The recent Reveries and Passions festival at Chicago’s Symphony Center, organised by Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, presented a three week overview of French music at the beginning of the twentieth century, focussed especially on the works of Debussy and Ravel. But rather than arranging the most familiar and best-loved works of that period (La Mer, the second Daphnis et Chloé suite) into a series of ‘greatest hits’ programmes, the festival offered a selection of more ambitious and less-frequently performed works by each composer.
At the centre of the festival was a concert performance of Pelléas et Mélisande, Debussy’s lone operatic masterpiece, which featured a handful of memorable performances – most notably Sir Willard White’s anguished Golaud and the rapturous Pelléas of Stéphane Degout – supported by inspired…
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