Popular guest conductor Fabien Gabel joined the Rochester
Philharmonic Orchestra in a return to Kodak Hall on Thursday for a program that
truly was a tale of two halves, featuring startlingly contrasting moods.
It can be argued that the evening’s first piece, Bernard
Herrmann’s suite from the film “Vertigo,” was its best: Gabel’s conducting was
fluid and forceful as he presided over teetering violins, the scurl of low brass, and the ominous, dreamy quality of the
vibraphone. “The Nightmare” features some of the most electrifying strong riffs
you’ll hear in all of orchestral music, and in “Scene d’amour,” Herrmann
manages to make moments of ecstatic romance sound fatally haunted. Overall,
Gabel and the RPO’s take on the suite was immersive, and accentuated the
composer’s gift for lush orchestration and gushing violin melodies that reach
ever upward.
Herrmann’s music cast such a beautiful shadow that it seeped
into Bรฉla Bartรณk’s
characteristically enigmatic Violin Concerto No. 2, coloring it with the
macabre. Bartรณk’s melodic gestures suddenly felt all
the more cataclysmic, and the atmospheric ambiguities turned disorienting and
dystopian.
At his best, Bartรณk has always been
an unsettling composer, making the jagged beautiful and the disparate cohesive,
in a way that is thrilling yet never quite comfortable. In the second movement,
“Theme and Variations: Andante Tranquilo,” Gabel’s
direction seemed to smooth out Bartรณk’s rough edges,
leaving the music not quite so savage, but still feral in spots.
One of Gabel’s greatest strengths is his capacity for
lyricism, exhibiting a kind of meta-connectivity between phrases that enhanced
the concerto and gave it more nuance. Soloist Juliana Athayde
played as if possessed, powering through double stops and flying up and down
the neck of the violin. The violinist evinced a consistent combination of
intensity and refinement.
From the first noble notes of Paul Dukas’s ballet “La Pรฉri,” it was clear that
the concert’s second-half aesthetics would be different from the wild and eccentric
feel of the first. Dukas is a vastly underrated
orchestrator, as vividly romantic and unabashedly evocative as Tchaikovsky.
Gabel was completely at home, communicating his intuitions to the orchestra
with instantaneous magic.
Claude Debussy’s “La mer” was the
program’s headliner. As the sea depicted in the music awoke, the RPO
demonstrated Debussy’s charm with sumptuous cello swells, shimmering violins,
and majestic horns. Gabel took his time, deliberately finessing the tempo and
crafting a sound that was grand but light on its feet.
The conductor seemed marginally less at ease here than he had
in the Dukas, as the fantastical was replaced by impressionistic realism. Gabel
still excelled at eliciting a wide range of dynamics and timbers with graceful
precision — but the performance lacked the free spirit that had inhabited the
previous piece.
Despite an anticlimactic ending with what should have been
the highlight of the concert, Gabel delivered a strong, polished performance,
leading an orchestra that sounded at the top of its game.
This article appears in May 10-16, 2017.
