Sofi Jeannin is best known in the UK as chief conductor of the BBC Singers. Here she made her debut with the BBC National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales in an unusual programme of music in France of the early 20th century. It created a richly resonant picture.
Ravel probably didn’t intend his 1905 cantata L’Aurore to see the light of day: too painful a reminder of his failure to win the Prix de Rome that year. Some beautiful moments pointing to the master-orchestrator and colourist he would become suggest he may indeed have been robbed. Tenor soloist Roland George’s voice emerged strongly from within the ranks of the chorus, whose acclamation of the risen sun rose to an exultant climax.
Lili Boulanger did win the coveted Rome accolade in 1913, when she was just 19, and her Vieille Prière Bouddhique, a daily prayer for the whole universe, dates from the following year. Like Ravel, she balanced the chorus with a tenor soloist, this time Deryck Webb. Modal inflections and expressive harmonies lent a slightly exotic aura, yet it was the undulating flow of the central flute solo heard against two harps that best underlined Boulanger’s instinctive musicality.
Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments was the composer’s tribute to his friend Debussy, but here seemed too to embrace Boulanger, who died just 10 days before Debussy, 31 years his junior. Using the revised score of 1947, Jeannin ensured Stravinsky’s tight rhythmic precision and the ritualistic solemnity of the final chorale section. This was very much an occasion to appreciate the BBCNOW’s fine wind players, who were also key to Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms, now extravagantly requiring five each of flutes, oboes and trumpets, though neither violins nor violas.
Jeannin controlled the massive sonorities of chorus and instruments with quiet authority, notably in the third movement setting of Psalm 150, the sense of Stravinsky’s attachment to the Orthodox rites of his homeland always present. While memorialising friends fallen in the first world war, Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin was conceived in discursive vein, the orchestra’s wind players – oboist Steve Hudson in particular – again most eloquent. It all added up to a memorable evening.
