In a brief platform introduction to the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra’s performance of Henri Dutilleux’s cello concerto Tout un Monde Lointain in which he was the soloist, Jean-Guihen Queyras described Dutilleux as “the most charming and civilised man I ever met”. It was a warmly sincere tribute, and a view that’s clearly shared by so many in the orchestral world who knew the composer – one of the reasons there are so many performances this month marking Dutilleux’s centenary.
Charm and civilised refinement are qualities that come through in his music too – that’s its strength and perhaps its weakness. The exquisiteness of the five movements of Tout un Monde Lointain, perfectly realised by Queyras and the BSO under Kirill Karabits, make it almost a paradigm of a mature Dutilleux work. There’s not a note out of place in its Baudelaire-inspired pages, not a texture or a harmony that is not precisely as it was so painstakingly imagined. But after almost 25 minutes of such immaculate musical surfaces you do begin to want something a bit more substantial – a passage that is more statement than suggestion, a moment of roughness or at a least that everything is not as cut and dried as it seems.
Certainly coming straight after such refinement, the bold colours of Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony seemed the broadest of brush strokes. The score is no pushover for any orchestra, and it’s a measure of what Karabits has achieved in Bournemouth that he should have programmed it, and then carried it off so convincingly. The fine detail and the depth of tone were consistently impressive – a glassiness in some of the string sonorities was down to the harshness of the Lighthouse acoustic more than anything else – while after a deceptively languid start Karabits’ performance gained steadily in power and presence; only the tinny electronic organ sound in the final section was a bit of a let-down.
