VoxCarnyx

Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Lovers of French music can enjoy a purple patch of programming in Scotland, with the SCO combining Berlioz with more local fare in an “Auld Alliance” concert with Karen Cargill this month and the Hebrides Ensemble using the same title for a programme doing a similar thing with Debussy and Ravel at May’s Perth Festival.

The RSNO were first out of the blocks, however, with their evening showcasing French composers, although it ended up being rather briefer than planned. In Perth and Edinburgh, featured soloist Catriona Morison had sung Chauson’s setting of Maurice Bouchor, Poeme de l’amour et de la mer, as advertised, but she was too unwell to do so on a third night.

By way of what would have been a not unpopular substitute, ticket holders were advised that first flute Katherine Bryan would now be the soloist for Francoise Borne’s arrangement of the hit tunes from Bizet’s opera, Carmen. During the afternoon rehearsals of that piece, however, the flautist was taken ill, leaving the orchestra without both half an hour of music and its principal flute for the Debussy and Ravel in the rest of the programme.

It says a great deal for the strength-in-depth of Scotland’s musical community, and the RSNO in particular, that the concert we heard seemed so little compromised. Shifting Ravel’s Une barque sur l’ocean – the only one of the Miroirs piano works the master orchestrator fully scored – to open the programme, the impromptu flute partnership of the promoted Jenny Farley and sight-reading last minute recruit Adam Richardson were called on to play the evening’s first bars of music and they never looked back.

That piece was always intended as an appetiser for the work that now had the second half of the concert to itself, Debussy’s La mer. One of the most popular works of symphonic impressionism, every detail of this performance, from Henry Clay’s cor anglais solo at its opening to the huge brass climax at the end, was superbly played. Conductor Thomas Sondergard’s handling of the architecture of the work was absolutely masterly, that enticing first movement ending in particularly robust pizzicato basses and the central Play of the waves maintaining the lightest touches so that the finale could build with a marvellously-paced unfolding power.

Before the interval, the work that had been planned for the start of the concert actually found a more advantageous slot. Melanie Bonis has a novelistic life story and her music is ripe for rediscovery. A student of Cesar Franck at the Paris Conservatoire, she wrote a series of celebrations of “Femmes de legend” for piano at the start of the 20th century and her orchestrations of three of them – Ophelia, Salome and Cleopatre – were only published this century and premiered by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Jessica Cottis in 2015.

The resulting suite sat very comfortably in the exacting company of Ravel and Debussy because Bonis was a highly accomplished orchestrator herself. If her picture of Hamlet’s doomed girlfriend was more pastoral than tragic, Salome emerged as a saucy minx and the Eastern flavour continued in the very colourful, and more substantial, tone poem Le Songe de Cleopatre. Concerns that International Women’s Day can seem tokenistic can be overlooked when the result is the discovery of little-known gems like these.

Keith Bruce