Page 445 - Liverpool Philharmonic 22-23 Season Coverage Book

For his debut disc as the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic’s chief

conductor, Domingo Hindoyan has brought together three of the most significant
French ballet scores of the first half of the 20th century. Paul Dukas’s La Péri
and Debussy’s Jeux, both arguably their composers’ greatest orchestral achievements,
were first performed within 13 months of each other, in 1912 and 1913 respectively,
while Albert Roussel’s Bacchus et Ariane dates from 1931. Hindoyan opts for the second
suite that Roussel extracted from his score.

The artwork for Hindoyan’s first release with the RLPO.

As an introduction to the new Liverpool partnership, it could hardly be more
impressive. Jeux is always a tricky, elusive work to bring off, but from the mysterious
opening onwards, Hindoyan’s performance has a beguiling charm – if perhaps a bit too
charming at moments when detachment might have been more effective. The RLPO’s
playing, meanwhile, has all the refinement and balance anyone could expect. There is
also room on the disc for more Debussy, a suitably languorous, carefully nuanced
account of the Prélude à l’Après-midi d’un Faune.

Like Jeux, La Péri is designated as a poème dansé, and it is preceded here with the
sumptuous fanfare that Dukas composed to preface his ballet. It’s a beautifully
proportioned score of rich, glowing sonorities – Dukas often shows a fondness for
woodwind instruments in their lowest registers – and Hindoyan and his orchestra
clearly relish every morsel of it.

Alongside these masterpieces Roussel’s ballet, in which the influence of Debussy and
Ravel is spiced with edgier elements from Stravinskyan neoclassicism, sometimes
seems a little ordinary; even in the abridged form of a suite, there are some distinctly
routine passages. But the performance can’t be faulted, and if this is intended to be the
first instalment in a series of Liverpool recordings of the French repertoire, then a
release devoted to Roussel’s symphonies would certainly be worthwhile.

This week’s other pick

In his latest collaboration with the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra, Heinz

Holliger conducts a programme of Schoenberg and Webern for the Fuga Libera label.
The main works are both symphonies of a sort – Schoenberg’s Op 9 Chamber
Symphony, in a performance that thrillingly conveys the work’s ceaseless flood of