RTÉ NSO/Rophé NCH, Dublin
Ravel – Le tombeau de Couperin. Debussy – Nocturnes. Strauss – Don Quixote
Conductor Pascal Rophé’s frequent guest appearances with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra tend to be memorable less for tonal spit and polish than for his keenly communicative instinct for a grand musical design.
And although last Friday’s first half was devoted to the kind of French repertoire the NSO is associating with Rophé’s visits, the chief interpretive interest was to be reserved until after the interval.
Not that anything was indifferent about the playing either of Ravel's Le tombeau de Couperin, which was efficient almost to the point of haste, or of Debussy's three Nocturnes, of which the last benefitted from confident yet atmospheric contributions from 20 of the women's voices of the RTÉ Philharmonic Choir.
Still, it was hard to resist drawing an admittedly rather unfair comparison with the NSO's positively scintillating accounts, under guest conductor Jonathan Schiffman four weeks previously, of Ravel's La valseand Bolero.
Strauss's Don Quixotemight have been more justly compared with the persuasive recording by the NSO under Gerhard Markson released ten years ago. Yet Rophé's strongly contrasted perspective on this highly sophisticated work invited no such comparison.
It is, of course, up to the listener to focus either on the tale Strauss is re-telling or on his ingenious means of doing so. On this occasion, though, the narrative element seemed to take second place to a coherent, purely musical agenda that revelled in the prescient modernism of Strauss’s daring orchestral onomatopoeia.
Husband-and-wife team Martin and Adèle Johnson vacated their NSO principals’ chairs to take the solo parts respectively for cello and subsidiary viola. Both relished the limelight with an equal and involving verve.
