April 25 and 26, 2025
Meymandi Concert Hall
Raleigh, North Carolina – USA
North Carolina Symphony; Marie Jacquot, conductor; Marie-Ange Nguci, piano; Daniel Jordan, guest concertmaster.
Richard WAGNER: Overture to Tannhäuser(1845)
Franz LISZT: Piano Concerto No. 2 in A Major (1861)
Camille SAINT-SAËNS: Symphony No. 3 in C Minor, op. 78 (1886)
Christopher Hill | 26 APR 2025
While music director Carlos Miguel Prieto conducts in Romania this weekend, the North Carolina Symphony is being visited by conductor Marie Jacquot. In case her name is new to you, Jacquot is, in 2025, very much the rising star, currently Principal Conductor of the Royal Danish Theatre, Principal Guest Conductor of the Vienna Symphony, and Chief Conductor Designate of the WDR Symphony Orchestra.
She is a slim, attractive, dark-haired woman with an admirably fluid baton technique yet also conducts physically, often using hands alone in expressive passages, for example. During Friday’s concert, she was never totally airborne, as some conductors occasionally are, but she seemed comfortable with graceful leg as well as arm gestures when communicating with her players. Jacquot came to conducting from the trombone section of the orchestra, and it seems plausible that some of the best qualities in her interpretations derive from her understanding of breath rather than gesture alone.
The pieces in this weekend’s concerts are played in chronological order. Whether by design or coincidence, the three composers form an intimate historical triad. The apex of that triad is Liszt; however, the earliest work on the program is by another composer, Wagner, who was profoundly influenced by Liszt, represented here by his 1845 overture to Tannhäuser. The multilayered orchestration of this overture is, in some respects, the most remarkable of the whole program. It took four decades before another composer, Richard Strauss, was able (borrowing Newton’s phrase) to stand on Wagner’s shoulders. Marie Jacquot was most successful in bringing an appropriate devotional spirit to the opening and a light and playful spirit to the contrasting erotic music. It was only in the later trombone-driven processional music that your reviewer felt that tunes not assigned to trombones were simply being played rather than enunciated. I believe that either Wagner or his most highly regarded past interpreters expected more of a parlando approach here.
Marie Jacquot was joined in Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in A Major by another name that may be new to regular subscribers, Albanian pianist Marie-Ange Nguci. Nguci is herself establishing an international reputation, and she was recently named Radio France’s Artist in Residence for 2025–26. In that capacity, she will be performing concertos by Saint-Saëns and Prokofiev, as well as chamber music by Mendelssohn. Her Raleigh performance showed her to be a pianist with both a blazing technique and a deeply poetic temperament.
Marie-Ange Nguci (credit: Caroline Doutre)
Years ago, Arthur Rubinstein was well known in musical circles for practicing hard when playing in the biggest cities and for not practicing at all for venues like, say, Raleigh or Atlanta. Nguci played for Raleigh this weekend as though it were Berlin, London, or Vienna. The result was genuinely thrilling. She never banged in the Liszt but played with power and a rich tone. Her fast tempos were dauntingly fast but never sounded rushed. Her slow tempos sounded almost like she was improvising from her own meaningful space. The only fault your reviewer could find with Nguci’s presentation was that she apparently did not expect to play an encore and, therefore, did not play an encore, the sort of gesture that keeps one’s name alive in people’s minds. Bottom line: if she’s on the program, try to catch her. She’s the real deal.
A brilliant musical mind (as well as iconic virtuoso), Liszt spent the first twenty years of his career pleasing audiences and the next thirty-five trying to ignore or transcend habits he had acquired in doing so. Liszt, in the early 1830s, was part of the Parisian pianistic coterie (including Kalkbrenner, Moscheles, Hiller, Chopin, and others), but unlike those others, he hadn’t the training to compose a piano concerto (or, perhaps, the inclination to write a work that sounds like Hummel and Kalkbrenner). But he certainly wanted to write some kind of piano concerto, so he collected ideas that one day he could put into such a work.
In the 1840s, the young Joachim Raff helped Liszt learn how to score for orchestra, and by 1850, Liszt was knee-deep in symphonic music. Taking ideas from his 1830s sketchbooks, he now completed a version of Piano Concerto No. 2 in A Major that was performed in 1857. It didn’t blow people away, so he tinkered with it for another four years. The resulting 1861 version, in one continuous movement, gained and has retained a modest position in the standard repertoire. There is much to admire in it.
The conductor’s challenge in Piano Concerto No. 2 is to project the incisive, paprika-like flavor of Liszt’s instrumentation while allowing the pianist enough acoustic space to be heard by the audience. Ms. Jacquot succeeded in this quite a bit of the time but not all of the time. However, even when overpowering the soloist, the Raleigh players always sounded marvelous, not to mention virtuosic.
Intermission over, the orchestra launched into the opening of Saint-Saëns’ Symphony No. 3 as though it were a prayer arising out of deep silence. The effect was not perfect because quite a few members of the audience were reluctant to stop talking when the symphony began. But it was clear from Jacquot’s gestures that, for her, this symphony is personal.
Among prodigies of the classical era, Saint-Saëns (1835–1921) stood out (along with Mozart, Mendelssohn, and Bruch) as one of the most prodigious. Admitted to the Conservatoire at age 13, he composed his Symphony No. 1 in A Major at age 14, in 1850, and his Symphony No. 2 in A Minor at age 18, in 1859. These were more than well-made student works, but they had little chance of becoming repertory pieces because in mid-nineteenth-century France, Berlioz notwithstanding, instrumental music was something associated with German-speaking lands. France, like Italy, considered itself a land of opera (as well as of ballet). At the same time, France, unlike Italy, also prided itself on recent glorious military exploits under Napoleon and an extensive current network of lucrative colonial dependencies, second only to England’s.
Prussia’s successful invasion of France in 1871 thus came as a major psychological blow to the continent’s premier empire. Saint-Saëns’ response, on 25 February 1871 (shortly before Prussian troops marched victoriously down the Champs-Élysées), was to found a Societé nationale de musique, with the motto ars gallica. There was, of course, already an identifiable French style of opera and song (mélodie), but as an opera composer himself, Saint-Saëns recognized the aesthetic limitations of that genre’s French conventions. His hope was to stimulate interest in developing an identifiably French approach to instrumental music, one that matched or expanded on the depth of expression found in such recent German works as Liszt’s Faust Symphony, Raff’s “Im Walde” Symphony, as well as Schubert’s recently discovered “Unfinished” Symphony in B Minor.
Given the political climate of the early 1870s, a number of French composers rallied to Saint-Saëns’ cause. But as the 1870s wore on—and particularly after the premiere of Wagner’s Ring in 1876, leading composers in the Societé nationale de musique turned away from ars gallica and toward ars wagneria. By the mid-1880s, Saint-Saëns was seeing his Society promoting works that turned its original aesthetic goals on their head. It was at this copacetic moment in 1885 that the Philharmonic Society of London decided to commission an oddity for their next season—an instrumental symphonic work by a well-regarded French composer, which is to say: an instrumental orchestral piece by an opera composer. The list of opera composers that the Society considered started with Gounod and continued with Délibes, Massenet, and Saint-Saëns. When Saint-Saëns received his solicitation, he jumped at the chance to write not just another symphonic poem but a bold new French symphony to be premiered in a highly prestigious venue. Perhaps, he hoped, this would counteract the dominance of Wagnerians in French music.
Saint-Saëns immediately poured all of his creative powers into writing a Symphony in B Minor, the then-unique key of Schubert’s recently discovered “Unfinished.” And, indeed, the opening sounds very much like an hommage to the opening of Schubert’s “Unfinished.” By the time Saint-Saëns had finished the work, however, it had shifted from B to C minor and acquired a number of innovative features. Prominent among these is the ubiquity of thematic transformation in every section, the intricate interiors of its two-movement formal design, and the prominent use of new sonorities, especially organ and orchestral piano. Just as Saint-Saëns more or less defined the orchestral use of the xylophone in his Danse macabre, here his treatment of the piano as an orchestral instrument established a tradition that extends to d’Indy, Schmitt, Prokofiev, Duttilleux, and recent composers of many nationalities.
Within a few years of its premiere, Symphony No. 3 in C Minor became part of the standard repertoire, and it spawned half a dozen other remarkable French symphonies. Within the standard repertoire, it has never had to cede its position. Together with Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, Franck’s Symphony in D Minor, and Debussy’s La mer, it is today still one of the most highly regarded French symphonies.
I mentioned above that the conductor seemed to be in her element from the first measures of the symphony. That impression was only strengthened, page by page, as the score unfolded. Where Wagner sounded serious, Saint-Saëns sounded deadly serious. Where Wagner sounded bland, Saint-Saëns sounded incisive. I mentioned above that the conductor seems to know something about breath. In the Saint-Saëns, musical sentences, paragraphs, and sections all sounded like great breaths of different scales. This is in part because the composer wrote the symphony from something central to himself. But it is also because in recreating this work the conductor successfully communicated her enthusiasm to the North Carolina Symphony’s gifted musicians.
Based on Friday evening’s performance, we are fortunate to catch both Marie Jacquot and Marie-Ange Nguci together in what appears to be the promising spring of their careers. ■
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- North Carolina Symphony: ncsymphony.org
- Marie Jacquot: marie-jacquot.com
- Marie-Ange Nguci: marieangenguci.com
Read more by Christopher Hill.
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