Denève, Thibaudet provide French connection to NSO’s Russian-themed program
Jean-Yves Thibaudet performed Khachaturian’s Piano Concerto with Stéphane Denève and the NSO Thursday night. Photo: Andrew Eccles
Stéphane Denève had a flirtation with the National Symphony Orchestra earlier in his career. After the French conductor’s 2005 NSO stint, critic Tim Page even suggested Denève as a successor to Leonard Slatkin as music director. Since then, Denève has taken up posts with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and the New World Symphony. His return to the NSO Thursday night in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall made one think about what might have been had a Denève era followed that of Leonard Slatkin.
Twenty years ago with the NSO, Denève conducted a piece by Guillaume Connesson, a French film and orchestral composer he continues to champion. Connesson’s music also opened this program, his Maslenitsa being an energetic and pleasing evocation of Russian music that closed Connesson’s trilogy in homage to music from Italy, Germany, and Russia. The title refers to the pre-Lenten festival in Russia, a time of celebration analogous to Mardi Gras and Carnival.
The choice felt apt on a program devoted to Russian music. The outer fast sections, depicting the hurly-burly of a popular street fair, recalled Stravinsky’s “Shrovetide Fair” music in Petrushka. High clarinets chattered excitedly, and raucous brass provided occasional explosions of sound. A softly tolling bell marked the transition to the gloomy middle section, with planing chords in the low strings. Denève, who has also made a fine recording of this work with the Brussels Philharmonic, balanced and cleanly demarcated every aspect of the score.
Aram Khachaturian’s Piano Concerto, once a signature piece for American pianist William Kapell, has fallen off programming lists for the most part. French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, who has just released a recording of this daring work with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, deserves many plaudits for bringing it back to the NSO. He bounded through the first movement, at a pace somewhat faster than the score indicates, producing maximum thrill, if occasional loginess in the main theme’s hammered parallel chords.
Thibaudet excelled in the slower secondary theme of this movement, given at length to the piano soloist in a long cadenza. No surprise that the highlight of the concerto was the folk-centered slow movement, sparked by the somber solo playing of bass clarinetist Peter Cain. An even more marvelous thing happened when percussionist Erin Dowrey took a seat between the violin sections to play the otherworldly part Khachaturian gave to a musical saw. An actual saw played with a large bow along its straight edge, it produced a humming sound, a striking homespun analog to the electric theremin.
Denève guided the NSO through Thibaudet’s mercurial pacing in the third movement as well. Thibaudet, now 63, still has serious technical chops, and he wove and darted his way through the comic strokes of this finale, with another daring cadenza. In response to the audience’s enthusiastic applause, he offered a more circumspect encore, a glistening rendition of “La Cathédrale Engloutie,” from Book 1 of Debussy’s Preludes.
Since Gianandrea Noseda conducted Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition at the start of this season, one could be excused for thinking it was not worth hearing again so soon. Denève, however, hit all the right marks in a brilliantly detailed interpretation of this perennial favorite, orchestrated so vividly by Maurice Ravel. Denève invited the listener to lean in and examine the small brushstrokes of each picture in this depiction of an exhibit of art works by the composer’s friend Viktor Hartmann.
Every member of the orchestra played with confidence, a tightness of ensemble one must ascribe to the clarity of Denève’s beat and the surety of his ideas. Principal trumpeter William Gerlach played gleaming solos in the Promenade movements, with a tightly coiled repeated-note motif in “Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuÿle.” The alto saxophone in “The Old Castle” and the tenor tuba in “Bydlo” added inimitable character to this quirky score.
Movement after movement, Denève found previously unnoticed sounds, taking time to reveal them with spacious rubato and careful balances. The scurrying sounds of the “Gnomus” movement, the mischievous flutters of the “Ballet of Unhatched Chicks,” and the menacing brass of “Catacombs” all served Mussorgsky’s visual aim. Finally, Denève built the final movement, the “Great Gate of Kyiv,” to a thundering conclusion by beginning it not too ponderously, so that the soft interludes fit into the whole more logically. One hopes that the NSO and Denève will rekindle this old friendship more often in the future.
The program will be repeated 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday. kennedy-center.org
