★★☆☆☆
If Richard Dubugnon’s Klavieriana is a concerto, it’s a double concerto. Premiered by the pianist Noriko Ogawa and the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Fabien Gabel, this sequined postmodern caper featured a second keyboard soloist, celesta player Janet Simpson.
Half-sidekick, half-saboteur, the celesta disrupts the traditional dialogue between piano and orchestra, offering descants and distractions from the swarming strings, whiplash flutes and motoring bass figures. There are allusions to Berg, Gershwin and Rachmaninov in Dubugnon’s plush orchestration, a potted history of the piano concerto in the cadenzas. It’s attractive but inconsequential music, a score for an unmade Hitchcock rom-com.
Gabel conducts in crisp paragraphs, favouring brisk tempos, precise and lucid colours, a refined blend from the strings, tight percussion, expressive woodwind, cleanly executed endings and plenty of white space on the page. This worked well enough in the Dubugnon. In a programme otherwise composed of 20th-century suites, from Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin to Kodály’s Háry János and Christopher Palmer’s arrangement of music from Prokofiev’s War and Peace, each of which riffs on antique musical forms, the limitations of the conductor’s metrical approach were exposed.
Gabel doesn’t punctuate his phrases or vary the rhythm within them, and the gaps between each episode were of seemingly uniform duration. This had the effect of making a toile de jouy baroque fantasy, a cimbalom and saxophone-spiced neoclassical Hungarian comedy and a snapshot reduction of a Russian epic sound quite similar: all silky trills, tart fanfares, clever dances and virtuosic solos for clarinet (Richard Hosford), flute (Michael Cox), oboe (Richard Simpson), cello (Susan Monks) and horn (Martin Owen).
By the end of the Ravel I was longing for some rubato. In the Kodály I yearned for a darker, more specific timbre. By the end of the Prokofiev I was positively craving both.