On 13 June 1911 the Ballets Russes gave a memorable evening at which Stravinsky’s Petrushka was heard for the first time. Also played that night, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade must surely have shown the audience of the day the kinship of colour and spirit that binds the two works. For its twentieth anniversary, François-Xavier Roth’s orchestra revives that programme, once conducted by Pierre Monteux, in a recreation on French instruments of the early twentieth century.
A Scheherazade very French in spirit
From the opening of the first movement, “The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship”, the solo violin and the orchestra create a waltz atmosphere that glances at times towards… Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre! What holds the attention is the precision and clarity of Roth’s reading, along with his searching work on the score and the way he reveals Rimsky’s foreign influences, between Wagnerian maritime shimmer and Debussyan languor. The second movement, “The Tale of the Kalendar Prince”, takes us perhaps further still from the work’s Russian orientalism, with some sourness in the sound of bassoon and oboe and a certain placidity, happily lifted by a committed and virtuosic clarinet and by beautiful airborne moments on the violin. The movement proves rustic, vigorous, transparent, but no doubt a little one-dimensional. From the third movement, “The Young Prince and the Young Princess”, one senses a feeling for dialogue, helped by a well-judged legato. The oboe, always elegant; a leader growing ever more at ease in his playing; genuinely poetic moments emerging from this beautiful love scene; a sense of nuance — the audience, won over, even ventures a little applause! The fourth movement, “Festival at Baghdad; the Sea; the Ship Breaks against a Cliff”, is a demonstration of force, a sonic violence, with an ever-keen sense of dance, of animation, of legato. It snarls, with fine commitment from the cellos. The closing bars, spectacular and breathless, then marked by a return of the dreamlike theme of the first movement, draw sustained applause.
Petrushka, a Boulezian foretaste of The Rite of Spring
A complete change of atmosphere with Stravinsky’s ballet Petrushka, of which the composer writes in his autobiography: “the vision of a puppet suddenly endowed with life, exasperating the patience of the orchestra with diabolical cascades of arpeggi. The orchestra in turn retaliates with menacing trumpet blasts.” It is indeed the modernity of the page that Roth brings out, with the same feeling for clarity as a Pierre Boulez, a transparency that digs into the score to let its deeper meaning surface. The first tableau, all mischievous and placid good humour, is already full of colour. Special mention for the percussion, held to the demands of a syncopated and surprising score. It is the modernity of the writing, in all its freshness, that the orchestra brings out, and one can only understand the outraged reviews of the day. The surprise effects, with just the right measure of stridency, angry elisions and jolts, reveal the technical mastery of Les Siècles even more than in Scheherazade. The second tableau explicitly announces The Rite of Spring: formidably difficult, full of contrast, it thrills and disconcerts at once. The third tableau, syncopated and hard, reveals a Fauvist blaze, jolts and modernist anacolutha. The fourth, sharp and contrasted — a shimmering hubbub, yet organised and logical, always transparent (what harps!) — creates a carpet of sound able to conjure a more idiomatic atmosphere, spells, polyphonic layering of the finest effect, with trumpets that anticipate Copland. Between stridencies, rockets of coruscating arpeggios and jolting brass breakaways, Roth closes in style, carrying the audience with him; it reserves sustained applause for the strings and the percussion. The conductor then takes the microphone to pay tribute to Diaghilev and to that great artistic adventure which made Paris a city teeming with the avant-garde. Visibly more at home with Stravinsky’s modernist jolts than with Rimsky-Korsakov’s burnished shimmer, François-Xavier Roth and his orchestra revived in Grenoble something of the Parisian fever of the great Ballets Russes.
Read also: Strauss and Dvořák in Chamber Form — the Camerata RCO in Grenoble
