Constantin Silvestri (conductor)
Claude Debussy (1862-1918)
Images, L122 – II. Iberia (1905-08)
Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)
Pavane pour une infante défunte, M19 (1899 orch 1910)
Manuel de Falla (1876-1946)
Nights in the Gardens of Spain (1916)
The Three-Cornered Hat: Suites I and II (1916-17)
Sylvie Mercier (piano)
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/Constantin Silvestri
rec. 25 November 1966, Colston Hall, Bristol, UK (Three-Cornered Hat); 31 March 1967 (Iberia) and 22 April 1968 (Pavane & Nights in the Gardens), Winter Gardens, Bournemouth, UK
ICA Classics ICAC 5182 [73]
Between 1962 and their last concert together in November 1968, the Bournemouth Symphony reached considerable technical and expressive heights under Constantin Silvestri. Their commercial discography can be heard in the 15-CD Warner box, which also contains recordings with other orchestras, and some live broadcasts have emerged. This ICA Classics disc derives from Silvestri’s own private collection and is heard in splendid restorations courtesy of the promisingly-named Glenn Gould (original remastering) and Paul Baily (remastering). Everything, other than Pavane pour une infante défunte, richly hewn here, is new to the conductor’s discography.
It’s fitting to start with Debussy’s Iberia, heard from the Winter Gardens, Bournemouth in March 1967. A few years earlier in 1963 Pierre Monteux had recorded it with the LSO with tighter results in the central section, Les Parfums de la nuit. Other leading interpreters, such as Munch, Inghelbrecht and Paray varied in their responses – Munch especially, who varied in this movement from 8:45 in the Kingsway Hall in 1953 to nearly 10 minutes in 1953 live in Boston. Silvestri’s orchestra is tight, lean and superbly drilled. The conductor is more impetuous than Monteux, in particular, in the opening Par les rues et par les chemins, and there’s an extra quotient of swagger and sonic colour about the Bournemouth performance. The extra time Silvestri allows himself in the central panel has an almost Stokowskian effulgence in places, but it maintains orchestral discipline and is evocative and alluring. Crisp and tensile, coursing with life, the finale reinforces the galvanic impression he generated with the orchestra.
Falla was a known Silvestri repertorial strength and he selected pianist Sylvie Mercier for Nights in the Gardens in Spain. He had an instinctive affinity with young soloists who tended to be less thrown by his occasional departures from rehearsed dictates. Mercier is still with us at the age of 89 at the time of writing. The concert was given with Ravel’s Pavane, in the Winter Gardens. Its opening is quite mobile but retains a necessary level of evocation. The central panel may be a ‘Danza lejana’ (a Distant Dance) but it’s no shrinking violet and is fast, about as fast as Rubinstein in his recording with Ormandy. Mercier is colourful and acquits herself well, as she does in the finale where she and Silvestri remind one more of Curzon and Jordá than de Larrocha and Kubelík (a touch reserved) or Rubinstein/Ormandy (very fast). Mercier, by the way, was a student of Marcel Ciampi, consulted with Wilhelm Kempff and performed with Henryk Szeryng. She also made recordings of Chopin Études and was perhaps better known in later times as a painter and photographer.
The Three-Cornered Hat: Suites I and II was performed on 25 November 1966 at the Colston Hall, Bristol. It sizzles and sways with the percussion very much audible. There is real sectional discipline but also a sense of charged colour and energy throughout. Orchestral solos are all personable and suitably Iberian in sound, and El Corregidor, in particular, is evocatively phrased, Las uvas richly cantilevered and the final dance intoxicating in its rhythm.
There is some high-level hiss audible in the Pavane, in particular, but you’d have to go hunting for it to let it impede your enjoyment. Jon Tolansky’s notes are apt and rightly admiring of Silvestri’s achievement in Bournemouth. His note is translated into French and German. This Franco-Iberian disc shows just how potent the South Coast pairing was.
Jonathan Woolf
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