Starting point for this programme by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales was Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, often considered to mark the beginning of modern music. Evocatively played, it served too as a prelude to Thierry Pécou’s piano concerto, Cara Bali, conceived for Alexandre Tharaud who gave its UK premiere here. The work pays homage to the Balinese gamelan tradition, and no one would have understood better than Debussy – whose experience of hearing Javanese gamelan players at Paris’s 1889 Exposition Universelle was so fundamental – why Pécou should be drawn to its sound-world.
Yet this was not simply the re-creation of the aura and internal structuring of a gamelan orchestra within a symphonic line-up, rather a way for Pécou’s musical imagination to take flight. As well as exploiting the piano’s percussive character in ostinato patterns, Pécou blended his instrumentals in sounds that were tantalising for not being what the ear initially seemed to perceive.
