An evening billed as an “Ode to Nature” can only prompt a fundamental reflection, musicological and philosophical, on the expressive possibilities and the suggestive power of music. If painting gives the real to be seen immediately, music is certainly the most abstract of the arts, quite simply because in itself it describes nothing. We have to wait for the nineteenth century, and for Berlioz’s reflections in particular, before people begin to speak of “programme” works and of symphonic “poems”; then Baudelaire, with his remarkable analyses of the Wagner overtures, came at last fully to admit a possible, if mysterious, universal suggestive power in music. Listening to tonight’s concert of high quality, we can only deepen such reflections on music and the representation of the real — in this instance, nature. And what a fine evening, with the precise and elegant conducting of Daniele Gatti, future chief conductor of the prestigious Staatskapelle Dresden.
Mendelssohn’s Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage: Wagner in England
The evening opens with a rarely played Mendelssohn overture, Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage in D major, op. 27, premiered in 1828, in two tableaux inspired by two short Goethe poems reproduced on the score. The work is a seascape in music, evoking a calm crossing interrupted by a squall before the relief of safe arrival. We are far from the metaphorical landscapes of a Strauss or a Mahler, but under Gatti’s baton this overture reveals its undeniable charms. Gatti, as is well known, was trained as a composer, and is gifted with a prodigious analytical capacity and an intuitive sensibility without equal. His inspired conducting breathes, and manages to weave countless bridges between past intertexts and musical anticipations. So it was that we found ourselves at moments hearing Wagner in this recollected reading, which adopts a broad tempo and lets us glimpse the sensuous phrasing of the Tannhäuser and even the Parsifal preludes. All of which reminds us how far Gatti is a distinguished Wagnerian with much still to give us. But it is rather towards the British Isles that conductor and Orchestre de la Suisse Romande most often look. Through this short voyage we find ourselves watching Constable’s studies of sky and sea file past with their blue-grey shadings, in keeping with the fine lighting work carried out that evening by the Victoria Hall. A very gentle direction, culminating in more assertive passages in the Allegro, full of Victorian elegance; an orchestra of flattering, bronzed colours, with handsome clarinet arabesques. The composer already holds here the main elements of his future Scottish Symphony. The woodwind are to the fore, smiling, while the dialogue between flutes and clarinets takes on an entirely Dvořákian fluency. Gatti’s vigorous beat brings the work to a close with nobility and brilliance.
A Debussy Mer that brings off the union of Romanticism and musical modernity
It is a Mer prodigious in musical intelligence that completes this first half. It can never be said often enough that this piece might be regarded as the composer’s only symphony, spanned by a great arch of sound, an experiment in timbre of unheard-of modernity. Composed in Burgundy, then in Jersey and Dieppe, between 1903 and 1905, the work had a rather poor reception, and one can see why: the misunderstanding that persists even today around this famous score, too often played in post-Impressionist “Technicolor”, needlessly bloated or over-evocative, where what one should see is a symbolist and experimental work.
Gatti’s wager, then, comes off handsomely. Judge for yourself: the first movement, “De l’aube à midi sur la mer”, lets us hear shimmerings worthy of the Adagietto of Mahler’s Fifth, before revealing, at a fairly brisk tempo, details that recall Fauré. Gatti manifestly has a feeling for the work’s overall architecture and an instinct for its blocks of sound, as much as the ability to individualise the desks. This first span ends in a majestic, slow, impressive orchestral tutti. In the second movement, “Jeux de vagues”, some mischievous faun passes by here and there. The harps are remarkable, very audible, creating diamond-bright sonorities, while in the sneering of the brass one senses everything Sibelius would owe Debussy for Tapiola, the Finnish sylvan counterpart to La Mer. Gatti succeeds in capturing the subtlety of this music, letting us hear a mass of detail that is sometimes hard to catch on record or even in concert. Maritime impressions? At times. A work on timbre in the same sense as a Webern? Undeniably. In the refinement, the sinuosities and the abrupt surges — so many flare-ups of Romantic flame (Berlioz!) — Gatti is visibly at ease in this formidably complex score. The third movement, “Dialogue du vent et de la mer”, sets out to be more evocative and more growling. It is precisely the orchestra we hear tonight, with the cohesion and responsiveness of the strings, the poetry of the winds, and brass evoking the spray of Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea as much as the symbolist enigmas of Mallarmé.
Gatti and his players sculpt Kandinskian spheres, far from any picturesque evocation: this is music looking into the abyss and the bitter sea, placing itself in its own abyme. Certain stretches of sound also let us glimpse Puccinian symphonic pages, melancholy nocturnes, with violins of remarkable virtuosity and finesse, while the conductor manages to sculpt a closing trance at force 7 on the Beaufort scale.
