It’s summer. Who wants to work hard, even at listening? That seemed to be the thinking behind ‘Elegant Impressions’, the Festival Orchestra of Lincoln Center’s offering of French and French-influenced music this weekend, a brief, essentially weightless program in bite-sized pieces with guest conductor Eun Sun Kim. The whole evening contained less than an hour of music; the longest movement was about seven minutes long.
Debussy’s four-movement Petite Suite was originally a four-hands piano duet. Orchestrated by Henri Büsser almost two decades after its composition, it now registers as a prefiguration of Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin, sharing with its more often-performed descendant dance-like rhythms, good humor and a clarity of orchestration. Büsser’s work features the woodwinds, which is the FOLC’s strongest section. They, along with the horns and harp, gave the piece some lovely moments of sinuousness and suspension, despite Kim’s seeming insistence on momentum at the expense of any other quality.
Manuel de Falla wrote his Siete canciones populares españolos (Seven Spanish popular songs) in Paris, where he had been keeping company with and presumably been influenced by contemporaries such as Ravel and Stravinsky. These songs are ‘popular’ in the sense that they are folk songs. The orchestration here is by Ernesto Halffter, from the original for voice and piano. Mezzo-soprano Taylor Raven has a big, rich sound, with more agility and flexibility than one might expect from the size; her ornamentation and runs were always clear and precise. She delivered the material with sincerity without attempting to oversell it. Kim seemed overly cautious about overpowering her in the first couple of songs, but gradually brought the orchestra up to a more appropriate level. In her accompanying role, Kim tempered the pace to accommodate Raven’s phrasing when necessary.
With no such restraining influence, Kim barreled through Poulenc’s Sinfonietta as though she had a plane to catch. It’s not that the tempi were too fast, except for the Andante, which she rendered as more of an Allegretto. It’s that she somehow got this excellent group of musicians to actually rush, beginning measures before the previous ones were actually finished. There were a few moments that showed off their musicality – the lyrical passages and floating textures in the first two movements and the polka-esque sections of the finale stood out – but the overall effect was dispiriting. If this was meant to be a summer treat, it was like cutting open a watermelon to find it overripe inside.
