RSNO chief executive Simon Woods won’t thank me for this, but the super-refined French programme that Stephane Deneve and the RSNO played in Edinburgh on Friday, and took to the Amsterdam Concertgebouw last night, was performed the wrong way round.
The assumption was logical: that Faure’s Requiem, a low-key, softly-voiced work should constitute the first half, and then Roussel’s dynamic Third Symphony, coupled with Ravel’s mercurial La Valse, both of which were stunningly played, should energise the second.
But what nobody knew was that the Requiem would receive an interpretation and performance by Deneve and his forces that raised the veil of dark loveliness from the music and revealed a work of heartrending depth and shattering profundity.
This Requiem, in a performance of extraordinary emotional power, was no longer a series of beautiful, discrete movements. It was a continuum. It was one thing. The strands that wove through it, with Lisa Milne and Christopher Maltman
layering sheer beauty of tone and textual significance into the music, the choral singing of the RSNO Chorus with the heart-stopping clarity of the RSNO Junior Chorus together generating the halo of liturgical purity which shone softly through the performance, and Michael Bawtree gauging precisely and tenderly the weight of organ tone in the texture, all accrued into an integrated and devout presentation that I, for one, found emotionally devastating, and the true climax of a superb concert.
Star rating: ****