La Mer is indeed a set of “games” and a “dialogue” — but with music itself, that “abolished trinket of sonorous inanity”.
A velvety Pastoral in autumn colours
Debussy could wield a murderous pen in his Monsieur Croche, not hesitating to brand the masterpieces: “in short, the popularity of the Pastoral Symphony rests on the misunderstanding that quite generally exists between nature and men. Look at the scene by the brook! A brook where the oxen apparently come to drink (the voice of the bassoons invites me to believe so), to say nothing of the wooden nightingale and the Swiss cuckoo, which belong more to the art of M. de Vaucanson than to any nature worthy of the name. All of it is needlessly imitative, or of a purely arbitrary interpretation.”1 A naïve, purely descriptive evocation of nature was precisely not Beethoven’s intention, as one may suspect, not least when he wrote to the poet Gerhard in 1817: “the description of a picture belongs to painting; the poet too may count himself fortunate to be capable of it, his domain is not as restricted as mine in that respect; but on the other hand mine extends further into other regions, and our empire is not so easily reached.” Music will indeed be the art best able to express what the painter Kandinsky called the “spiritual” in art — those “other regions” of which the composer speaks.
Daniele Gatti is turned wholly towards those musical territories, unrolling a serene and autumnal carpet of sound, a little single-minded, surprisingly, but always absorbing. Far from the spring-like fire of the legendary Pastorals, from Carlos Kleiber to Karajan, Gatti adopts very measured tempi, in keeping with the composer’s markings (Allegro ma non troppo in the first movement). The orchestra offers from the outset a fine reading, all velvet — echoed by the change of stage lighting, now a reddish orange. The conductor’s gestures grow more restrained and let the desks sing, with woodwind as convincing as ever, very gentle strings and — this is in fact the evening’s great merit — pianissimi to revel in: it is very airy and becalmed.
The second movement, Andante molto mosso, the “scene by the brook”, confirms this impression, and the general spirit remains the same: gentleness, velvet, caress, murmur, with a discreetly dancing approach, closer in spirit to Giulini’s Beethoven at La Scala. The specific devices used to evoke birdsong include instrumental trills and cooings, producing an authentic imitation in which the high register naturally serves as the backdrop to the avian song. In a particularly evocative passage, flute and clarinet strike up a dialogue reproducing birdcalls, long before the works of Messiaen. One distinctly makes out the cuckoo’s call, while the flute skilfully imitates a bird whistle, used to attract birds by reproducing their cry artificially but faithfully. It repeats and accelerates a high F, a simulacrum of the nightingale’s song. The oboe answers by imitating the quail’s call, and the clarinet the cuckoo’s. Remarkably, Beethoven himself wrote the names of the three birds into the score, thereby making his imitative intentions undeniably clear, for all his misgivings. But Gatti’s strength lies in giving priority to the overall sense, the architecture, the serene and wholly becalmed vision — which can surprise, so accustomed are we to the genuine sonic dramas most conductors offer. The Allegro, “Merry gathering of country folk”, loses its character of a scherzo glancing towards the popular dances of the later Bruckner symphonies, and becomes instead a fine slow dance, accentuated by Gatti’s movements, in a kind of regular metre. The storm of the Allegro is no grand spectacle, far from picturesque evocation: it is a purely musical movement, a moment of agitation which quickly lets us sense the lull of the final movement, the Allegretto, “Shepherd’s song, happy and thankful feelings after the storm”, still clothed in that disconcerting serenity — after a slight approximation from the solo horn — dancing, and dressed in the warm colours of an autumn late afternoon.
One will grant it: the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande always sounds different according to the conductors who direct it, and this evening allowed us to explore subtle territories, with a Daniele Gatti who ought to count in the European musical landscape, so praiseworthy are his loftiness of view and his command of philological and musical questions. It was indeed an ode to nature tonight — but above all an ode to the nature of music, that ungraspable art. And, to return to our opening question, let us give the last word to Jankélévitch:
“Music is at once expressive and inexpressive, serious and frivolous, deep and superficial; it has a meaning and it has no meaning. Is music an entertainment of no consequence? Or is it a coded language, the hieroglyph as it were of a mystery? Or perhaps both at once?”2
1 Debussy, Monsieur Croche antidilettante, chapter XIII, “Beethoven”
2 Vladimir Jankélévitch, La Musique et l’ineffable, Seuil, 1961
Read also: Sibelius, Ligeti and Beethoven — Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Hannu Lintu in Geneva · Turnage and Vaughan Williams — Daniel Harding and the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande
