Debussy's somewhat disengaged attempt to provide Diaghilev's Ballets Russes with a dance score, Jeux, might have fared better if the same company had not premiered Stravinsky's Rite of Spring only two weeks later. As it was, Stravinsky sounded the clarion call of modernism while Debussy coughed up romanticism's death rattle.
Nijinsky's thin scenario, in which two sporty girls are amorously pursued around a park by a stalker, didn't help. Debussy claimed to be aiming for the crepuscular harmonics of Parsifal; in truth, though, his efforts to illustrate an insignificant episode of erotic cat and mouse brought him close to producing a Tom and Jerry score.
This is not to suggest that Jeux is without incidental pleasures. It wafts by with a dream-like logic (or lack of it), pleasant ideas spilling profusely without ever being harried into a structure. It's the kind of French bon-bon that the BBC Philharmonic's principal conductor Yan Pascal Tortelier adores, so it's a pity he wasn't around to conduct it.
Tortelier's replacement for this programme was the rising young Japanese conductor Kazushi Ono, who cuts an unruffled, debonair figure on the podium. He affects a minimal manner, pinching his baton perpendicularly between finger and thumb as if it were the stem of an expensive cocktail glass. He was pretty much reduced to a spectator as Stephen Hough took the stand to gallop through a speedy account of Mozart's E flat major Piano Concerto, the Jeunehomme. Hough is a dazzling technician, but the piece is the best example of an early period in which Mozart prioritised prettiness over profundity. At times Hough seemed to be scowling at the nimbleness of his fingers like a master chef forced to spend the evening decorating a cake.
Ono and the orchestra perked up for a ravishing performance of the closing scene and Dance of the Seven Veils from Strauss's opera Salome, featuring the strident Swedish soprano Irene Theorin. This was a sultry, loin-stirring trawl through the most celebrated striptease music in the orchestral repertoire. The expanded, tumescent brass section sounded positively indecent.
