Debussy, Stravinsky, Sibelius: three aesthetics, three sets of demands. Between the orchestral fluency of Clair de lune, the telluric tension of the Rite and the introspection of the Violin Concerto, the evening is marked by the presence of Midori, a towering figure of the violin, whose Sibelius is awaited as the high point of the concert.
PROGRAMME:
Claude Debussy / André Caplet – Clair de lune (arranged for orchestra)
Igor Stravinsky – The Rite of Spring
Jean Sibelius – Concerto for violin and orchestra in D minor, op. 47
As a prelude to its Spanish tour, the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande appeared at the Victoria Hall in Geneva on 5 February 2025 alongside the violinist Midori, with a demanding programme. Debussy, Stravinsky, Sibelius: three visions of sound, three explorations of timbre and rhythm. An evening of influences and confluences.
A Debussian print
This Clair de lune can be heard as the serene counterpart to La Mer. The solo violin traces a pared-down line, a sketch of absolute delicacy. The stroke does not waver, seeks no effect, and settles with exactness. Jonathan Nott brings out the individual desks without ever diluting the structure. The woodwind add light shadows, the strings support without weighing anything down. The whole plays on transparencies and on breathing, and finds the precise balance between fluency and architecture. Everything is a matter of controlled lightness. Nothing is heavy, nothing is effaced. The conductor gives space without losing the line, avoids all mannerism, and favours clarity of gesture. A suspended moment, a reading that refuses easy solutions and restores the bare outline without coldness, the gentleness without softness. The charm of a Verlainian print, the light of Horace Vernet’s skies.
The Rite of Spring: a sculpted primitivism, an inheritance assumed
The entry of the solo bassoon, slightly behind in its rhythmic placement and its intonation, allows a moment of fragility to show, quickly recovered by the orchestra’s cohesion. The woodwind weave a shifting fabric, diffuse at first, gaining in intensity with each added instrument.
From these opening bars Jonathan Nott offers a reading at once fluid and taut. The French inheritance is everywhere present, not least in the handling of timbre and of harmonic transitions. Where some conductors harden the line, Nott favours breath and suppleness of phrasing.
The rhythmic supports are never static: each motif takes its place within a larger dynamic, a flow of sound that absorbs the tensions without ever freezing the pulse. The orchestra advances by successive stages, always leaving room for the sound to expand.
In this section some conductors take a frontal, brutal approach that puts the rhythmic shock first at the expense of fine articulation. Jonathan Nott chooses differently: the attacks are clean and incisive but never crushing. The energy comes not from pure percussive impact but from the layering of rhythmic strata.
The strings do not merely hammer; they weave a shifting fabric, and every sforzando belongs to a larger dynamic. Stravinsky’s jagged writing, so often reduced to a primitive effect, recovers here its internal complexity. The approach recalls the principles of orchestral colouring dear to Rimsky-Korsakov: variations of timbre and texture matter as much as the brute force of the rhythmic impact.
In the “Ritual of Abduction”, the influence of Mussorgsky becomes dazzling. The percussion are not hammered but sculpted within the orchestral space, with a play of resonances that recalls the choral writing of Boris Godunov. The strings do not crush the woodwind lines: they create a floating pulse, a fragile balance between tension and suspension.
In the “Dance of the Earth”, the orchestra reaches a phenomenal power without ever tipping into excess. The violins, pushed to the limit of their capacities, do not scatter into uncontrolled chaos. The conductor’s left hand always imposes an exemplary legibility and an elegance, and every dynamic accent belongs to an implacable progression.
The brass, projected into the sound space with surgical precision, never saturate the orchestral mass. Each desk remains distinct, each impact finds its echo in the underlying harmonic planes.
In the second part the structure changes. The orchestra no longer plays on brute motor energy but on a progressive build-up of tension, an architecture of sound in continuous expansion. The woodwind do not recede; they take an essential place, reintroducing elements of archaic incantation. The “Mystic Circle of the Young Girls” becomes a genuine orchestral psalm, a harmonic litany in which the Mussorgskian inheritance returns in another form. The percussion, far from an indistinct hammering, create zones of suspension, a space in which the tension never fully relaxes.
In the “Sacrificial Dance” there is a measured release, an inexorable ascent within a structure of perfect legibility. The ending does not throw itself into chaos; it is accomplished with tragic necessity, an implacable logic that avoids every gratuitous effect. Jonathan Nott does not try to impress by brute force. His conducting does not push the orchestra into exacerbated violence but sculpts a sound that restores to Stravinsky all his harmonic and orchestral complexity. A real lesson in musical intelligence.
