SAN DIEGO — “Oh, L’enfant et les sortilèges, without a doubt,” was conductor-composer Esa-Pekka Salonen’s instant answer when the San Diego Symphony’s creative consultant, Gerard McBurney, asked him to name “the most perfect piece of orchestration in the history of Western music.” In Ravel’s 1925 operatic collaboration with French writer Colette, “Every note is gold,” Salonen said. As the orchestra began planning its second season in the sonically reborn Jacobs Center two or so years ago, Ravel’s 150th birthday year — 2025 — inspired president/CEO Martha Gilmer and music director Rafael Payare to name the same piece.
With its prismatic, precision-crafted score, fantastical plot, and theatrically vivid characters, L’enfant et les sortilèges (The Child and the Spells) dovetailed nicely with Gilmer’s career-long mission to enhance the visual dimension in orchestral concerts. As the Chicago Symphony’s vice president for artistic planning and audience development, Gilmer had developed with McBurney the celebrated “Beyond the Score” series in 2005: visuals, music, text, and occasional dramatization synergized into an educational/multimedia Gesamtkunstwerk. Celebrating the launch of the San Diego Symphony’s 115th season Oct. 3 with a semi-staging of L’enfant — Ravel’s psychic drama/dreamscape of a young boy’s redemptive discovery of compassion — promised the same alchemical dazzle.
McBurney recalled that when L’enfant was selected, Payare enthused, “‘Oh, wonderful.’ And then he looked at me, ‘You have to make it look great.’” Without the budget to revive L’enfant productions via the art of David Hockney (Metropolitan Opera, 1981) or Maurice Sendak (Glyndebourne, 1987), McBurney forged his own artistic and theatrical solution for the challenge of mounting an opera on a stage filled with 80-some orchestra musicians.
Chicago artist, musician, and onetime political cartoonist Joe Fournier crafted colorful stylized visuals to illustrate Ravel/Colette’s imagined world of talking armchairs and teacups, remonstrating animals, and threatening Arithmetic. Theatrical projection designer Michael Tutaj animated Fournier’s images into a flowing visual narrative splashed onto the reflecting wall above the choral terrace. Theatrical lighting veteran Paul Miller then immersively illuminated the entire space within viewers’ vision with shifting color washes — from the stage floor and ceiling to the proscenium splay walls and even the side walls to the audience’s left and right.
McBurney deepened the immersion by staging the dramatic action around and within the orchestra and audience. While Isabel Leonard’s Child/L’enfant remained stage front throughout, her seven antagonists emerged from the aisles behind the audience-level side chairs, from the stage-right performers’ entrance, from rear of the stage onto a raised platform between orchestra and choral terrace, or into the choral terrace itself. In a minor masterstroke, members of the Children’s Chorus — holding handheld props signaling they were “frogs” or “Arithmetic” — intermittently crossed the stage in a charmingly choreographed single file. The effect was of continual motion and enveloping action. On such canny details as these, as much as on big-gun talent, hang memorable performances.
Payare’s orchestra, supported by Maurice Boyer’s Symphony Chorus and Ruthie Millgard’s Children’s Choir, matched McBurney’s image- and motion-rich feast with virtuosic refinement. The concert was the U.S. premiere of the Ravel Edition’s evidently authoritative new version of L’enfant, “aimed at correcting long-standing errors and restoring Ravel’s original intentions.” Gilmer noted that the edition’s editorial director, François Dru, personally coached the orchestra on the revised score’s nuances.
Though McBurney calls L’enfant “almost the most spectacular concerto for orchestra ever written,” Ravel seemed especially to favor the woodwinds. Rose Lombardo (flute), Sarah Skuster (oboe), Andrea Overturf (English horn), Sheryl Renk (E-flat clarinet), Frank Renk (bass clarinet), and Valentin Martchev (bassoon) played with flawless elegance and personality. They helped confirm that, a year after its unveiling, the overhauled Jacobs Music Center’s acoustic is as breathtaking as ever: a warm bath of sumptuous, detailed sound that feels so fully present and enveloping you’d swear it was amplified (it’s not). That acoustic is now setting a new bar that goads the musicians to realize their potential, knowing their best will be heard.
For all the evening’s visual saturation and instrumental polish, it was the eight singers (seven making San Diego debuts) led by Leonard, who made this L’enfant soar. From the moment she entered — already fully in character as Ravel’s hyperactive, self-absorbed six-year-old — her charisma was tangible. Leonard’s mezzo-soprano is robust, expressive, commanding; her acting effective; her radiant stage presence undeniably magnetic. Soprano Liv Redpath — as the fire, the nightingale, and, most memorably, the princess — channeled her own charisma. Baritone Elliot Madore (playing the grandfather clock and black cat) and Angel Raii Gomez (as the tea pot, little old man, and tree frog) flashed scene-stealing comedic chops. Madore and mezzo-soprano Meridian Prall’s vamping in the notorious feline romance duet was priceless (Leonard, summoning her inner kindergartner, had the Child shield his eyes from their caterwauled mating ritual).
Quibblers could object to the absence of projected subtitles synced with the singers’ words (the libretto was mostly but not entirely baked into the animated projection screen above the chorus). Or the decision not to more explicitly dramatize the Child’s “wicked” violence — stabbing the caged squirrel, pulling the tom cat’s tail, etc. — to make his moral transformation feel more earned.
Francophilically prefiguring the Ravel pre-intermission were orchestrations of two Debussy piano pieces — L’isle joyeuse (The Joyful Isle) and La boîte à joujoux (The Box of Toys). Aside from the French connection, all three pieces involve childhood-themed material, and all were composed or orchestrated within a six-year span. Debussy wrote L’isle joyeuse in 1904; Bernardino Molinari began orchestrating it, with Debussy’s consent, in 1917, a year before the composer’s death.
Debussy composed La boîte à joujoux in 1913; André Caplet orchestrated it a year after Debussy’s death. Both modernist French masters, born 13 years apart, influenced the other’s work. Ravel adopted Debussy’s harmonic vocabulary and even orchestrated and transcribed his works. Debussy studied and “modestly plagiarized” (biographer Stephen Walsh’s words) Ravel’s Habanera in 1898 and in 1903 wrote a parody of his Jeux d’eau.
But the choice of these two Debussy gems wasn’t about musicology: They allowed the orchestra to shine on its own without distraction. The San Diego woodwinds glowed, as they tend to do; the strings played with plush, layered textures. Offsetting La boîte à joujoux’s occasional longueurs were pianist/repétiteur Mariam Bombrun’s tastefully essential sonority and the winning delivery of the prologue by young narrators Lavender Hartzell and Blake Hay.
The orchestra’s triumphant opening night inaugurates a season peppered with highlights: a six-work Brahms festival in March; marquee appearances by baritone Matthias Goerne, pianists Marc-André Hamelin and Steven Osborne, and violinists Leonidas Kavakos, Augustin Hadelich, and Randall Goosby; Shostakovich’s searing Eighth Symphony and Mahler’s enigmatic Seventh; and contemporary composers from Jimmy López and Unsuk Chin to Gabriela Ortiz and Olly Wilson. Expectations are high.
For details on the 2025-26 San Diego Symphony season, go here.
