Degout/LSO/Hannigan - Roussel, Ravel, Britten, and Haydn, 13 March 2025

Barbican Hall

Images: Mark Allan

Roussel: Le Festin de l’araignée (symphonic fragments)
Ravel, arr. Anthony Girard: Histoires naturelles
Britten: Les Illuminations
Haydn: Symphony no.104, ‘London’

Stéphane Degout (baritone)
London Symphony Orchestra
Barbara Hannigan (soprano/conductor)

Barbara Hannigan is unquestionably a star in today’s musical firmament. Anyone who has heard (and seen) her Ligeti Mysteries of the Macabre, live or recorded, would neither doubt nor forget that. I have been an admirer, even a devotee since I first heard her, singing songs by Berg and Webern with the Scharoun Ensemble and none other than Pierre Boulez in 2008. Her more recent, yet by now established, forays into conducting, often in combination with song, have never failed to interest and to excite. And she clearly has a deep fondness for Haydn, regularly conducting symphonies from across his œuvre. What, then, is not to like, especially in combination with the LSO and another outstanding artist, Stéphane Degout? 

Very little, in fact, though I found myself somewhat disappointed by the Haydn symphony this time around, it seeming not yet really to have settled. Proceedings nonetheless got off to a fine start with the suite, once popular yet now somewhat out of fashion, from Roussel’s 1913 Diaghilev ballet Le Festin de l’araignée. The parade of animal victims for the spider in his web had a keen narrative thrust, full of character, and vividly but far from only pictorial. Hannigan and the LSO above all imparted a sense of how it ‘moved’, even without dancers. It may not have the magic of, say, Ravel and Debussy, but it charmed, without overstaying its welcome. However different it may be in most respects from more celebrated Ballet russes commissions, there was kinship to be sensed, both in work and performance. It was far-sighted, moreover, of Roussel wittily to write a part for mobile telephone to coincide with nightfall on the lonely garden. Who would have imagined? To quote Edward Bhesania’s programme note on the music itself, ‘Nothing has changed and yet everything has changed.’ 

A piece Ravel did not orchestrate will probably always be too tempting for composers to resist, even if others have had a shot before them. I wish I could say Anthony Girard’s orchestration of Histoire naturelles offered revelations, but it sounded more workaday than that. It was skilful enough and could hardly fail when it came closer to what Ravel himself might have done, but the somewhat heavy string writing (doubtless a sense of mock-gravity to depict the peacock, but was it quite the right sense?) at the opening of the first song, ‘Le Paon’) gave a distinctly odd impression, especially given Degout’s seemingly effortless way with words and music alike. Indeed, his performance offered a masterclass in French song, all the supposed difficulties (they are real enough) with the language melting away. Again, I could hear Girard’s intent in the percussive clatter of ‘Le Grillon’, but it did not seem quite right. I was more persuaded by the closing guinea-fowl song, whose orchestration seemed genuinely to have one see, even to feel, with her. So too of course did Degout’s vividly communicative vocalism: not a million miles from the theatre, yet subtly distinct. 

Hannigan both sang and conducted for Britten’s Les Illuminations, the Rimbaud text making it seem more at home with its predecessors than otherwise it might have done. Lucy Walker’s point, in her programme note, that ‘perhaps sheltered by the non-English language here, Britten seems to be letting his hair down and channelling some of Rimbaud’s … spirit,’ seemed to me very well captured by the performance, Hannigan clearly inspired rather than inhibited by the exigencies of her dual role. The LSO, never less than very good, seemed a few notches more incisive here, doubtless partly as a result. From the opening bars, richness of string sound seemed to take us to a different level. Hannigan as soloist proved just as communicative as Degout, as were other, instrumental soloists, first among equals leader Benjamin Gilmore in ‘Phrase et Antique’. Rhythms were tight or swung, as required. A well-nigh operatic ‘Marine’ proved key to necessary transformation of mood. ‘Being Beauteous’ captured its particular qualities, not least the sense of a young heart racing. Throughout, Britten and his interpreters permitted Rimbaud to speak: not unmediated, for that would be a nonsense, but heightened, or at least a little transformed. ‘Assez connu. Les arrêts de la vie. Ô Rumeurs et Visions! Départ dans l’affection et le bruit neufs!’ Indeed. 

