Tight control of all things musical is the hallmark of a performance by Donald Runnicles when he is on the podium with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. As Principal Guest Conductor for over a decade and a half, Runnicles appears to have developed a very productive and respectful musical relationship with the ASO that leads to top-tier performances. Their performances of late 19th-century and mid-20th-century French music in this concert continued that strong partnership.
Debussy’s Trois Nocturnes is a shimmering musical canvas, inspired by James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s impressionist paintings of the same name. While Debussy is said to have disliked being labeled “an Impressionist composer” he nevertheless described his work as providing impressions of the effects of light. Nocturnes is a popular concert piece partly because it showcases the composer’s skill with orchestration, as well as his ability to create diaphanous sounds even when employing a full symphony orchestra. The first movement, “Nuages”, makes use of organum, a medieval form of polyphony where groups of instruments play the same melody but transposed by an interval. The woodwinds were assured and precise in their depiction of the illusiveness of clouds. The middle section of the second movement, “Fêtes”, features the brass and percussion in a raucous street party-like scene. Unfortunately, the acoustics of Symphony Hall muddy the sound of a full orchestral forte, thereby robbing this section of some of its transparency. The final movement, “Sirènes”, includes a wordless chorus, here featuring the well-prepared female voices of the ASO Chorus. It was a shimmering performance.
The 1949 Concerto for flute and strings by Andre Jolivet featured as soloist one of the orchestra’s finest first chairs, flutist Christina Smith, who never fails to impress with her musical and technical artistry. She provided an outstanding performance with spot-on intonation in this somewhat odd and quirky piece of music. Jolivet’s compositional style in the concerto is firmly rooted in the mid-20th century, where melody and cohesion often take a back seat to dissonance and color. The challenging flute solo at times only seems to be providing accents to the string parts. Yet when the flute is prominently stating its own thematic material, it often seems unrelated to what the strings are playing. It is as if the composer was developing two different works but decided to combine them. In fact, the flute could be playing in one hall and the strings in another and the listener would not necessarily find either insufficient on its own. In addition to Smith’s fine performance, the ASO strings were precise and together, with Maestro Runnicles keeping a good balance between them and the soloist.