Read my review for VOICE Magazine of the Music Academy Festival Orchestra concert on Saturday, July 30, 2022

There’s something about the French!

The Music Academy Festival Orchestra has been in fine musical form all summer, coming together as an ensemble of superb peers to produce in just weeks, reliably impressive interpretations of major orchestral repertoire under a host of world-famous conductors. The ensemble has quickly acquired a delicately honed and carefully balanced arsenal of orchestral color, imagery, and flat-out thrilling finesse in performance.

The pleasure of hearing the full orchestra in all its sonic glory last Saturday at the Granada Theatre, especially considering its well-deserved imprimatur this summer for gorgeous romantic orchestral sound, was enhanced not just in dollops, but ladles of crème fraiche by guest conductor and French music specialist, Stéphane Denève.

Music Director of the St. Louis Symphony and Brussels Philharmonic, Principal Guest Conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and Director of the Centre for Future Orchestral Repertoire, Denève is cutting edge, and offered a lush musical cocktail of compelling early to mid-twentieth century romantic impressionism; a comingling of programmatic sense and sensibility that puzzled and satisfied, simultaneously.

Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 3 in A minor, Op. 44, composed near the end of the composer’s life in 1935-36 opened the concert. The Second Orchestral Suite (1913) by Maurice Ravel from his “symphonie choréographique,” Daphnis et Chloé, was the only other work on the program, intensifying the passion and audience palpitation levels considerably. There was a brief break between the two works, but no intermission.

Of Rachmaninoff’s three symphonies, the Second Symphony is performed most often and is revered particularly for its several cascading waterfalls of luscious tunes, tethered resolutely to the composer’s famously rich orchestrations. The first and third symphonies have not fared so well over time.

At 40+ minutes, the four movements of the Symphony No. 3 rolled out promisingly Saturday night, with an immediately engaging tune in the first movement, Lento – Allegro moderato – Allegro. Truth is, the remaining three movements, despite their lush orchestrations and sometimes interesting emotional pivots, simply don’t get off the ground melodically; the soaring tunes of the Symphony No. 2 are AWOL in the Third Symphony. Some suggest old age, exhaustion, depression, or the approaching world war as distractions.

So why program this symphony? The answer is both simple and disarming. Denève, grounded in French repertoire, re-examined before our eyes and ears, Rachmaninoff’s late-late Russian romantic masterpiece at least partially from an impressionist’s interpretive perspective. Unable to soar as successfully as the composer’s earlier symphony, the Third is nevertheless worth at least occasional dusting off for its rich orchestrations, if not its currency in 1936 European compositional innovation.

Exploring the good, the bad, and the inadequate mechanisms of this puzzling Russian work proved advantageous for both the musicians in the orchestra and the audience; an enabling musical dissertation from Denève to the young virtuosos of the orchestra – with his hands. Determined to find something to save in the chassis, the conductor spruced up the undercarriage, replaced some spark plugs and chrome, and found value in his re-tooling of the work, à la française. The Symphony No. 3 still doesn’t run seamlessly, but Denève’s attempt to fix it, was fascinating.

The orchestra was deliciously tight in all departments. Strings unforced and gorgeous in sonority throughout. Wind, brass and percussion sections, working together as co-conspirators in thrills, relished executing rhythmic and dynamic contrasts as they were intended – unexpectedly thrilling.

Denève, a large man, was in mesmerizing control of all things, including minutia. The third movement, Allegro – Allegro vivace – Allegro, for example, was extraordinarily re-examined and codified on several levels by the conductor, while the last movement, Allegretto – Allegro vivace, particularly the fugue section, served up a satisfying sonic lush out in the conductor’s hands, despite not having a single memorable tune.

After demonstrating a flair for Russo-French rapprochement with his Rachmaninoff interpretation, Denève let loose his inner Gaul, for a magical performance of Maurice Ravel’s, Daphnis et Chloé Suite No. 2 (1913). The Second Suite is a pastiche of dance segments - Lever du jour, Pantomime, and Danse generale - from the full-length ballet composed for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in 1912.

From its mystical opening bars - animist warbling in winds intimating a Panhellenic nature idyl - straight through to its triumphant Dionysian finale of shifting rhythms and irregular meters, the Second Suite is an imaginative tour de force for orchestra, with one of music’s most exhilarating endings – a sonic whirling dervish celebrating pagan love. The audience, quiet as church mice throughout the roughly 18-minute musical orgy, erupted in roars and hoots of delight after the last tsunami chord – an apt acknowledgement of an extraordinarily exhilarating performance.

Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review

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