Tilting at windmills at the Festival Ravel

Wednesday’s pair of concerts at the Festival Ravel offered contrasting programming experiences. The early evening chamber programme, at the Église Notre-Dame-de-l'Assomption in Ascain, had the perfect trajectory: three works building from solo clarinet (and taped “shadow”) to string quartet to septet, the divine Introduction et Allegro. Alternatively, the late evening concert by the Orchestre de Chambre Nouvelle-Aquitaine suffered from a bitty programme – four soloists and a long stage reset for the world premiere of Martin Matalon’s piano concerto – lacking direction or a central focus.

It’s not only Ravel celebrating an anniversary (150) this year. France’s great musical iconoclast Pierre Boulez was born a hundred years ago and shares the platform with Ravel in four programmes this week. Dialogue de l'ombre double (Dialogue of the Double Shadow) was inspired by a specific scene in Paul Claudel’s 1924 play The Satin Slipper where the shadow of a man and a woman projected onto a wall come together. The clarinettist, here the excellent Nicolas Baldeyrou, “dialogues” with his surround-sound shadow, a pre-recorded clarinet part, spatialised by means of six loudspeakers placed around the audience.

It’s a virtuosic piece, full of trills and tremolos, flutter-tonguing, rapid grace notes and grungy overblown growls, Baldeyrou fully meeting its challenges. The dynamic level of the pre-recorded clarinet part sometimes felt too loud, but this will always depend on where the individual audience member is positioned – a tricky balance.

Two Ravel masterpieces completed the hour-long recital. The Belcea Quartet has performed at the festival before, but its only representative this year is its superb leader Corina Belcea, to head a specially formed string quartet for Ravel’s only essay in the genre. It took a while for the group to hit their stride – the thrust and parry of the pizzicato second movement felt tame, its slow, viola-led central section a little too indulgent – but they scaled down to an incredibly soft dynamic in the Très lent third movement, followed by a finale full of élan.

Then we arrived at the summit, a truly delightful performance of Ravel’s Introduction et Allegro, the string quartet and Baldeyrou joined by flautist Aliya Vodovozova and Anneleen Lenaerts to lead what is, in effect, a miniature harp concerto. It’s easy to make the harp glitter and sparkle, but what impressed here was the sheer range of rich tonal colours Lenaerts displayed, particularly in her long cadenza where time felt suspended. I, for one, would have been perfectly happy for the piece never to have ended.

The late evening concert was held at the new Centre culturel Peyuco Duhart, a concrete brutalist throwback only opened two years ago. The hotchpotch programme opened with two Debussy numbers, expertly orchestrated by Ravel, which demonstrated the satisfying playing of the Orchestre de Chambre Nouvelle-Aquitaine and the uninspiring direction of Jean-François Heisser.

Cervantes’ Don Quixote has long attracted composers and the concert’s smartest bit of programming paired two sets of songs by Ravel and Jacques Ibert which both came via the same route. Film director Georg Pabst was preparing a cinematic version, to star legendary bass Fyodor Chaliapin. He commissioned Ravel to write four songs but Ravel, gravely ill by 1932, was only able to complete three. Pabst fired him and hired Ibert to do the job instead. Ravel’s trio of songs was published as Don Quichotte à Dulcinée, his final work, while Ibert’s go under the collected title Chansons de Don Quichotte. They make for rewarding listening. Allen Boxer sang with a charcoal soft baritone and fine diction, although was stretched by a few upper notes.

Young violinist Iris Scialom played a fiery Tzigane, which deserved a more fiery orchestral response than she received, and soprano Apolline Raï-Westphal sang the Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé with bright tone and eager phrasing.

Then came the lengthy stage reset for Matalon’s Trame XV, inspired by Ravel’s piano repertoire, so the programme told us, with Heisser himself as soloist, both on a grand piano and, in the third section, on electronic keyboard. The concerto has a slightly sinister jazz feel to it, the spidery solo writing meandering – there was a lot of rest counting going on – until a thumping finale full of sound and fury, signifying… not a lot.

Mark’s press trip was funded by the Festival Ravel.