Just as the finest Stradivarius needs a virtuoso to make it sing, so a crack symphony orchestra needs a conductor of skill and talent to bring it to the heights. The London Symphony Orchestra is on a roll currently, playing like angels for its former and current Chief Conductors, yet the Venezuelan maestro Gustavo Dudamel’s evening of music by Richard Strauss and Ravel was mixed, both in bag and blessing.
Neither composer escaped scot-free, although the Frenchman suited Dudamel better than Strauss. Indeed, his account of the Rapsodie espagnole was a joy, easily the evening’s high spot and a showcase for the orchestra’s capacity for variegated tone and dynamic subtlety. The opening Prélude à la nuit was a gift for the strings who wove magic from Ravel’s delicate scoring, while the two dance movements that followed, Malagueña and Habanera, each wore their essence like a delicious memory. The composition is more a work of pastiche than, say Debussy’s Ibéria, but the conductor brought out all its colours, from an expertly played tambourine-as-castanets to some thrilling spatial effects that filled the Barbican with the intoxication of pure sunshine. Moreover, Dudamel’s colorations brought out a striking kinship between Ravel’s closing Feria and the Firebird ballet that Stravinsky would compose just two years later.
Dudamel turned the composer’s Shéhérazade into a comparable garden of perfumed delights. The LSO sounded rapturous in all three songs and his baton work was absolutely on point. However, just as the poet Léon Leclère adopted the Wagnerian pseudonym Tristan Klingsor because it went from hero to villain in a single name, so the celebrated Latvian diva Marina Rebeka combined exquisite vocalising with the worst French diction I’ve heard in years. Hard to believe that this gleaming soprano has sung Thaïs, Médée and even Elisabeth de Valois – the latter in Paris – in the same language. Ravel’s settings derive so much of their beauty from the delicacy of Klingsor’s French, yet the texts went for nothing. Rebeka affected a suitably languid demeanour from which to deliver them but unfortunately this relaxed state extended to her buccal muscles ('the lips, the teeth, the tip of the tongue'...). The result, for all its voluptuous exoticism, was musical porridge.
And so to Strauss. Dudamel’s way with Don Juan lacked subtlety but the LSO purred like a pre-war Lagonda and powered through the score, its engine tuned to perfection. The Suite from Der Rosenkavalier, on the other hand, was a 21-minute car crash. From the word go, a frenetic dash through the Act 1 Prelude, it sounded suspiciously as though Dudamel didn’t know what the music depicts. His way with the Prelude was sex on speed dial, the rush to climax a short ride in a fast machine in which the orgasmic trio of horn whoops and their subsequent repose barely registered. We know that 17-year-olds (like Octavian) tend to have a spirited libido but this amorous encounter was about as erotic as a tectonic tremor, an aftershock instead of an afterglow.
The waltz of the vulgar Baron Ochs saw matters improve slightly and the great theme shone at every iteration, but the final love duet “Ist ein Traum”, one of the most ineffably beautiful moments in all opera, lacked both finesse and dramatic sensitivity. Whereas Octavian and Sophie are lost in each other, this interpretation was just... lost.
