Divertimento - Bartok
Cello Concerto in C - Haydn
Kol Nidrei - Bruch
Serenade for strings - Tchaikovsky
The picture of the Belgian orchestra, I Fiamminghi, in the Kilkenny Arts Festival brochure included 34 players. The orchestra fielded at the festival's opening concert, in St Canice's Cathedral on Saturday, numbered just 16, with not a wind player in sight.
So the careful contrast of Haydn's Cello Concerto in C - the outer movements with oboes and horns as well as strings, the central Adagio with strings only - were lost, as well as the textural and timbral variety brought to the outer movements by the wind instruments. The losses in Bruch's Kol Nidrei, scored for full orchestra with harp, were even greater.
That said, the Haydn provided the greatest musical rewards of the evening, mainly through the lightly-grained, honeyed tone of France Springuel's solo playing. With such a small orchestra to contend with, Springuel managed that most pleasurable of feats on the cello, fullness of presence without undue projection, so that her tone could sound unusually strong yet unforced.
She seemed altogether more at home in the Haydn than in the Bruch, where the necessary ardour wasn't always persuasive - the soloist, too, loses out when the colour of a full orchestral complement is effectively rendered monochrome.
In the string works, which opened and closed the concert, the conductor Rudolf Werthen put his orchestra impressively through their paces. He's a man with a good ear for the possibilities of tone and texture within a string orchestra, and an effective judge of when to introduce a moment of dramatic dynamic contrast. On Saturday he tended to drive the music a bit hard, and with phrasing that went too often in straight lines. The effect was to draw attention to the playing more than to the music, an impression which was reinforced in two pressured ethnic encores.
