Sydney Carter’s Lord of the Dance might well act as the individual watchword for this concert given by the London Philharmonic Orchestra under Edward Gardner which inaugurated a short Southbank festival entitled “Multitudes”. Its broad intention is to recapture and reinforce feelings of musical joy that can be expressed by visual means additional to the actual notes being performed. The novel element here was provided by Circa, an Australian performing arts company directed by Yaron Lifschitz, fueled, as the publicity handout puts it, “by their core values: quality, audacity, humanity”.
Mikhail Fokine, the choreographer charged with staging Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloé, was somewhat ahead of his time. He had already marked out a manifesto for reforming the standard approach at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg: “In the ballet the whole meaning of the story can be expressed by the dance. Above all, dancing should be interpretative. It should not degenerate into mere gymnastics.” He remained largely unheard in Mother Russia but hoped to find a favourable ear with Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes in Paris. Yet his collaboration with the master impresario and the composer himself was beset by all kinds of problems, and the premiere in 1912 was severely delayed.
It helps that the narrative on which Ravel drew is relatively simple. The goatherd Daphnis and the shepherdess Chloé play out their courtship on the island of Lesbos but are forced apart by pirates, only to be reunited with the help of the god Pan. Ravel wished to create a vast musical fresco less concerned with archaism than with fidelity to the Greece of his dreams. There was no attempt by Circa to follow any of the twists in the storytelling. The only nod to the two title characters came towards the end of the ballet when at the back of the platform two of the Circa artists entwined and released themselves from two poles and a high wire. Elsewhere performance elements were limited to a narrow strip in front of the orchestra. With just ten artists this was often a tight squeeze, and although the LPO did not sport a standard-sized string complement the platform was packed with players, including two harps and an array of percussion. Acrobatic feats were very much at the heart of the display: leaps, twists, embraces, somersaults and cartwheels, ascents and descents in varying configurations. I was certainly impressed by the agility and ingenuity of the performers. However, coordination was sometimes lacking, with wobbles threatening to become unintended tumbles, together with approximations of a general idea rather than any precise choreography. Did this matter all that much? There was energising vitality, pleasure derived from the changing alignments of human bodies and an occasional hint of sensuality. In short, this was a spectacle in itself.
As a stage act though there were a number of distractions. When bare feet land on hard surfaces, especially from a height, the ensuing noises took attention away from quieter moments in the musical score. Inevitably too, what the LPO players were doing on stage, even minor events such as page-turning and the movement of string bows, created a divertissement of its own. I wondered whether the overall effect might not have been enhanced by having the orchestra behind a gauze curtain, the players forming more of a backdrop to the entertainment out front.
In terms of orchestral execution, there was little to criticise. There were some fine flute and piccolo solos at the start of the Troisième Partie, mellifluous woodwind, supple strings and resplendent brass throughout, and individual percussion timbres such as triangle, antique cymbals and glockenspiel all made their mark. Yet despite its duration – 58 minutes for the entire ballet – I never really felt a high degree of languorousness and sensuality. The sound was often very direct, sharp even, with little sense of an enveloping heat haze or sufficient dynamic nuances, though the massive climaxes came across very strongly. In Gardner’s emphasis on precision and exact rhythms you could almost hear Stravinsky’s disparaging reference to the “Swiss watchmaker” coming through.
When you listen to recordings of this ballet, the wordless chorus is often relegated to a minor role. Happily, not here. The BBC Singers, suitably boosted in numbers and discreetly amplified, were positioned as a group in the side stalls at a diagonal slant to the conductor. They appear almost at the very beginning of the ballet, after a low drone from the strings, and add not only colour but dramatic accents at important points in the score. At the start of the Deuxième Partie there is an a cappella passage where the perfectly pitched BBC Singers produced an impressive body of sound, initially shrouded in ghostly and slightly disembodied tones, then siren-like with the sopranos soaring above the stave while the basses provided a rock-solid underpinning. As the Bacchanalian celebrations slowly kicked into gear in the final stages, they added a sumptuous choral blaze.
After a minimal interruption for applause, the platform still bathed in orange light, Gardner moved gradually into Ravel’s La Valse, the ten Circa artists in their black embroidered costumes again traversing the performance strip. This short piece, which Diaghilev dismissed by saying, “Ravel, it’s a masterpiece…but it’s not a ballet…It’s the portrait of a ballet…the painting of a ballet”, was originally entitled Wien. There are two ways of looking at its significance. There are those who see its premiere in 1920 as an epilogue to a bygone age, a tale of death and destruction, with the final pages of virtual hysteria representing the ultimate cataclysm. Yet for the composer himself other ideas remained uppermost, not least in the nostalgic backward reference to its working title, as evidenced in the score: “An Imperial Court around 1855”. Old Vienna needs to be felt in its accelerandos and ritardandos, the exaggerated dynamics and repeated glissandos. In turn, the constant sway of ballroom taffeta has to be reflected in its musical execution.
Save for the concluding descent into madness, Gardner adopted a steady tempo, slowly weaving strands together, emphasising textures rather than atmosphere. Ravel himself described what he envisaged: “It is a fatal spinning around, the expression of vertigo and of the voluptuousness of the dance to the point of paroxysm.” You should, metaphorically speaking, find yourself lying flat-out on the dance floor when this piece ends. That didn’t quite apply in my case.
Alexander Hall
Maurice Ravel
Daphnis and Chloé (complete ballet); La Valse
BBC Singers, Chorus Master Stephen Higgins – Circa – London Philharmonic Orchestra, Conductor Edward Gardner
Yaron Lifschitz, Director & Stage/Lighting Designer; Libby McDonnell, Costume Designer
Southbank Centre, Royal Festival Hall London, 23 April 2025
Photos © Pete Woodhead