Smiling, conductor Michel Plasson emerges from the wings and, with an almost friendly demeanor of someone showing his pleasure to reach his podium, weaves his way among the members of the Nice Philharmonic Orchestra. This happens under the initial applause of an eager audience. No sheet music before him. Like a delicate butterfly, his right hand ascends: it calls the solo flutist who, in a magnificent interpretation by Isabelle Demourioux, launches the famous motif from Claude Debussy’s “Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun,” a piece that opened what was an unforgettable musical moment at the Nice Opera.
The program featured four contemporary composers from a turn of the century, all signatories to an eminently French repertoire, a “tradition” with which the former conductor of the Toulouse Capitole Orchestra truly feels in harmony. It must be said that the Maestro could easily conduct without a baton, as he draws from bodily suggestion the incentive elements of his orchestral direction: a striking gaze—a pair of large, wide-open eyes—cast at an instrumentalist, audible sighs and moans to invite the strings to match his rhythmic breathing, a lift of his body to accompany a melody’s ascent into the higher octaves, a firm, clenched fist to give the cue to the percussion, a gentle sway and broad gestures when the entire orchestra feeds the central theme with its multiple sounds, seemingly spreading the manifestations of its full power in the calm manner of a vast river’s downstream flow.
And yet, it would be wrong to claim that Michel Plasson delights in the overflowing of sentiments: everything lies in particularly balanced rigor, control that is more suggested than imposed, a solid method that would incorporate an infinite flexibility of execution. If proof were needed, his interpretation of Ernest Chausson’s Symphony in B-flat major, op. 20, would easily provide it: in this grave and late work of a composer largely influenced by César Franck but also—its underlying melodies remind us at every measure of the score—by Richard Wagner, Michel Plasson never yielded to his desire. All the melodic surges, the apocalyptic rises of the strings, or the grandiose final sanctions of the brass so recognizable in the Weimar master’s work, all these creeping “Wagnerisms” were contained—not denied or diminished, but simply softened, modulated, refined to allow the French originality and tonality of the composer, who passed just before the turn of the century, to shine through.
Albert Roussel’s “Bacchus et Ariane,” Second Suite, with some passages that inevitably evoke the orchestration work—perhaps that of a famous scherzo—by Paul Dukas, opens on a superb dialogue between the Viola (Vasile Loan) and the First Violin (Vera Brodmann-Novakova), capable of conveying the full mythical dimension of the piece while the winds, led by clarinets and oboes, punctuate with a sustained yet discreet rhythm, foreshadowing the eventual reunion of the two lovers in a frenzied bacchanale. The dreamlike atmosphere continued with Maurice Ravel’s “Daphnis et Chloé,” “the longest work the Master ever wrote and likely the one that gave him the most trouble,” according to a specialist. A choreographic symphony written for Serge Diaghilev’s Russian Ballets, this orchestration monument begins with a “daybreak” whose expressions, luminosities, and colors are so finely rendered by notes and instrumental play that they become mental representations, delightful images. Michel Plasson offers us a version of exceptional quality, always imbued, like his character, with humble simplicity.
Since the Maestro will perform only four times in France this year, it was out of the question to let him go after such a deluge of pleasure. He gently exerted himself to offer an encore—the “Fairy Garden” by Ravel—which he associated “with the color of the sky and the lovely city of Nice!”
