Love, death, and the ocean: Ernest Chausson’s Poème de l’Amour et de la Mer began its 10-year gestation in the wake of the composer’s visit to Bayreuth for the premiere of Wagner’s Parsifal, but it wears its debt to Tristan und Isolde shimmeringly on its sleeve; a French impressionist spin on that dark and stormy cocktail. Programming the two side by side might have run the risk of anticlimax in every sense, but this concert by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic had the opposite effect, a vivid, focused performance – not to mention a starry soloist – ensuring Chausson’s bittersweet song cycle held its own as a centrepiece.
The Wagner came first, the undulating Prelude and ecstatic Liebestod embodying all of Tristan’s heady romance and revolutionary chromaticism despite omitting the three-and-a-half hours of opera usually heard in between. Perhaps keeping his – and the orchestra’s – powder dry for what was to follow, chief conductor Domingo Hindoyan’s reading was admirably clear, even translucent in parts, but occasionally stilted as well: bliss was approached, it seemed, but never quite attained, and at fortissimo moments risked slipping into bombast.
