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Wednesday, March 2, 2005
Masur leads Orch National de France at Emory
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW
Orchestre National de France. Tuesday at Emory University’s Schwartz Center for Performing Arts. www.arts.emory.edu.
Wondrous sounds at Emory’s Emerson Concert Hall. The Orchestre National de France, a 70-year-old ensemble linked to government-run Radio France, played with verve Tuesday evening.
It’s a fine, energized group, with an Anglo-Saxon sense of cohesion and weighty substance while retaining something of an old-school French sound and style.
On the podium was German conductor Kurt Masur, a former New York Philharmonic chief, who has led the French National Orchestra since 2002. His sober interpretations — broad, sturdy and dark wood in character — have become part of the ensemble’s personality, too. The drawback of musical globalization is, at least initially, artistic homogeneity.
They started with a rarity: Debussy’s Fantasy for Piano and Orchestra, a pleasantly faceless work from 1890, which the composer withdrew just before its premiere.
Masur and pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet revived the 22-minute quasi-concerto, perhaps as a curiosity, for this U.S. tour. With a piano part that’s demanding without flattering the soloist, it’s no wonder the piece is infrequently heard.
The components hummed nicely for Ravel’s Concerto in G, and the playing was remarkable. Thibaudet is an ace Ravel interpreter, aided by awesome finger strength, taut rhythmic drive and sharp-edged phrasing.
Masur and orchestra delivered a bold and surprisingly affecting reading of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade.” In her violin solos, concertmaster Sarah Nemtanu portrayed the 1001-night storyteller with a dramatic contours and, at times, a dark sense of foreboding.
The second movement is almost a concerto for orchestra, where individual instruments are given brief solo passages — an excellent chance to hear the ensemble section by section. While the oboes and clarinets sang and swayed with an agreeably reedy (and thus almost exotic) tone, the flutes, bassoons and harp had a generic, international timbre. Another Rimsky chestnut, “Flight of the Bumble Bee,” was rather sloppily dispatched as an encore.
Also heard Tuesday was a wondrous improvement in the Emerson’s acoustics. What happened? It seems the team that designed the hall’s sound — Dawn Schuette and her colleagues from the acoustician firm of Kirkegaard Associates — have been tinkering again, plugging light-fixture holes in the ceiling and making other adjustments.
The hall opened several years ago with strained acoustics that did not always make for easy listening. For the first time Tuesday, I felt like I was in the same small room with the musicians on stage. The sound now bathes the listener. It’s still not an ideal place to hear music. People seated in the balcony complain of muddiness in the sound. But Tuesday, from my seat near the rear of the main floor, the improvement was startling. Let’s hope the tinkerings continue.
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