The Philharmonia’s City of Light series explores music in Paris between 1900 and 1950, so Henri Dutilleux’s orchestral song-cycle Correspondances, premiered in its original version in 2003, inevitably felt like something of an interloper in this programme under Esa-Pekka Salonen – though not an unwelcome one. Even in this late work, Dutilleux’s style is recognisably part of a French tradition that places a high value on colour and delicacy – characteristics that also indelibly marked the two works by Ravel that followed.
Of the five texts that Dutilleux sets, two are letters – one from Alexander Solzhenitsyn to cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, the other adapted from Vincent Van Gogh’s letters to his brother Theo; it’s hard, though, to see much of a connection between these two items and the poems by Rilke and the Indian writer Prithwindra Mukherjee that accompany them.
Dutilleux nevertheless shows virtuoso skills in harmony and orchestration in providing a musical amplification of them, with Barbara Hannigan’s light and lucid soprano supplying an admirable sequence of immaculately wrought vocal gestures.
She returned with equal success in the second half as the Princess in Irina Brown’s clever semi-staging of L’Enfant et les Sortilèges, which made a virtue of the limited space above and in front of the orchestra to suggest the setting and magical characters of Ravel’s lyric fantasy. Several of the singers tripled or even quadrupled their small roles, with Chloé Briot a natural standout as the unruly Child, while the Philharmonia Voices made the most of their individual and collective opportunities.
So, too, did Mitsuko Uchida, whose elegant performance of Ravel’s G major Piano Concerto closed the first half. Her absolute precision was allied to spirit and a wide tonal range, with Salonen and the orchestra supplying a neatly managed accompaniment.
