Alexander Zemlinsky spent most of his career in the slipstream of more celebrated composers, and La Petite Sirène — the symphonic fantasy he wrote in 1902–03 as a coded autobiography of impossible love — has remained exactly where that career placed it: admired in the right rooms, rarely performed. Thomas Guggeis conducted it at the Auditorium de la Maison de la Radio as a man who had long since absorbed the score: the restless Wagnero-Mahlerian paragraphs shaped with structural patience, the late-Romantic density handled without inflation, Zemlinsky‘s own harmonic voice audible beneath the shadows of Wagner and Mahler who rĂ´dent through the texture without quite taking over. The Orchestre National de France played with an alertness that the Auditorium‘s acoustic threw into relief. For those who know Zemlinsky through Der Zwerg or Eine florentinische Tragödie — those compressed, brilliant one-act masterpieces — La Petite Sirène is the same interior violence at full orchestral scale, the same sense of a creative life pressed against an invisible ceiling. Guggeis made the connection audible, and it was the most arresting conducting one has heard in this hall in some time.
Mozart‘s Concerto No. 10 for two pianos was a different proposition, and the Jussens met it with the full range of what they do. Arthur and Lucas Jussen are an exceptional pair: the dialogue between the two keyboards unhurried and genuinely symbiotic, their blend the quality of a single musical intelligence speaking in two voices, the technical command absolute. If one small reservation surfaces in retrospect, it has to do with colour rather than quality: the Concerto was written by Mozart for himself and his sister Nannerl between commissions, a rieuse piece in E-flat that calls for the light buffa spirit of the Figaro finales, and what the Jussens and the Orchestre National de France offered was somewhat richer and more saturated than that — a reading of real beauty, in which the conversational lightness of the writing occasionally gave way to something weightier. Guggeis shaped the architecture with his usual command; the evening was a fine one throughout.
The encore confirmed what the concert had already established. Whatever the brothers chose, the Auditorium erupted — that particular warmth a hall produces when a room and its performers have fully found each other. The audience left the Maison de la Radio delighted.
***
CAST
- Piano — Arthur Jussen
- Piano — Lucas Jussen
PRODUCTION
- Direction musicale — Thomas Guggeis
- Orchestre — Orchestre National de France
Arthur & Lucas Jussen © Marco Borggreve / Thomas Guggeis © Simon Pauly
