‘J’aime la musique française” is what the Orchestre National de Lille were calling this programme, when performing at home last week. The audience on the London leg of its UK tour seemed to love French music too, at least when represented masterfully, if predictably, by Ravel and Debussy.
Conductor Alexandre Bloch’s orchestra is an impressive ensemble, warm-toned and beautifully balanced. Perhaps too beautifully: in the immediate acoustic of this relatively small hall real transparency in the sound was elusive, and textural details sometimes got lost. Still, enough of Ravel’s Technicolor writing came across to bring the Mother Goose Suite and, as an encore, the Feria from his Rapsodie Espagnole, to storybook life. In Debussy’s La Mer everything seemed a little too much in focus, the water viewed closeup rather than from a distance and shrouded in sea spray, but Bloch’s sense of propulsion and the glowing sound he drew from his players carried their own rewards. Ravel’s La Valse, 12 minutes long, would have made a snappy close to the main programme had it not been for the equally long stage rearrangement that preceded it; but it was worth the wait, whirling with sinister energy and whipped along by Bloch to its cataclysmic finish.
In the midst of all this early-20th-century Frenchness was Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 4, with Eric Lu the soloist. His pensive opening statement promised more character than he delivered in the neat outer movements, but the second movement really worked, Lu stubbornly reverential against the crisp, combative strings. He packed almost as much incident into his short encore, Chopin’s E minor Prelude, which was noisy at its climax but gained focus to conclude full of tension.
• At Sage, Gateshead, 30 January; at City Hall, Sheffield, 31 January; at Leeds Town Hall, 1 February.
