EVENING STANDARD
August 30, 2006

Messages Delivered with Finesse

Fiona Maddocks

The first thing you notice about the Orchestre National de France is that they treat their tuning seriously. Each section, via the leader, tunes separately, a performance reminiscent of student drill but a wise strategy other ensembles could do worse than adopt.

This finesse paid off in the London premiere of Hans Werner Henze's Five Messages for the Queen of Sheba, a 20-minute orchestral piece based on his opera, L'Upupa (2003), inspired by the magical hoopoe bird and an Arabian folk tale.

Replete with exotic, warbly sonorities, including smoky, louche saxophones and celesta, it had many aural riches. But only in the fourth "message" Fandango, in which percussion and crisp, cascading woodwind created fantastical textures, did Henze do more than tickle the ear pleasurably.

The orchestra played fluently, seemingly unfazed by the Nokia theme tune ringing around the hall in a hush between movements. Though luckily in tune with the orchestra, the noise revived in this listener murderous tendencies already mentioned in these columns.

Continuing Shostakovich's centenary celebrations, his huge Symphony No 7 in C major (Leningrad) occupied the second half. Composed in 1941, it was regarded as a barely coded statement against Nazism, its symbolic power for many years silencing comment on the music itself until a few bold objectors dismissed it as platitudinous and bombastic.

Until now I would have been inclined to agree. Yet Kurt Masur, a conductor whose economical gestures here paid off handsomely, achieved something remarkable by emphasising the work's lyrical qualities.

While the insistent "warmachine" music sounded properly screaming and menacing, the revelation was the melodic music in between, made all the more limpid by the warm French string sound, quite different from Valery Gergiev's gutsy Russian players last week.

Having been retarded in my appreciation of Shostakovich's symphonies, I can admit to several Damascene moments this summer in Kensington Gore. This was one.