Even now, more than 50 years after it all began, the period-instrument movement can still produce wonderful, eye-opening surprises. The frontline of its pioneering has shifted ever closer to our own time, and has now reached the early decades of the last century; the differences between the orchestral instruments of that time and those of today may be much smaller than, for instance, between Beethoven's orchestra and today's, but as Simon Rattle's concert with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment showed so beautifully, those differences still matter. Even the most familiar music acquires fresh perspectives when heard with the soundworld for which it was conceived.
Rattle's programme was devoted entirely to French repertoire: beginning with Fauré – the four-movement suite from his incidental music to Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande – and going on to Ravel and Debussy. Debussy's Prélude à l'Après-Midi d'un Faune was the earliest work, Ravel's Piano Concerto for the Left Hand the latest, and all seemed more warmly transparent than usual with the OAE's sound founded on gut strings, which allowed the woodwind to be carefully nuanced and the wonderfully rounded tone of the brass to be incisive without becoming overbearing.
If it was the performance of Debussy's La Mer that was the most startling – textures were opened up, subtleties of scoring made points that are often lost with modern orchestras, while Rattle always balanced the symphonic and the descriptive elements carefully – Pierre-Laurent Aimard's account of the Ravel concerto was extraordinary, too. He used a handsome Erard piano that had a crisply defined tone, especially in the lower registers, which enabled him to profile the solo line against Ravel's orchestration with ease, while the textures around him, not least the Jurassic murmurings, with which the work opens, acquired a new clarity
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