French conductor Alexandre Bloch gave much more than a lick and a promise to these colourful but familiar works, firing up the imagination with shimmering imagery and a healthy sprinkle of fairy tale magic as he brought his impressive Orchestre National de Lille to Cadogan Hall in a mostly French programme to excite the senses and get the juices flowing. And while, clichéd though it is, it always feels somehow more satisfying to have French music played by a French orchestra, even in these days of the more ‘international’ orchestral sound, there was also a neatness in having a few fairy tales thrown in, particularly as they also originated from France. Even the obligatory Beethoven in his celebratory year had a touch of the Beauty and the Beast about it.
Debussy’s evocation of the sea, Ravel’s children’s pieces and his dazzlingly fractured waltz full of sonorous intent were enough to make you drool. But Bloch didn’t do this purely through orchestral effect, but through meticulous detail, precision and balance, starting in the playground of our imagination with Ravel’s orchestratral suite version of Ma Mère l'Oye (Mother Goose). Bloch is one of the most animated conductors you’re ever likely to see, but here he showed off Ravel’s more low-key and subtle side, with a lithe smoothness in the opening Pavane and bringing out the more delicate instrumentation and varied textures with cohesion. The transparency and accuracy of the strings was a real treat, alongside cosy woodwinds and a particularly rich horn sound, and a satisfyingly growling contrabassoon and soaring violin solo in the fourth piece (The Conversation of Beauty and the Beast).
The orchestral colour moved up a notch in Debussy’s La Mer, Bloch making the most of the ONL’s capacity to create unsettled effects through agitated strings, weaving woodwinds and agile brass and carefully picking out orchestral spectra in the composer’s constant shape-shifting, alternating between coldness and warmth and building turbulent undercurrents. Strained harmonic tensions against increasingly aggressive strings sweeping across the vista revealed a magical and mysterious layer of sound culminating in a thrilling climax.