The first movement of Haydn’s final London Symphony, no.104, augured well. It had grandeur in its introduction, nowadays too often missed, as if Hannigan recalled Boulez’s extraordinary recording with the Vienna Philharmonic. (Perhaps she did.) It had no tedious mannerisms and was very well balanced, inner string parts sounding as if in a quartet. Tempo – not only speed, but mood – was similarly well judged. A dignified account of the slow movement offered generally good command of line and detail, held nicely in balance, though there were a couple of occasions in which tempo seemed to slip rather than to be knowingly modified. The minuet, taken fast, had a fine swagger. Alas, an excessive, almost endless holding back at the beginning of the trio and in several cognate passages made a mess of that (at least for me). The finale seemed to me just too fast, lacking in that grandeur that older conductors, not only Boulez, brought to the work. Playing, though, was excellent, and Haydn’s invention could still be relished.

Prokofiev and Roussel, Kissin/Philharmonia/Ashkenazy, 24 January 2008

Royal Festival Hall

Roussel – Bacchus et Ariane: Suite no.1
Prokofiev – Piano Concerto no.3 in C major, Op.26
Prokofiev – Symphony no.6 in E flat minor, Op.111

Evgeny Kissin (piano)
Philharmonia Orchestra
Vladimir Ashkenazy (conductor)

Prokofiev greatly admired the music of Albert Roussel, and one could hear why in this first suite from the ballet Bacchus et Ariane. Roussel exhibits a splendid command of the orchestra, a sharp ear for rhythm, and a typically Gallic lack of sentimentality. Indeed, there were passages one might have been forgiven for attributing to the Parisian Prokofiev of the 1920s. The Fiery Angel and Le pas d’acier sprang to mind. Ashkenazy and the Philharmonia gave a good account of this suite. There was always a clear sense of the music’s direction and the dances were well characterised. The Stravinskian influence from The Rite of Spring was apparent at the moment when Theseus’s men rush at Bacchus, although Roussel never sounds quite so primitivist. A greater variety of orchestral colour would have benefited the performance; this is not Ravel, but there is some gorgeous orchestration nevertheless. However, the audience would still have had a good sense of the music and its character.

Evgeny Kissin joined the orchestra for Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto. His was a towering reading of what is probably the most popular of Prokofiev’s five piano concertos. The music suits Kissin perfectly, providing a great opportunity not only to showcase his phenomenal technique, but also for the various aspects of his individual sonority to shine through. His tone can melt as well as stab, and never loses its strikingly mature roundedness. Especially noteworthy was the careful weighting of each chord, however frenetic the context, so that even when Prokofiev is at his most percussive, every note is still made to tell. This is a far rarer gift than one might imagine. It clearly helped to have a conductor with intimate knowledge of the score under his fingers. Ashkenazy’s direction was always sure and was estimably synchronised with the soloist. An especially noteworthy instance was the third movement’s perfect alignment between the piano, percussion, and con legno strings. Elsewhere, the strings sometimes sounded a little thin, overshadowed by the fine contributions of the duly grotesque – where necessary – woodwind and the powerful brass.

Prokofiev’s Sixth Symphony is a more sombre work than its immediate predecessor, the Fifth, and arguably the greater of these two great ‘war symphonies’. Ashkenazy, however, made it sound closer to the more triumphal Fifth than I can previously recall. The strange combination of darkness and other-worldliness that characterises the first movement was never made quite to tell as it should, nor was the driving sense of purpose that should once and for all give the lie to claims that Prokofiev was not a true symphonist. Songfulness replaced threnody in the second movement Largo: not unattractive in itself, but by the same token mistaking what seems to me to be the predominant quality of the movement. Ashkenazy’s direction here sometimes had a tendency to meander, where clarity and implacability of purpose should be all. Indeed, the brooding quality of dark tragedy was short-changed throughout, with the consequence that the masterly handled – at least in isolation – final explosion at the end of the otherwise almost carefree third movement seemed to come almost from nowhere, and lost its cyclical sense.

Ashkenazy’s reading sounded oddly like a work very much in progress, as if the symphony were new to him, which of course it is not. Once again, the woodwind and brass – trumpets and horns with wonderfully ‘Russian’ vibrato on occasion – outshone the strings. The 'cellos in particular sounded surprisingly thin, worlds apart from Mravinsky’s Leningrad Philharmonic, who premiered the work in 1947. Such weakness was not evenly spread throughout the section, for the violins on occasion at least captured an authentic Prokofiev bitter-sweetness, and the double basses impressed throughout. The latter, however, only served to highlight what was lacking above.