BBC Symphony Strikes a Solid Note

The BBC Symphony is not one of the world’s top five orchestras, but it doesn’t matter. It plays clean, it plays straight, it plays with commitment.

Give it a hall with as immediate and bright an acoustic as in the Cerritos Center for the Performing Arts--where it performed two different programs over the weekend--and count on every detail being heard. Every one: from the hovering glints off tiny antique cymbals in Debussy to the monster fortissimos in Berlioz.

Enforcing the transparency and coherence was Andrew Davis, a genial, energetic, no-nonsense conductor whose strengths favor clarity and directness over inference and nuance.

Given this approach, the predominance of French music, which usually calls for nuance and subtlety, seemed a curious choice. But it worked. While all the music could have been more characterized, more expressive, it was all bedrock solid and unmanipulated.

On Saturday, he led Ravel’s Piano Concerto In G, with Jean-Yves Thibaudet as the soloist; Debussy’s “Prelude a l’apres-midi d’un faune”; Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements; and Mark Anthony Turnage’s “Momentum.”

Sunday afternoon, he conducted Ravel’s “Valses nobles et sentimentales,” Berlioz’s “Symphonie fantastique” and Strauss’ Four Last Songs, with Felicity Lott as the soloist.

Stravinsky, of course, decried “interpretations” of his music, although he wasn’t always such a strict literalist when conducting it. Davis kept all the motor rhythms and gear shifting in the Symphony as clean and clear as the composer calls for. But he could have made it more harsh and ominous.

Turnage’s 10-minute “Momentum” (1991) is a vivid and coloristic work that was commissioned by the City of Birmingham Symphony, where Turnage was composer-in-residence, to inaugurate a new hall. It has appropriate fanfares and maintains interest through adroit incorporation of various musical styles, including jazz and rock. Davis gave it a hearty performance.

A little more wooziness would have made Debussy’s afternoon dream more sensuous, a little more swooning and charm would have made Ravel’s waltzes live up more to their title, a little more mania would have made Berlioz’s symphony more fantastic.

But all that might have come at a loss of the many felicities heard because of the transparency and balance that Davis elicited in these scores--details of accent, dissonance, ingenious instrumentation, development. There are always trade-offs.

Davis was particularly fortunate in his collaborators. Thibaudet played Ravel with his customary poise, virtuosic ease and refined forcefulness. He made the slow movement a seamless cantabile, with shaded counterpoint.

Lott brought lustrous, pearly vocalism to Strauss’ great valedictory work. Although her warm voice sometimes was swallowed up by the orchestra, it soared exactly when it should have. Lott was not a finicky word painter, but she nonetheless communicated the distinctive emotion of each text.

Concertmaster Michael Davis and principal horn Timothy Brown played their solos sensitively.

Two encores on Saturday: “Les entretiens de la Belle et de la Be^te” from Ravel’s “Ma mere l’oye” and “The Death of Tybalt” from Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet.” One encore at the matinee on Sunday: Chabrier’s “Espan~a.”