Harding Leads French Orchestra without Audience

Last month the Orchestre philharmonique de Radio France, the resident orchestra affiliated with Radio France, decided to break its silence with a broadcast of a performance played in the Radio France Auditorium without an audience physically present. More specifically, the program was presented by a reduced string section conducted by Daniel Harding, whose two selections were separated by a solo clarinet performance by Jérôme Voisin. The concert took place this past June 18 and was captured on video on a Web page created by the ARTE television channel in France.

The string players were deployed across the generous space that the stage afforded. Nevertheless, there were still pairs of musicians sharing a single stand. Presumably, the performance was preceded by some level of testing. Voisin was the most “socially distanced” performer, playing his solo up in the audience terrace section above and behind the stage.

The two string selections were both composed in the same decade but could not have been more distinctively different. The program began with the music that Igor Stravinsky composed for the ballet “Apollo.” As was discussed on this site this past May, George Balanchine created the ballet “Apollo” for the Ballets Russes, which first performed it in Paris in 1928. Stravinsky had begun work on the score in 1927. The concluding offering was Alban Berg’s arrangement of the second, third, and fourth movements from his Lyric Suite, which he composed for string quartet between 1925 and 1926. The string ensemble version was composed in 1928.

Given my “deep dive” into Balanchine’s choreography in May, it was not difficult for me to see at least a rough approximation of the ballet “in the mind’s eye.” Harding’s conducting left me with the impression that he, too, had seen the ballet performed and assigned tempos to each of the sections that would have been appropriate for dancing. Nevertheless, the camera work for this concert was particularly informative in calling out the many different solo passages in the score. (Most ballet lovers are probably only aware of the extended violin solo that depicts Apollo’s first experience in making music at the beginning of the ballet’s second tableau.) Indeed, thanks to the well-conceived approach to video capture, the attentive listener could appreciate just how the interleaving of the instrumental parts complemented Balanchine’s choreography, particularly where it involves Apollo’s interactions with the three muses.

While the performance of Stravinsky’s score can provide a new perspective of how he first worked with Balanchine, I do not find the string orchestra arrangement of the Lyric Suite movements equally informative. Most importantly, the quartet version has an overall architecture that was clearly well considered. Here are the tempo markings for the original six movements:

1. Allegretto gioviale
2. Andante amoroso
3. Allegro misterioso – Trio estatico
4. Adagio appassionato
5. Presto delirando – Tenebroso
6. Largo desolato

What should be immediately apparent is the strict alternation between fast and slow movements. However, when one unpacks the qualifiers, one discovers that the fast movements keep getting not just faster but more frenetic (from jovial to delirious), while the slow movements keep getting slower and more despondent (from amorous to desolate).

Whether or not that architecture was intended to reflect the different facets of the illicit relationship Berg supposedly had while writing the suite, the “landscape of mood shifts” is distinctively lost when the second, third, and fourth movements are “Untimely ripp’d” from the “dispositional architecture” of the original score. Nevertheless, Harding and his ensemble had to play with the cards that had been dealt. For the most part, they gave a clear and expressive account of those three movements. Here, again, the attentive listener could appreciate that there were as many subtle variations in texture as those encountered in the “Apollo” score (making this one of those rare occasions in which Stravinsky and Berg can share a single sentence with a positive connotation).

Clarinetist Jérôme Voisin playing the Messiaen selection (screen shot from the video being discussed)

The “intermezzo” that Voisin performed between these two selections was “Abîme des oiseaux” (abyss of birds), from Olivier Messiaen’s “Quatuor pour la fin du temps” (quartet for the end of time). As many readers probably already know, Messiaen wrote this composition while a prisoner of war at Stalag VIII-A in Nazi-held Görlitz during World War II. The quartet players were clarinetist Henri Akoka, violinist Jean le Boulaire, cellist Étienne Pasquier, and Messiaen himself at the piano. Messiaen began by working on “Abîme des oiseaux,” the third movement of an eight-movement score, consulting closely with Akoka to learn more about his clarinet technique.

One might argue that “Abîme des oiseaux” is as much out of content as the three Lyric Suite movements that Berg arranged for string ensemble. However, to the extent that it was the seed from which the entire quartet grew, the context is decidedly different from that of the Berg selection. Indeed, the clarinet solo is practically long enough to serve as a composition unto itself. The music itself presents Messiaen at his most expressive, while also informing the listener about how the composer was influenced by the sounds of birds and other natural settings. In addition, there was a poignancy in Voisin’s solitude up there in the terrace that seemed an appropriate context for Messiaen’s own description of this movement in terms of sadness and loneliness.

The Web page created for this concert is supposed to remain in place through June 17, 2022. This performance is a journey well worth taking. However, given the context in which it took place, it may well deserve viewing sooner, rather than later.