Having completely colonised the 18th and early nineteenth centuries, the period-instrument motion is now making inroads into late Romanticism and early modernism. François-Xavier Roth and Les Siècles have led the best way with their exploration of the flip of the twentieth century French repertoire, and right here was the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, with conductor Maxim Emelyanychev, making use of their historic experience to Slavonic and Nordic music of the identical interval.
The place orchestras comparable to Les Siècles meticulously listing the historic provenance of the devices they use in each live performance, the OAE has by no means supplied such info, inviting the suspicion that of their combined programmes one measurement would possibly match all. Right here, as an example, it appeared as if the identical woodwind and brass devices had been getting used for the overture to Glinka’s Overture to Ruslan and Lyudmila, which started the live performance, as for Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony which ended it, but the 2 works had been premiered greater than 70 years aside, in a interval when the design of woodwind particularly was evolving quickly, and taking completely different paths in several components of Europe. Certainly the purpose of interval efficiency isn’t just to conjure up a obscure aura of authenticity, however to get as shut as doable to the sound world a composer imagined for his music, and within the early fashionable interval, that requires way more historic precision.
However by itself, barely compromised phrases, the OAE live performance was rewarding sufficient. Emelyanychev had jump-started it with an electrifying efficiency of the Glinka overture, instantly testing out the agility of the OAE strings, earlier than giving the orchestra’s wind sections their probability to shine, or reasonably glint darkly, in Rachmaninov’s early tone poem, The Rock. If the primary suite from Grieg’s Peer Gynt music was extra routine, the quieter passages confirmed off the velvety heat of the intestine strings, a high quality that Emelyanychev underlined on the finish of the live performance in an encore of extra Grieg, one of many Op 34 Elegiac Melodies.
The Sibelius symphony had its highly effective moments, too, whether or not each textural element was exact or not. The primary motion had all of the requisite grandeur, with the OAE horns to the fore, the magical transformation right into a scherzo adroitly managed, however the efficiency appeared to lose a few of its momentum afterwards. The numerous pause that Emelyanychev made earlier than launching the finale didn’t assist. Many conductors permit no hole in any respect after the gradual motion, in order that the entire symphony turns into a single natural entity; right here that sense was misplaced and the work appeared diminished because of this.
