French and American music with Denève and Banks at Severance

Guest conductor Stéphane Denève led The Cleveland Orchestra in a program of 20^th and 21^st Century music which highlighted the cross-pollination between the French and American musical scenes.

The concert began with Darius Milhaud’s ballet La création du monde (The Creation of the World), Op. 81, written after the composer traveled to the United States and encountered Harlem Jazz.  The work was written for a small ensemble, heavy on winds, brass, and percussion – with very few strings.  In six brief sections, the work evokes a variety of moods, including not merely jazz but a Cakewalk, and even a military march by Schubert. 

Saxophonist Steven Banks joined the Denève and the orchestra for A Kind of Trane (Concerto for Saxophone and Orchestra) by Guillaume Connesson.  The work, in three movements, fuses not only jazz, but minimalism, techno, popular elements and brief moments that recall film noir scores.  Banks, using both soprano and alto saxophones, put forth a stunning virtuoso performance that captured each musical strand and mood – however fleeting.  Denève and the orchestra furnished more than an accompaniment, but a seamless collaboration so polished that it belied the fact that this week’s performances constituted the Cleveland premiere of the work.  The audience leapt to its collective feet at the work’s conclusion, and Banks performed Malotte’s “The Lord’s Prayer” as an encore.

 

Banks and Denève after the Concerto.

 Following intermission Denève returned to conduct the Suite from Francis Poulenc’s 1924 ballet “Les biches” (The Does).  It has long seemed to me that Poulenc was the early 20^th Century’s answer to Franz Josef Haydn – wit, surprise, and quicksilver moods concealing subtle depths.  Although the composer had not yet visited the United States when this ballet score was composed, there are still hints of America in the work – not least in the work’s central Rag-Mazurka which, despite the dance form implied, doesn’t sound the least bit Polish.  Astonishingly, this weekend marks the first time The Cleveland Orchestra has performed all but the first movement of the suite.

George Gershwin’s An American in Paris has become so popular over the near century since it was composed that too many performances tend to sound alike and routine.  This performance was anything but.  Denève brought a marked sense of rhythmic freedom which served as a reminder that Gershwin once described the work as a rhapsody.  Each section segued seamlessly into the next with lilting freedom – with the exception of the “Charleston” section which sounded appropriately lock-stepped. 

Tonight’s concert was a magnificent reminder that just as there is Fusion cuisine, so can there be music which fuses different styles including classical, jazz, and popular.  None of these styles suffer when mixed – rather they are enhanced.  In music, as in much of life, overweening puritanism is a dead end.