Hoddinott Hall, Cardiff
There was more extraordinary playing at Cardiff's recent flute festival than a concertgoer would normally aspire to hear in several years but, within the week came another top-flight virtuoso. Emmanuel Pahud is principal flautist of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, and Marc-André Dalbavie's 2006 Flute Concerto is just one of many works written for him in his parallel solo career.
Embedding this concerto in the BBC National Orchestra of Wales's programme of Debussy, Ravel and Massenet underlined Dalbavie's musical heritage, and Pahud himself made the connection with the style of Jacques Ibert, hardly a model for radicalism. The characteristically French concern with instrumental timbre emerged strongly and, over the course of the single-movement work, it was this exchange of sonorities – notably between the soloist and brass and also tuned percussion – that engaged, rather than any imposing structure. Dalbavie's music is ostensibly abstract, yet it had a transparent, elemental quality that seemed to relate to air, breath and wind, perhaps a deliberate conceit given the nature of the flute. From the opening flurry of scale passages, this constant movement and the immense flourish which Pahud brought to his delivery were what propelled the piece.
Francesco Piemontesi was the equally poetic soloist in Ravel's G major Piano Concerto. However, the subtleties of scoring here and in Debussy's Jeux were all but obliterated by the final work, Massenet's orchestral suite Scènes de féerie, in which conductor Thierry Fischer was decidedly heavy-handed. The feeling of bombardment would have been lessened in the radio broadcast but, in Hoddinott Hall itself, it felt most unsubtle.