The Violin Concerto: the apotheosis of dance
From the first bars everything is said: Midori establishes a tone, a sonority — full, warm, velvety. The orchestra melts into the violinist’s sound, absorbs her inflections, sculpts a shifting setting, always under tension. The lower strings unfold a woody colour of rare depth, a full sonority: every note seems to carry its exact weight in the building of the phrase. Midori seeks no effect. The bow digs into the material, anchors itself in the violin’s resonance without ever slackening the tension. The low register sounds with a contained intensity; the attacks are precise, biting, without hardness. In the ascents the intonation remains beyond reproach, and the passage from low to high is made with a suppleness recalling the fluency of a perfect legato. The sound keeps its thickness even in the highest registers. This capacity to maintain an even sonority across the whole range, without break, without loss of substance, places Midori among the great interpreters of the work. This reading is far from the more carnal interpretations of Oistrakh, or the more virtuosic ones of Hilary Hahn or of the young María Dueñas, who has lately made her mark in this repertoire with a more spontaneous, youthful and dramatic approach. Midori, by contrast, builds an architecture of sound, a clarity that sacrifices nothing of the emotion. The orchestra adapts to this conception: never too present, never effaced, it knows how to stand back when the violin takes up its song, then return to relaunch the dynamic. In the moments where soloist and orchestra intertwine, the fusion reaches a perfection rarely heard.
In the Adagio the clarinets open the movement like a suspended call. The resonances already recall the Fifth Symphony, a future echo of the flight of swans. Midori lets lines sing that seem to stretch beyond time. The vibrato, measured, never disturbs the purity of the emission. Every note is placed with absolute precision, without the least expressive overload. The passages in the middle register keep an almost vocal warmth, while the high notes attain an unreal transparency. The orchestra becomes a shifting setting, never fixed, and the pizzicati, the held wind notes and the muffled brass timbres create a floating space, a kind of halo of sound around the soloist. The balance between soloist and orchestra is remarkable. Too often this movement suffers from an accompaniment either too dense or too distant. Here every element finds its place, neither crushing the violin nor isolating it. The close of the movement deserves particular mention: that final triple piano, of an airborne grace, touches on a kind of sonic ideal. Midori, absolute mistress of dynamic control, makes the space vibrate on an invisible thread. Nothing is emphasised, nothing forced; everything is held in a balance of infinite delicacy.
The third movement opens on a rhythmic impulse that never flags. Midori approaches this finale with a feline lightness, a suppleness of attack that lets her breathe perpetual energy into it without stiffness. The interval leaps, so demanding in this concerto, are executed with formidable precision. The spiccato, chiselled to perfection, never loses intensity even in the swiftest passages. The détaché remains firm and clean without ever jarring the overall line. In the high register one reaches a purity of sound that recalls the greatest versions. One thinks of Heifetz’s brilliance, of Oistrakh’s heightened tension; but here the reading never tries to crush the score beneath a technical demonstration. Everything serves the movement, the breath that animates this finale. In this performance energy and finesse coexist without cancelling each other out. This Allegro, so often taken as a virtuoso showpiece, recovers here its full dramatic — and, let us say it, dancing — function.
Midori’s Sibelius is as striking for its musical intelligence as for its technical command. Every sound, every nuance is conceived within a sonic balance that avoids both overload and dryness. A suspended moment, a lesson in interpretation, a vision that assuredly belongs among the modern references for the concerto.
As an encore Midori chose Bach, revealing another side of her art. The Preludio from the Partita No. 3 in E major, BWV 1006, is often approached as a purely technical challenge, a torrent of notes in which speed prevails. Here there is nothing mechanical, nothing cold: every note vibrates with a singing clarity, a fluency that gives the discourse absolute self-evidence. The double stops are never brutal, the sequences seek no effect. Everything seems to flow in an organic movement, a natural and warm breathing that never constrains the line. The phrasing is drawn with great elegance, letting a real architecture of sound show beneath the surface of the virtuosity. Midori chooses suppleness over metronomic rigour, song over demonstration. The reading always keeps that sense of dance inherent in the Partitas, a subtle swing that gives every motif a living dimension. A performance of luminous precision, in which one finds all the refinement and the power of her approach. Here is a Bach that breathes, that dances, that sings.
This evening was not merely a concert: it was a lesson in musicianship, a model of conducting, and a celebration of sonic intelligence.
Read also: Sibelius, Ligeti and Beethoven — Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Hannu Lintu in Geneva · Ode to Nature — Daniele Gatti and the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande
