Prieto and North Carolina Symphony excel in colorful French, Spanish, and Russian works

Christopher Hill | 10 MAY 2025

Carlos Miguel Prieto closes his North Carolina Symphony season generously this weekend with three colorful, adroitly scored French, Spanish, and Russian works of the early twentieth century plus orchestrated excerpts from a popular nineteenth-century Spanish piano suite. All four pieces are right down this conductor’s alley, and it was with a sense of anticipation that the audience warmly greeted him when he first walked on stage.

Up first: Ravel’s La valse, a depiction in sound of pre-1914 Viennese decadence and its consequences. Prior to the Great War Ravel had been a long-time member of an artistic coterie that styled itself as Les Apaches—that is, “the street gang.” Few if any members of this coterie (certainly not the petit Ravel) would likely have fared well in a real street gang, but calling oneself a street gang member affirmed an intention to disrupt conventional behavior, something Ravel regularly did in the realm of French concert music. Along came the Great War, pitting Austria (among others) against France. Ravel, an ardent patriot, volunteered and even served on the front lines as a truck driver. At the war’s conclusion, as a member of the winning team, he let Austria, on the losing team, see just how musically disruptive he could be, writing a piece that sounds at first like something akin to Der Rosenkavalier, later like poisoned schmaltz topped with Viennese whipped cream, and finally like a battlefield with shells exploding all around. As with so many of Ravel’s works, La Valse exists in two effective versions, a virtuosic one for piano and a masterfully orchestrated one for orchestra. Ravel’s orchestra, in the manner of the day, calls for strings plus two harps, winds and brass in triples (excepting the four horns), and a battery of eight percussion instruments in addition to timpani. As with every Ravel score, there’s no end to the imaginative and effective passages he provides his players.

Your reviewer’s last live encounter with La valse was in Philadelphia with the esteemed Yannick Nezet-Seguin conducting. That was a strong interpretation but no match for the one I heard Friday night in Raleigh. Carlos Miguel Prieto has the measure both of the music and of its message; there wasn’t a single unfocused moment in the performance. From the outset Ravel’s percussive punctuations were treated as intrinsic facets of the seductive waltz harmonies and textures swirling by, as punctuations that from minute to minute became increasingly threatening, eventually alarming. At the same time, the sonic whipped cream in between them was to die for, with the North Carolina Symphony playing like a Viennese orchestra at a New Years concert. After the recapitulation (of sorts) began, the percussion’s challenges were quickly accepted and music steered towards conflict. The battlefield ending was clearly written by someone who had spent time at active battlefields, and in Prieto’s hands it was shattering.

Impressionist piano concertos are rarities. Debussy’s Fantasie comes to mind, as does the Schmitt J’entends dans le lointain, the Bax Symphonic Variations, and the de Falla Nights in the Gardens of Spain. No doubt there are others your reviewer has either not encountered or forgotten. But I’m certainly not forgetting the two piano concertos of Ravel, who by the time he wrote them had shed his impressionist habit, as had Schmitt when he wrote his Symphonie concertante, as had Bax when he wrote his Saga Fragment, as had de Falla when he wrote his Harpsichord Concerto. In any event, of the four aforementioned impressionist piano concertos, de Falla’s is the only one found with any regularity on twenty-first-century concert programs.

Nights in the Gardens of Spain began in 1909 as four nocturnes for solo piano. It became a three-movement concerto in 1916 after prompting from pianist Ricardo Viñes (another member of Les Apaches), to whom de Falla dedicated the work. The composer calls for a modest orchestra, with only flute and oboe families in triples, other wind and brass families appearing in doubles, a single harp, and percussion limited to timpani. This instrumentation ensures a bright top to the concerto’s many quieter, nocturne-like passages but also power in its climaxes.

In short, the orchestra fares well in Nights. The piano, on the other hand, is best thought of as an obbligato instrument within the orchestral mix. The first movement is notable for its modal piano arpeggios over which, much of the time, melodies are presented by the orchestra. For a professional virtuoso, playing such an obbligato requires a certain degree of self abnegation. Thus in at least one climactic passage the soloist, Alessio Bax, could be seen arpeggiating furiously from the bottom of the keyboard to the top and back down again, yet doing this for the eye, not the ear, since the result of his playing was entirely inaudible. Surely this was the fault of the conductor, one might think. Your reviewer would counter: Maybe sometimes, but not this time. Besides, why should either musicians or audience sacrifice one of the few Big Emotive Moments of the piece for the sake of its umpteenth piano arpeggio? In fact, the fault lies in the composer’s scoring. Prokofiev (among others) knew exactly how to make this work.

Pianist Alessio Bax solos with the North Carolina Symphony. (credit: John Hansen)

Since winning the Leeds Competition in 2000, Alessio Bax has maintained a busy concert schedule. Italian-born but now New York–based, Bax is perhaps best known as a soloist for his recordings of Bach keyboard transcriptions. He plays Beethoven and Brahms, too, and his recorded repertoire is particularly rich in Russian and twentieth-century music. Unlike many pianists he eschews the early romantics (excepting Liszt). Together with his wife, pianist Lucille Chung, he performed a Poulenc double concerto in Raleigh in 2019, and the couple has recorded several CDs of duo piano works, the most recent of which features Debussy and Ravel. Bax, then, seems an excellent choice for performing de Falla.

This impression was confirmed when, having concluded Nights by doubling its static double bass line, Bax encored with de Falla’s Ritual Fire Dance (the piano arrangement made for Artur Rubinstein). Now Bax could leave self abnegation behind—not having to double anybody—and play ad libitum to his heart’s content. The result got the audience’s blood up, and the encore is likely what his visit will be remembered for by most.

The second half of the program opened with Isaac Albéniz’s Suite española, op. 47, originally written for piano solo. Its eight movements comprise a survey of Spanish regions, each represented by a different genre of popular music. Movements 1, 2, 3, and 8 were published individually in Madrid in 1886 (as numbered movements of Suite espagnole—note the French). Movements 4, 5, 6, and 7 were completed by 1889 and published individually in 1901 (again as parts of Suite espagnole) by Dotesio in Madrid.

In the 1960s the distinguished Spanish conductor Rafael Frübeck (de Burgos) orchestrated four movements (7. “Castilla,” 1. “Granada,” 5. “Asturias,” and 6. “Aragon”) from Suite espagnole as a symphonic opus, Suite española. By the time he recorded his orchestration with the New Philharmonia in 1979 he had added 3. “Sevilla” between “Granada” and “Asturias.” The resulting five-movement suite, a true sonic showcase, has now been widely played by orchestras.

Suite española is music simply about itself and the cultures it borrows from. What you hear is what you get. It would work well in a pops concert. Your reviewer was accordingly impressed, then, with the deeply respectful treatment Prieto and the orchestra gave it. Under his clear and nuanced direction, they played as if the North Carolina Symphony were a Spanish orchestra, putting the right kind of ritardandos in the right kind of places and adding plenty of gusto where it was called for. But although this performance might have been rooted in Spanish particulars, there was also, somehow, in the presentation a note of humanity broader than any particular culture, a sense that Suite española can be life-affirming music for people from anywhere.

The concert closed with Stravinsky’s biggest hit, a work the composer claimed (perhaps with a pinch of hyperbole) to have conducted himself over a thousand times, The Firebird Suite. The Firebird ballet of 1910 responds on several levels to the operatic music of Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky’s long-time tutor. In later years Stravinsky described The Firebird as an anti-Rimsky-Korsakov work. It would be more accurate to call it a super-Rimsky-Korsakov work, for it continues the older composer’s amalgam of melodic charm, daring harmony, and brilliant orchestration with folk-lore narrative. At the same time, in The Firebird the student surpasses his master in imaginative brilliance. Yes, it’s Stravinsky’s first ballet, and yes, its musical vocabulary is clearly related to that of Rimsky-Korsakov’s 1907 opera The Golden Cockerel (not to mention Roussel’s First Symphony, among other works). But it is what it is: an orchestral masterpiece.

Carlos Miguel Prieto leads the North Carolina Symphony in Stravisky’s ‘Firebird Suite.’ (credit: John Hansen)

Your reviewer’s last live audition of The Firebird was in Washington D.C. with the National Symphony Orchestra under Giancarlo Noseda. That was a memorable performance, but in my humble opinion the one in Raleigh this weekend was even better. As evidence of why it was even better I offer the suite’s “Berceuse.” It is not easy for an orchestra to play very very quietly for long stretches, especially after they’ve just been playing loudly. Under Prieto the players not only did this but did it while keeping their blended timbres varied and alive, three-dimensional as it were. The sustained sound was truly magical.

Exhibit B is the suite’s “Finale.” It’s not easy for an orchestra to play loudly for long stretches and simultaneously maintain a timbrally varied, three-dimensional quality to their blended tones. That happened in the “Finale,” and as a result the end of The Firebird Suite sounded genuinely triumphant, not stentorian or aesthetically correct.

Nobody’s perfect. There was a brief patch near the end of the “King Kastchei” movement where orchestral textures became less translucent than what was achieved by the National Symphony Orchestra. But this was uncharacteristic and perhaps won’t recur in subsequent performances. More importantly, although this performance might have been rooted in Russian particulars, there was also, somehow, a note of humanity broader than any particular culture, a sense that The Firebird captures something about the struggle between dark and light in people everywhere. Above all, most importantly, Stravinsky’s music, like Ravel’s and Albéniz’s, sounded thoroughly alive, as though Prieto and the orchestra could shape it differently another day and not lose anything important. Because, well, being able to do things differently is what freedom’s all about. Such freedom derives from and depends on mastery. There’s plenty of artistic mastery in Raleigh these days. ■

EXTERNAL LINKS:

• North Carolina Symphony: ncsymphony.org
• Carlos Miguel Prieto: carlosmiguelprieto.com
• Alessio Bax: alessiobax.com

About the author:

Christopher Hill has performed, in concert, as soloist, accompanist, and band member, classical, jazz, blues, and rock music on various keyboards and stringed instruments. He obtained a degree in musicology and has written about music, music theory, and music history for over five decades. He currently lives in Durham, North Carolina, from whence he travels to concerts throughout the Southland.

Read more by Christopher Hill.

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