Audiences in Davies Hall often combine getting out of their seats after a concert with a standing (or crouching) ovation, but on Sunday night they had no choice: the massive sound of the visiting Royal Philharmonic Orchestra shook the rafters and almost physically pulled the listeners out of their seats to join in the celebration of Stravinsky’s The Firebird.
Respighi’s Fountains of Rome was yet to come at the orchestra’s second concert the next evening — “Neptune in his shell chariot, emerging from beneath the sea and standing under a Roman triumphal arch” — but the Sunday finale foreshadowed Respighi’s bombast.
Not that there is anything wrong with bombast when the heaven-storming sound is of the victory of good over evil, “the dissolution of Kashchei’s enchantments, animation of the petrified warriors, and general thanksgiving,” which also marked the titanic entrance of 27-year-old Stravinsky into the pantheon of great composers.
The Firebird was a splendid affair, even if the composer’s own interpretation reveals more grandeur than a surfeit of decibels. In a slightly different interpretation than the RPO has given during its 50-year association with Charles Dutoit, Thierry Fischer who replaced the RPO’s former artistic director and principal conductor on a little more than a week’s notice before the tour, conducted with precision and élan.
What’s similar between the two Swiss conductors is the lack of posing, the focus on the music. The much younger Fischer, born in Zambia to Swiss parents, is more athletic, of course, but he leads with an economy of movement, giving the deserving musicians of the orchestra a great deal of freedom.
Where Fischer is unequivocal about taking control is in quiet passages: At the beginning of The Firebird, for example, he took a long time before the downbeat, waiting for the concert hall to settle down (although coughing spells continued); the orchestra then produced a breathtaking hush in the low strings, introducing the sorcerer Kashchei’s magical realm.
Orchestral solos over the silken carpet of the strings (Fischer flanked downstage by the first violins and violas in an unusual seating) were exceptional in telling the Firebird’s many adventures, beginning in sequence with principal violist Abigail Fenna and Concertmaster Duncan Ridell.
Woodwinds and brass shone, especially Emily Hultmark’s bassoon introducing the lullaby and Nicolas Fleury’s horn welcoming sunlight. Emer McDonaugh’s flute must have especially pleased the conductor, a prominent flautist himself. Clarinetist Katherine Lacy, oboist John Roberts, and trumpeter Mike Allen contributed mightily. And just whom did we see yonder as the third harpist? It was none other than Douglas Rioth, borrowed from the San Francisco Symphony.
Musicologists may have fun with the debatable program designation advertising the 1910 version, considering that Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes premiered The Firebird that year, and this suite is far from the music played then, nor is it one of the three standard suites that followed over the years. The designation came with the 1926 restaging of the ballet: Go figure.
The first half of the concert went well, even if lacking the heat of the Stravinsky. Debussy's Petite Suite, written for four-hands piano, was heard in an orchestrated version, beginning lyrically but climaxing too loudly in the “Cortège” and the concluding “Ballet.”
Gautier Capuçon was the impressive soloist in Haydn’s Cello Concerto No. 1, sounding powerful and sensitive in turn. He rewarded the standing with an affecting, orchestrated version of Pablo Casals’s “Song of the Birds.”
The orchestra’s second concert in Davies Hall, and the last of the North American tour, was on Monday, the program including Respighi’s Fountains of Rome, Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 2, with Jean Yves-Thibaudet, and Stravinsky’s Petrushka.
