V přírodě — In Nature’s Realm — is the opening panel of a Dvořák triptych of concert overtures the symphonic circuit prefers to leave on the shelf, and on Friday night at the Concertgebouw‘s Grote Zaal it became the doorway to the entire evening’s argument. Santtu-Matias Rouvali had built a program with one through-line: every score on the desk was someone listening hard to the outdoors, and the bouquet ran from a Bohemian wood to an Aegean dawn, with Sol Gabetta as the human voice at its centre. That kind of curatorial coherence is rare in symphonic programming, and rarer still when each leg of it is played with this much character.

V přírodě, written in 1891 just before the American adventure, is the Dvořák score most haunted by the Rusalka to come — the same forest, the same listening, four years before the water-sprite arrived to sing in it. Rouvali opened with low strings tuned almost into a single breath and let the Concertgebouworkest woodwinds emerge from inside the chord rather than over it, so the famous birdcall figure had the quality of something overheard rather than announced. There was none of the Czech-sentimentality usually slathered on top of this music; instead a clean, almost Janáček-prophetic transparency. For an audience that knows Dvořák by his moon aria, this was the same composer two operas earlier, already inside the trees.

Then Sol Gabetta entered for Martinů‘s First Cello Concerto, that strange Parisian object the Czech began in 1930 and kept revising — through Vieux-Moulin in 1939, through Nice and Pierre Fournier‘s editorial hand in 1955 — as if he could never quite stop hearing it. The opening Allegro moderato is neoclassical in skeleton but folk-haunted in flesh, a relative of Stravinsky‘s Paris-decade scores with a Moravian birthmark, and Gabetta played it with the long-breathed, vocally-phrased line she has made her trademark. Her cello speaks before the bow has truly engaged — a halo around the lower register, then a focused, almost mezzo-soprano middle voice that Rouvali had the sense to frame rather than match. The Concertgebouworkest strings drew back when she sang and the woodwinds answered her phrases as one answers a question in a dream.

The slow movement justified the whole booking. Martinů is best known to opera audiences for Julietta, that ondoyant 1937 dream-opera in which characters keep forgetting and re-finding themselves, and the central Andante moderato of the concerto belongs to the same suspended air: a long cantilena hovering over a softly rocking accompaniment, with the soloist asked to phrase as if she were singing a part not yet quite written. Gabetta found it. Her mezza voce, when she narrowed the bow into that velvety inner-string sound, had the unforced lyric authority of a singer who has stopped trying to project and started trusting the hall. The Grote Zaal does the rest — and it did. The finale, a busier neoclassical romp, earned its applause without quite matching the middle panel, which is in any case how the piece is built. Rouvali kept the pulse honest and the textures airy, and let the soloist’s small rhythmic liberties pass without policing.

After the interval, the wild card of the program revealed itself as nothing of the kind. Stravinsky‘s Jeu de cartes, the 1936 “ballet in three deals” he wrote for Balanchine‘s American Ballet, has always lived in the shadow of the early Diaghilev scores, and yet in this company — between Martinů‘s Paris pastoral and the Ravel to come — its place in the program was self-evident: this is Stravinsky at his most pastoral-neoclassical, a card game played in a clearing rather than a casino. Rouvali has a real ear for Stravinsky‘s rhythmic profile; the metric games were sharp without ever turning into a sport, and the Rossini-quoting wink near the close was placed with the dry good humour of a sharper showing his hand. The Concertgebouworkest brass played with the kind of stylish leanness one wants from a Pulcinella or a Rake’s Progress — and one did wonder, watching Rouvali in this score, when an opera house is going to put him in the Stravinsky pit. He would conduct a magnificent Rake.

Then the closer everyone came for, and the test of whether the through-line would hold. Rouvali‘s Lever du jour from Ravel‘s Second Suite of Daphnis et Chloé was not the conventional Concertgebouw daybreak — slow, marbled, monumental, a postcard sunrise — but something subtler and more believable: a sunrise heard from inside a Mediterranean grove, the wind machine present but discreet, the strings carrying the line rather than being submerged by it. The wordless chorus is absent in the suite, of course, and Rouvali did not try to manufacture it from instrumental tutti; he let the music tell you what was missing. The Pantomime gave the Concertgebouworkest‘s flute principal a small operatic scene of his own — the pan-pipe solo phrased like an Octavian, all youthful breath and inward warmth — and the Danse générale, taken at a confident rather than reckless tempo, built without ever losing the landscape. This was not a bacchanal that had forgotten it was in nature.

What lingered, walking out into the Museumplein, was less any single piece than the through-line itself. Every score on the program was the work of a composer who also wrote for the lyric stage — Dvořák the man of Rusalka, Martinů the man of Julietta, Stravinsky the man of The Rake’s Progress, Ravel the man of L’Enfant et les sortilèges — and every one of them was, in the works heard tonight, doing in symphonic form what their operas would later do with voices: building landscapes one could enter, populated by feeling. Rouvali, still in his early forties, conducts as if he has understood that point at a structural level; he does not separate the symphonic ear from the theatrical one. And Gabetta is, simply, one of the cellists who phrases like a singer rather than around one — breathing between bars, letting the line decide, asking the orchestra to listen rather than to follow. If an opera-house programmer is reading this, she would make an extraordinary recitalist in a Cocteau-anniversary evening, or in the chamber music of Poulenc‘s last years. But for now the symphonic stages have her, and the lyric ear can travel.

***

CAST

• Cello — Sol Gabetta

PRODUCTION

• Orchestra — Concertgebouworkest
• Conductor — Santtu-Matias Rouvali
• Program — Dvořák, V přírodě, op. 91 / Martinů, Cello Concerto no. 1, H. 196 / Stravinsky, Jeu de cartes / Ravel, Daphnis et Chloé, Suite no. 2
• Venue — Concertgebouw, Grote Zaal — 15 May 2026

Photos: Milagro Elstak / Het Concertgebouw; Sol Gabetta photos courtesy of Radio France via Wikimedia Commons; Grote Zaal interior via Wikimedia Commons.