LENOX – At Tanglewood it was a weekend of highs and lows, many of them French.
Lets start with the good news, most of which was connected to the debonair French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, who arrived last week with armfuls of Ravel, almost every piece the composer had written for piano, decanted over two solo recitals in Ozawa Hall (the first of which was reviewed by the Globe on July 21) and one orchestral program on Sunday afternoon in the Koussevitzky Music Shed.
This was a true marathon and Thibaudet was the man to do it. Ravel has fascinated him since his earliest days as a pianist and he studied with a teacher, Lucette Descaves, who represented a direct link to the master.
On Sunday, supported by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Emmanuel Krivine, Thibaudet tripped jauntily through Ravels Piano Concerto in G. Its a glittering piece in which the composer claimed he sought a certain unburdened lightness and sheer instrumental brilliance. Other pianists such as Martha Argerich and Pierre-Laurent Aimard have looked for more, prodding the piece around the edges, but Thibaudet on Sunday took Ravel delightfully at his word, flitting through the fast outer movements with unflappable suavity and precision. His tone had a soft focus without losing definition, and the opening paragraphs of the Adagio Assai floated dreamily from the stage at once reverentially hushed and songful.
Thibaudets tone appropriately darkened for Ravels more sharp-edged Left-Hand Concerto – written for the piano virtuoso Paul Wittgenstein, who had lost an arm in the First World War – but even here the notes sparkled like black mica. Under Krivines direction the BSO too often privileged power over finesse, but the work still hit its mark. So did the muscular Bolero and the characterful Mother Goose Suite that rounded out the program.
If the BSO has a long history of distinguished Ravel performances, the same cannot quite be said about its track record with the French Baroque composer Jean-Philippe Rameau, whose suite from Pigmalion showed up on Friday nights program and, alas, marked the nadir of the orchestras summer season. The BSO had not played a single note of Rameau in over 15 years, and it showed in the tentative, slack, and stylistically adrift playing in which tempos dragged and the textures of this pellucid score were too often thick and muddy. Some of the same qualities found their way into Bachs Orchestral Suite No. 4. Given how rarely the orchestra surveys Baroque territory these days and how few rehearsals any program can receive at Tanglewood, the deck seemed stacked against the debuting Spanish conductor Pablo Heras-Casado. One hopes he will have another chance to make a better impression.
Fridays main draw was mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, tapped here to open the program with music from one of her signature roles, as Iphignie (from Glucks Iphignie en Tauride). Supported by a fine quartet of Tanglewood Music Center sopranos, Graham was in splendid voice and brought the music across with a luxurious, well-focused tone and plenty of dramatic conviction. She returned on the second half with two excerpts to savor, from Handels Alcina and Ariodante.
Saturday nights orchestral offerings had an altogether different feel thanks to the vibrant, caffeinated conducting of Jaap van Zweden, music director of the Dallas Symphony, in his BSO debut. Things got off to an auspicious start with Steven Stuckys mesmerizing Rhapsodies (2008), a curtain-raiser that plays ingeniously with aural depths of field, here given a reading both taut and invigorating. Unfortunately, those qualities didnt carry into soloist Arabella Steinbachers subsequent account of the Brahms Violin Concerto, which favored lumbering tempos and a refined but largely impersonal approach to the solo line.
I was struck by the performance of Beethovens Seventh Symphony that van Zweden and the BSO pulled out after intermission. They were working against withering heat and humidity, and that generalized summer lethargy that sometimes collects around the umpteenth airing of any Beethoven symphony in the Shed. Yet despite some rough spots, they summoned a lean and crackling performance that wedded inevitability and surprise. For his part, van Zweden radiated energy from the podium, chose relatively brisk tempos, and led the orchestra as if he expected nothing less than exactly what he received.
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