IT'S like . . " Philippe Cassard is searching for the right word to describe the finale of Maurice Ravel's Piano Concerto in G, which he is to play with the National Symphony Orchestra on its four-city spring tour, which begins at the National Concert Hall next Friday. "It's like," he concludes triumphantly, "a hundred bottles of champagne opened at the same
Images of the NCH bubbling happily over come irresistibly to mind. But there's more. The second movement, for instance. "The piano has an introduction of, maybe, three minutes alone - completely alone - and then there is a short development and then the piano plays an accompaniment to exactly the same music as before, but played by the cor anglais. You just accompany - like a song. It's absolutely charming, and I wish the best to the - how shall I say it - to the Irish French horn."
On the phone from Paris at an impossibly early hour of the morning, Philippe Cassard is himself charm incarnate; Eric Cantona to the Nth degree, and then some. Ireland in the spring? Formidable. And of course there's that concerto. "Ravel was very impressed by Gershwin and by jazz bands of the Twenties and Thirties, so you get an extraordinary combination of pure Ravel style in the slow movement and this fantastic American feel in the finale." We are, I assure him, looking forward to it. "Me, too," is the prompt reply.
Since he won what is now the Guardian piano competition in 1988, Cassard has been a regular visitor to Ireland, but he has not played with the National Symphony Orchestra since 1991 when he did two concerts here; Rachmaninov's Paganini rhapsody, and a Mozart gala with John O'Conor and Finghin Collins. The remainder of his Irish performances have been as part of various chamber ensembles - an activity, he says, ideally suited to his musical temperament.
When you play solo, or with orchestra," he explains, you are - well, it's like the feeling that you are a bit naked in front of the audience. You really have to be strong and to control your nerves; otherwise you can get memory problems or, not cold playing exactly, but something distant, you know? In another way this pressure can give you inspiration, ideas you couldn't get when you just practise at home. It just comes suddenly on the stage - you are alone, and good things happen. Also in a recital you have to involve yourself so deep in the music that sometimes - you don't forget the audience, of course, but sometimes you don't feel the response until a long time afterwards, maybe at the intermission.
"Chamber music is different. When you play with friends you belong to a sort of family and you are just a voice among others; you have to find the right colour, the right feeling, the right tempo, together with the others. And when it happens it's extremely exciting because if you feel that, immediately afterwards the audience feels it also.
OF course, the recital is something extremely fantastic for your ego, for the pleasure you can give, alone, to a big audience - and if you can give this pleasure, even for a few minutes, it gives you an extraordinary encouragement to improve your playing.
Plenty of pleasure is on the programme for the NSO spring tour; the concerts, which will see the return to Ireland of the Italian conductor Rico Saccani, who conducted Verdi's Aida at the Point Theatre two years ago, open with Ambroise Thomas's featherlight Mignon and conclude with Dvorak's exhilarating and melodic New World Symphony.
