GRAMOPHONE Review: Ravel Orchestral Works – Basque National Orchestra/Trevino
Ravel may have lived most of his live in Paris but the Basque National Symphony Orchestra are bound to wear this particular badge with pride. And with that pride, of course, comes an added responsibility that the Spanish elements of these familiar pieces – inflection, danceability, a nose for very particular colours – are precisely ‘on point’. They are. And conductor Robert Trevino doesn’t need anyone to remind him how sexy this music is and can be.
Alborado del gracioso emerges from the strumming of some gigantic Spanish guitar (pizzicati in abundance), rhythm and articulation stamping out the footwork and building momentum into the heat of the midday sun. It sounds right. It smells right. So that the fantastical erotic world of Rhapsodie espagnole is all the more surreal an experience, more a song of the night where Alborado is a song of the morning. Trevino and his players find all the half-lights and illicit sighs, bewitching and lascivious in the ‘Prélude a la nuit’ and ‘Habanera’ and darkly masculine in the wild and somewhat threatening ‘Feria’. I like that nothing here sounds ‘precious’ – even this score’s most beguiling passages sound red-blooded – and that is to Trevino and the orchestra’s credit.
But I wanted more made of the seductive elements of Bolero – the jazzy come-ons of all those solos and exotic combos of instruments that Ravel so cleverly teases the ear with. This reading all quite laid-back with, for my money, not enough sense of crescendo about it. The arrival of the trumpets should feel more splendid, more brazen, a turning point, and the big key change should absolutely lift you out of your seat. It goes for very little here – meaning that the vulgar pay-off with its roaring tam-tam and rudely explicit trombones kind of arrives from nowhere.
La Valse wafts in from arguably the same mysterious hinterland, its enticements spelled out in x-rated portamenti and a luxuriance that is strangely unsettling. What a masterpiece this is. Trevino doesn’t gild this apotheosis of the waltz with extravagant rubato and he doesn’t ‘do a Karajan’ with those elastic – indeed positively indecent – distortions in the crash-and-burn coda. But it’s impossible not to convey a wider human catastrophe in the inevitable disintegration – and he does. That final swoon down on the collective G-string of the violins is so lush as to be positively indecent.
So not everything gels here – Bolero is a bit of a disappointment – but that very real sense of kinship between conductor and players is certainly tangible.
