Symphony skillfully re-creates Ravel visit
In 1928, at the height of his international popularity, Ravel undertook a grueling concert tour of the United States. For four months, the intensely private composer shuttled by overnight train from one hotel to another, conducting and serving as piano soloist on his own works.
Among his stops was a two-concert visit to San Francisco, where he conducted the San Francisco Symphony in programs that included “La Valse,” the orchestral song cycle “Shéhérazade” and the orchestral suite “Le tombeau de Couperin.” And on Thursday, April 19, in Davies Symphony Hall, guest conductor Yan Pascal Tortelier led the orchestra in a smartly executed all-Ravel program that paid a 90th anniversary tribute to the occasion.
It’s not easy now to re-create the feeling of a time when a musical elder statesman could have been greeted as an actual celebrity. (“Ravel,” a slim and exquisite 2006 novel by the French writer Jean Echenoz, conjures up this tour, and the composer’s final years, in deft strokes.)
But Tortelier and the orchestra — together with mezzo-soprano Susan Graham, who was an eloquent soloist in “Shéhérazade” — did convey some of the sensibility of music that was still both new and accessible. The intermittent strangenesses of Ravel’s harmonic language, a language that at the time was still in the process of being assimilated, mixed with the unassailable ripeness and sensuality of his orchestral mastery.
That blend was most notable in the performance of “Daphnis et Chloé” that occupied the second half of the program. This was the one piece that did not figure in Ravel’s San Francisco visit, but it fit right into the program, and Tortelier (who stepped in after the originally scheduled conductor, Charles Dutoit, was fired in the wake of allegations of sexual misconduct) led a vibrant and energetic account of the score.
Purists might have lamented the lack of the chorus whose wordless expostulations are a key part of the sound world in this ballet (the arrangement without chorus was Tortelier’s handiwork), but there was enough instrumental vivacity to make up the loss. The strings raced and darted, the brass glowered gracefully, and the woodwinds — especially the flute section of Tim Day, Linda Lukas and Catherine Payne — contributed to the image of an Arcadian fantasy world.
A pair of early piano pieces by Debussy, “Sarabande” and “Danse,” opened the evening in Ravel’s orchestral versions, just as they did in 1928 — a reminder that the tradition of the unobjectionable and inconsequential curtainraiser has always been with us.
There was more meat and more enjoyment in Graham’s lustrous and insinuating account of “Shéhérazade,” with its dreamy, billowing melodies and tellingly inconclusive ending. Graham’s vocal tone may not be quite as robust as in the past — her lower register tended to fade — but she probed the cycle’s fusion of surrealism and eroticism as expertly as ever. Yan Tortelier Pascal led the orchestra in a smartly executed all-Ravel program that paid a 90th anniversary tribute to the occasion. Joshua Kosman is The San Francisco Chronicle’s music critic. Email: jkosman@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @JoshuaKosman