Search - Yannick Nézet-Séguin :: Ravel: La Valse, Daphnis et Chloe Suite No.2

Impressive Youthful Conductor

Classics Lover | 01/12/2010

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I think Yannick breaks the stereotypes of classical music conductors. When I think of conductors, an image of an old man immediately appears. However Yannick is the exact opposite! He's a dynamic young, and might I say - attractive, conductor. You can hear his youthfulness in this record as he conducts the internationally acclaimed orchestra the Rotterdamn Philharmonic. There's power, there's grace, but most importantly - there's Yannick own touch/voice to the impressive classical works he's conducting."

Nezet Seguin, RotterdamPO: Ravel Orch Mus: Exacting, Sparkli

Dan Fee | Berkeley, CA USA | 05/17/2010

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Yannick Nezet Seguin is a rather natural-likely candidate for being nominated, Next Big Thing, when it comes to leading Ravel's orchestral music. He hails from French-Speaking Canada, and has already made a super audio surround sound splash with his Atma disc of Debussy's La Mer, and that rarity work by Canadian composer Pierre Mercure, Kaleidoscope.



My personal listener's bottom line complaint mainly is: I only wish we got the Daphnis et Chloe ballet, whole, in super audio surround. Other than that, I find my positives running contrary to other commentator negatives.



The opening of the second suite from Ravel's complete ballet is properly clean, clear ... and what's more to my ears, fresh and sparkling. Compared to Jun Markl in Lyon on Naxos, Nezet Seguin in Rotterdam is warmer, and to that extent, less fiercely etched than Markl. This suite is vibrant yet modernist - not so much overflowing with sensualist excess as set afire with the very musical intervals which shape a Ravel-ian phrase-texture, seeming to magically catch fire within the phrasings, enhanced by what my ears hear as considerable tonal warmth, balanced just so, coloring the typical fires lit by the band departments etching. Nezet Seguin offers us a reading that is somewhere on the modernist spectrum of expressive manners - as so far suggested by Markl in Lyon and Boulez (New York, or Cleveland, or Berlin). Yes, Nezet Seguin lets his Rotterdam departments loose as the ballet proceedings rev up, nicely. But Ravel's musical search to inhabit old Greek myths on display in French museum cases seems entirely about a 20th century wondering where else to go with rationality and an aesthetic heritage rooted in the Golden Mean, Apollo's Temple lighted in fabulous Mediterranean Sunlight, rather pointedly in view after Wagner and Richard Strauss. This second suite from Daphnis et Chloe is definitely NOT Late Romantic Old School. One sips these liquors so deftly distilled; one does not guzzle, nor gulp. The taste and manners are sensual, even so.



Then we go on to the Valses Nobles et Sentimentales. Here again, lilting rhythms arise with just so energies, clothed in considerable tonal warmth, and never anything less than etched clarity of phrase, shape, texture across all the band departments. This is so impeccably dressed well for appearing in public that one cannot perhaps help recalling Eric Satie or Marcel Proust in gloves and spats, odd enough to nod towards Satie's collection in honor of what we might call the Secret Life of Umbrellas?



By the time we move on, to the darker, more off-kilter shadows and lilts and glitters of La Valse, the sixteen minutes of waltzing seems like an interlude, an introduction. The ballroom is filled with quite a lively crowd, many of whose evening characters seem to be masked, and some of whom definitely whiff of sinistre, left-handed tastes and manners. In this reading a listener may find it hard to finally settle down, knowing just how to weigh Paris or Vienna .... great cities with back alleys, dives, houses of dubious reputation, and citizens who could be reading Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, every bit aware of their florid homosexualist hanky-panky.



While we are still puzzling over civilized dress and water front manners, we suddenly find ourselves plunk down, right in the mysterious middles of Ravel's Mother Goose Suite. This started musical life as two pianos reminiscing, redolent of nursery life, childhood, and children. But it hardly lacks shadows and depths, enough to fuel innumerable adulthoods overflowing with subtle and not so subtle ambivalence ... gone all Knaben Wunderhorn, Grimm Brothers, and Hans Christian Andersen. Nezet Seguin by this time seems to be partly demonstrating that his Dutch band is closer to France than many suspect, and he serves up this five-movement suite with marked warmth, vigor just nearly out of balance with modernist distancing, and colorist drama let loose by the exquisite orchestrating. One yet again no sooner starts thinking what a dandy technician of utterly high finesse the composer was, than one yet again realizes Ravel was sheer genius. This transformative impulse runs parallel with watching great animation and discerning something entirely witty, deep, colorful, folksy, and lasting in its lights and flickers and setups, all chasing round and round and round. No wonder Ravel immediately appreciated George Gershwin's genius, to the extent of advising him not to study orchestration after all.



So I come to disagree with the nay-sayers. I suppose I see their point, that Nezet Seguin can be faulted for not being freer in his Ravel. But I come to the composer, as much via Michelangeli and Boulez and Mark in Lyon and Mikko Franck, as by Stokowski, Bernstein with St. Cecelia, and Martinon. So I'll keep this one a while, as I expect Nezet Seguin has a Giulini-like staying power when it comes to Ravel. I only wish EMI were more user-friendly when it comes to super audio surround mastering, and of course, that they let Nezet Seguin helm up an even finer ensemble. I'd like to turn him loose in Philadelphia, or somewhere similar. Oh yes. SACD, too?"