THE Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra brought a predominantly French programme to last night's penultimate Prom, shrewdly framing the concert with two works that tied in with this season's themes: the sea and fairytales. Debussy's La Mer was one; the pair of suites from Ravel's ballet Daphnis et Chloe was the other.
The triptych of pieces in La Mer might represent one of the peaks of musical Impressionism, but the impressions were crystal clear in this excellent, translucent performance conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. Whether in the dawn murmurings of De l'Aube a midi sur la mer, or in the more threatening gusts and surge of breakers in Dialogue du vent et de la mer, there was a real sense here of Debussy's extraordinary capacity to evoke the inexorable, unfathomable power of the sea and of light glinting off its surface. The orchestra also brought character and colour to Ravel's Daphnis et Chloe, balancing the music's Classical delicacy, fragrant languor and vigorous sensuality, to which, in the final frenetic Danse generale, the wordless voices of the Crouch End Festival Chorus added a further dimension of ecstasy.
In between these two radiant works came the British premiere of a new piece by Mark-Anthony Turnage, glumly entitled From the Wreckage. But much was salvaged here, thanks particularly to the participation of that astonishingly versatile, expressive trumpeter Hakan Hardenberger. From the Wreckage is a miniature trumpet concerto, calls on the soloist to use three different sorts of instrument in music of extreme virtuosity, and has the virtue of brevity. The atmosphere of the piece is weighed down by a certain despondency. But it shared with the Debussy and Ravel each side of it a sense of moving from darkness into light, while never quite casting off a veil of desolation that the passing references to jazz and blues served only to accentuate.
