key presence on the podium only made Poulenc’s stylistic pivoting seem all the more wildly ridiculous and irreverent. What emerged was a starkly polarised music, one pole rooted in overblown ferocity, where phrases stabbed like knife points. The combined forces of the CBSO Chorus and Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra Chorus could hardly have given more, their controlled but shouty demeanour ideally suited to Poulenc’s material.
At the other end of the continuum was a kind of stylised stoicism, superficially downcast but suggesting an outlook concerned less with grief than with the most appropriate outfit to wear to the funeral. Here, too, Yamada kept a lid on things, allowing the music to speak for itself without wallowing. Thus, Poulenc’s ostensible solemnity sounded by turns opulent and cheesy. Only in the unaccompanied portions, the Tasmanian Chorus now simple and unadorned, did one feel anything approaching authenticity. In some ways soprano Eleanor Lyons was a perfect barometer, channelling both the floating coolness (with extremely impressive high register notes) and the swooping angularity of these stylistic extremes. One was left with the impression of a composer caught between his own contrasts of attitude, attempting to posture, strike an upbeat pose, yet also revealing glimpses of something more darkly genuine.
Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major proved problematic. Not so much the opening Allegramente, where the CBSO was clearly positioned in an elaborative role, their squalling, jazzy asides, energetic bursts and dreamy lyricism emanating from Fazıl Say’s prominent point of origin. Both Yamada and Say’s embracing of the work’s volte-faces made it feel like tumbling between worlds: now light and saccharine, now wrapped in ethereal beauty, now drivingly ebullient.
Things went awry thereafter, Say playing the central movement as if to himself, locked into a basic, plodding momentum that reduced its waltz-like possibilities to something relentless. The closing Presto lacked coherence, with the different sections of the orchestra like disjunct fragments Ravel had crudely cut and pasted together, only occasionally sounding as a unity. Not only was Fazıl Say an entirely separate entity here, but his doggedly metric approach made the piano material feel calculated rather than spontaneous and playful. Say’s brief but spectacular encore, featuring his own improvised take on Mozart’s Rondo alla Turca, left one frustrated at finally hearing what had been so lacking in the Ravel.
A new kind of polarity emerged in the two suites from Daphnis et Chloé. Suite no. 1, which opened the concert, was made to feel like a curiously extended sequence of transitions. Always leading somewhere but never arriving, the music spoke as so many changes of mind, with Yamada leaning into its few concrete moments almost in desperation. The gentler passages were beautifully shaped into hovering, tremulous textures, injecting uncertainty into their sensual ideas, though the climax just sounded bombastic. Suite no. 2, which opened the second half, stood in complete contrast. Its beautiful flurries of awakening progressing from nothing to warm effulgence. Inner details were clear, melody emerged organically, the whole carried by a delightful sense of weightlessness, the strings wrapping the flute solo in a cotton-like mandorla. The closing Danse générale had not a trace of bombast, swinging between short reposes and gloriously exuberant peaks.
