Salman Rushdie in the programme asking leading questions about the Scheherezade scenario; Roger Nichols providing matchless notes on the music; full text of the exotic poetry set in the middle work of the evening; a much-recorded soloist versed in song, and Mahler, as well as opera; one of Britain's top choruses; and a visiting French orchestra exhibiting two items of home repertoire with sensuous vocals and scenes from an imposing ballet score.

All their artistic director Jacques Mercier now had to do with his Orchestre National de Lorraine, was get up and play out the Festival.

The blunt observations and pertinent insights of Rushdie threw dark, salutory light for us on one of the cherished legends from his familiar area of oriental culture. It was a substantial and disturbing read.

To be treated to Nichols' writing about music, especially his authority on Ravel, combined with Rushdie's presence to create a sense of exceptional occasion and that this would be a concert programme to be kept for a lifetime.

All the simmering words were there, French and English, of Tristan Klingsor's three poems from his Schéhérezade, that the young Ravel provocatively chose to set while at the Paris Conservatoire in 1903. The only miscalculation and disservice was that the dimmed Dome lighting prevented one following the text, in order to tie up readily the astonishing sound pictures that Ravel, at just 27, was painting behind the word feelings and images.

Durham girl Sarah Connolly, stepping in for Patricia Bardon, in a long, black halter-neck dress and a jade pashmina worn well off-the shoulder, was a sultry paintbrush dabbing and touching across Ravel's caressing and throbbing canvases.

The Brighton Festival Chorus were reuniting with Mercier , with whom they won a Gallic recording award with Debussy's Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien and the L'Orchestra National de L'Ile de France. They needed no words, though, to crown the fresco, the composer's description, of Ravel's Daphis and Chloé ballet score highlights. They left the audience hallucinating in aaahs and oohs about Chloe's timely recue by Pan and her restoration to Daphnis' devotion.

And how, then, did Mercier do with his ONL? While plenty of stops were pulled out in all the above preparations, he might have pulled out a shade too many himself at first. After moving though sunny Bank Holiday crowds thronging the city — the traffic delayed a number of the audience — the adrenalin of the occasion may have got slightly the better of him in the opening work.

A silver, flying Beatle mop of grey hair, spread fingers with no baton, a swirling posture, his sense of urgency in setting the scene, ultimately produced screeching strings as the savagery of the Sultan wreaked its carnage and the sea swell tossed Sinbad's ship. Valid effects? Or rough edges?

Some of the marching seemed a little ragged in the story of the Kalender Prince, again with Mercier attacking the tempo. And after the strings gloriously announced the young prince and princess, I thought Mercier's concern with momentum denied his wind soloists space to weave their separate and eagerly-awaited spells.

This movement was sealed effectively, though, by violin soloist Denis Clavier (Monsieur Piano: an odd name for a fiddler . . .), whose key seductive solo was given room to evoke the necessary voluptuousness.

Claivier's violin turned seemingly to alarm and fright in the finale and, almost as though Mercier had been waiting all along for this, the furious tempo was almost too much for the strings. But hey, this a live occasion and the thrill was palpable when the percussion hurled the work to its zenith before Clavier lowered the curtain with enigmatic mystery and allure.

After the interval, Mercier and ONL were on home soil. Their accompaniment to Connolly was delicieuse. In Asia, the schooner did rock in the harbour, life or death was dispensed on a whim, assassins did smile. In La flûte enchantée, notes did fly like kisses to the lover at the casement. Hips lightly swayed in The Indifferent One.

Nichols threw fascinating light on the unharmonious meeting of minds of Ballet Russes' commissioning impressario Diaghilev, choreographer Fokine and composer Ravel in their Daphnis collaboration. And the moment after initial rehearsals when Ravel's expansive but particular musical take on Daphnis and Chloé, and his publisher Jacques Durand's belief in it, suddenly made Diaghilev listen, and u-turn on his decision to scrap the whole thing.

A trumpeter then a horn player disappearing, not for comfort breaks, not in Parisian student protest, but to play offstage at the choir's entry, added to the intrigue of this peculiarly French music-making.

I missed their return, so much else was happening amid the visual aura generated by 88 players now fully in harness with Mercier's tempi — and earning the encore of repeating the Bacchanale finale for a rewarded audience.


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