Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich: Alexander Toradze, piano, Kirov Orchestra, Valery Gergiev, cond., Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 17.10.2006 (BJ)

 

On the one hand, I have never been an admirer of Valery Gergiev. On the other hand, there is nothing that gives me more pleasure as a critic than to be able to change my mind in a positive direction about someone I don’t admire. So I went to this Seattle debut concert by the Kirov Orchestra and its widely celebrated chief with the perennial hope of making such a transition.

The concert, certainly, was better than any I have heard Gergiev conduct before–not altogether surprisingly, for this was the first time I have heard him at work with his own orchestra. Whether or not, as is rumored, he shares a certain distaste for such minutiae as rehearsal with his distinguished predecessor Gennady Rozhdestvensky, and with John Pritchard a few years further back, there was no sign of inadequate preparation in the evening’s performances of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto and Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony.

The only evident orchestral problem in the Tchaikovsky was that, despite the usual sound-check that visiting orchestras routinely make when visiting a hall new to them, Gergiev had clearly not taken the measure of the auditorium’s acoustics. It is an excellent hall in many respects, but it leaves room for raucousness if a conductor does not take the utmost care over balance and dynamics. The opening flourish from the horns served immediate notice that this was to be a performance larger than life, which might be all very well in a work of such outgoing emotionalism, but in the event, several tuttis in the outer movements were not just raucous but physically painful in their impact.

It may perhaps have been the contribution of the soloist, Alexander Toradze, that provoked so violent an orchestral response (though that would not explain similar excesses in the Shostakovich after intermission). Toradze is a puzzle. I heard some fine performances by him when he was 20 years younger, but by now he seems to have developed almost into a caricature of himself. What was most puzzling about this particular performance was not the simple tendency to bang that he is often accused of, but rather the arbitrariness that characterized his whole interpretation. The nuances never seemed to grow out of the inner nature of the music. It was more as if, each time Toradze delivered a stentorian phrase, his next move was to say to the listener, “Wait a minute–I can do subtle and poetic too!” There was an abundance of undeniably beautiful moments, quiet and lyrical in tone and phrasing, but they revealed no connection with the touches of bombast that preceded and followed them–and the concerto, as a consequence, fell apart.

It was, then, Shostakovich’s wonderful Eleventh Symphony, with its fresco-like portrayal of the events that shook Russia in “The Year 1905,” that offered Gergiev the evening’s one real chance to make a cogent musical statement. Only a critic endowed with a more than ordinary degree of curmudgeonliness could call the performance he fashioned a bad one. It was a good performance. There were even moments of real excellence, such as a sequence of bloodcurdling orchestral sonorities toward the end of the work’s roughly one-hour duration. There was some superbly atmospheric and musically percipient orchestral playing, especially from a contrabass section–all, I think, bowing underhand in the German fashion–that commands an exceptionally rich and strong sound. But there are less commendable elements in the orchestra. Aside from a finely focused and sensitive principal bassoon, and despite some compelling playing from other woodwinds in their solos, the woodwind section when it played as a group produced a distressingly acid tone evocative of the kazoo rather than of anything more dignifiedly symphonic.

Gergiev left no doubt of his emotional commitment to his late compatriot’s searingly impassioned musico-political statement. It was all very thrilling, if still at times painfully raucous in tone and pervasively undifferentiated in the crucial textural matter of inner parts. Some of the quieter moments, too, had real eloquence. But even the fiercest tearaway rhythms in the second and fourth movements emerged without true propulsive vitality. The effect was that of a well-drilled machine, not a genuine breathing organism.

Altogether, then, this was not a performance to challenge comparison with the greatest realization of the work I have ever heard. That was also given in Seattle, where I happened to be on a visit ten years before my recent move to this area. The orchestra on that occasion was not some starry visiting ensemble from Russia, but the good old Seattle Symphony. The conductor was Gerard Schwarz. And the intensity and depth of his interpretation were on a level far beyond anything to be experienced in Gergiev’s ultimately facile histrionics. It takes a guest concert of this kind to bring the too easily forgotten excellence of the home team back into focus. At a time when some of the news about the Seattle Symphony has become humanly distasteful, I hope that at least some of the listeners on this occasion were so reminded.

 

Bernard Jacobson