Prom 48: LSO & Simon Rattle- Ravel, Royal Albert Hall, London, review: Colourful music full of fantasy, but never sentimental

A talking armchair and an opinionated squirrel, a Beauty, a Beast and a fairy garden: Ravel’s musical world is one of magic. Storybook characters come to life, childhood stretches out to the horizon. The music may be brightly coloured, full of fantasy, wit and play, but it is rarely whimsical, and never sentimental. To tell these musical tales well is to take them absolutely seriously; to tell them best, as Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra did here in their all-Ravel Prom, is to persuade your audience to do the same.

Simon Rattle is far too skilled a musical storyteller to shout at his listeners, however many of them there happen to be. Instead of amplifying the concert’s opener – Ravel’s charming ballet Mother Goose – to fit the Royal Albert Hall, he beckoned us all in closer. Whispered delivery lent intensity to these familiar tales, characters emerging silhouetted on clarinet, bassoon or flute, clearly etched against the watercolour wash of strings. If these were fairytales then they were Folio Society editions – every detail lovingly, respectfully traced.

The same approach should have brought the magic of the composer’s one-act opera L’Enfant et les Sortileges, in which a naughty boy must confront the animals and objects he has wronged, to the surface. But despite vivid work from the orchestra and a superb cast, of which Jane Archibald’s luminous Princess, Gavan Ring’s deliciously neurotic Grandfather Clock and Patricia Bardon’s Mother were just the beginning, the tone never quite settled.

At the centre of it Magdalena Kozena’s L’Enfant felt altogether too much – too knowing, too petulant, too affected – for Rattle’s grown-up fantasy, turning a story into a pantomime. Where was this same assurance, this vocal weight earlier in the evening in Sheherazade, Ravel’s orchestral song-cycle? The mezzo herself described it as “one of the most erotic pieces ever written”, and yet this pale, under-projected performance was more convent girl than courtesan.