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Thursday, December 1, 2005
Stephane Deneve conducts the ASO
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW
Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Thursday in Symphony Hall. Program repeats Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. www.atlantasymphony.org.
Stéphane Denève is a young French conductor riding a wave of critical raves. After one hearing, for instance, a Washington Post critic all but suggested the 34-year-old conductor should be next in line as music director of the National Symphony Orchestra — although he’s just started his first significant job, learning the ropes with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, a regional ensemble.
Thursday in Symphony Hall, Denève made his Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. If he wasn’t instantly offered keys to the city, he at least left an uncommonly vivid first impression.
His programming of mostly French music helped. So did the conductor’s showmanship. Tall and crowned with a mop of reddish-brown hair, he spoke with panache and wit to the audience, introducing the first piece: Guillaume Connesson’s “Une Lueur dans l’age somber” (“A Glimmer in the Age of Darkness”), composed this summer and premiered, in Scotland, in September.
The conductor said Connesson, 35, was inspired by a space-telescope photo of light from the other side of the universe. Denève framed our aural impressions by calling the 20-minute work a “cosmic-pastoral symphony.”
“Une Lueur” sounds modern and very French, where harmony is a counterpoint of timbres. It also evokes the gentle atmospherics of Debussy, and places Connesson in the company of other great (and eclectic) Francophone composers like Vivier, Dutilleux and Dusapin.
“Une Lueur” has no “program” or plot line, but there is an arc of a voyage, with audible anchor points and a satisfying sense of resolution.
In Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23, German pianist Lars Vogt seems to share a mindset with Denève. Vogt’s playing was elegant, substantial and surprisingly fresh at each turn. He seems incapable of delivering a routine performance.
There’s a sublime passage, near the end of the concerto’s slow movement, where the strings pluck simple accompaniment and the pianist has just a few notes on the page. Here the soloist is expected to ornament and personalize the phrase. Vogt didn’t embellish at all. By sheer gravitas, he connected each note into a richly detailed, almost operatic lyrical line — it was a moment of subtle, poignant, deep Mozart.
After intermission came Claude Debussy’s “Iberia,” a sort of touristic postcard of Spain. It’s the middle movement from the symphonic triptych “Images.”
By emphasizing the almost mechanical repetitions in the opening and closing sections of “Iberia,” Denève reimagined the composer’s painterly, Impressionistic sound, where the foreground of lissome woodwinds is set against a watery and slow-moving orchestral background.
Although the orchestra often sounded uncertain of where the conductor would lead them next — with a corresponding reduction in ensemble cohesion — the interpretation was smart and rousing, a lucid frenzy.
Denève closed with Maurice Ravel’s “La Valse,” a glittery, ballroom-sized waltz with an unsettling undercurrent suggesting cultural doom.
Here again, Denève precisely and exquisitely balanced the winds against the strings, to ghostly effect. In familiar Ravel, the ASO sounded like its old self, in the most beguiling ways. One expects to be hearing a lot more from Stéphane Denève.
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