CBSO at Symphony Hall ★★★★
This century has seen the belated rise of the female composer. It’s a welcome sign of the times that the CBSO’s composer-in-residence this season is Anna Clyne. Ruth Gipps, who died in 1999, had close connections with the CBSO: she played oboe with the orchestra while her husband Robert Baker was on clarinet. With that first hand knowledge of wind instruments it’s no surprise that the current CBSO section enjoyed themselves performing her mercurial Wind Sinfonietta from 1991 which zips through four contrasted movements in a quarter of an hour, opening with a Pastoral where Rachael Pankhurst’s cor anglais excelled, and a lively scherzo which showcased the orchestra’s horn players.
Few better to conduct the piece than François Leleux, once an orchestral principal oboist and renowned soloist, before taking up the baton. He took both roles in Debussy’s Rhapsody for Cor Anglais and Orchestra which began life as a work for saxophone, but never got past the sketch stage and which Debussy never orchestrated. Here we heard it in the sinuous exotic orchestral version by Gilles Silvestrini. It’s tinged with sounds from the east, reminiscent of the quieter moments of Rimsky’s ‘Scheherazade’, with Leleux’s tone suitably seductive and agile, as in the brief snake-charmer’s passage of rapid passagework. A delightful miniature.
Marie-Christine Zupancic’s flute was languor and shimmering summer heat transformed into sound at the opening of Debussy’s ‘Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun’. Leleux never lapsed into the mistake some conductors make of letting languor slide into torpor; those strange miniature fanfares by the combined oboes and clarinets made their mark before the harp signalled our return to dreamland.
Here in 2024 Kazuki Yamada conducted the most exciting performance of the ‘Symphonie Fantastique’ I’ve ever heard in concert. It was blistering, incendiary, bordering on the deranged. In other words, quintessential Berlioz. Could Leleux match that? In short no – but then he wasn’t trying to. Leleux’s was a Gallic interpretation with lightness, elegance and wit to the fore. His ‘Rêveries – Passions’ sighed and reclined on a chaise longue, rather than raging in existential despair and the scene in the countryside had a neat and trimmed Marie Antoinette playing-at milkmaids rusticity. Leleux’s ‘March to the scaffold’ was taut but the ‘Dream of a witches’ Sabbath’ lacked the unhinged wantonness that Yamada gave us. Leleux's was a plausible reading of the symphony but not one that will linger in my memory.
Norman Stinchcombe