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Mussorgsky, Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky: Dmitri Alexeev (piano), Russian State Symphony Orchestra / Mark Gorenstein (conductor), St. David’s Hall, Cardiff, 16.5.2008 (GPu)

Mussorgsky, St John’s Night on the Bare Mountain
Rachmaninov, Piano Concerto No.1
Tchaikovsky, Symphony No.5


With soloist, orchestra, conductor and repertoire all being Russian, this was about as thoroughly Russian an evening of music as one could very well hear without equipping oneself with a visa (or, I suppose, a valid ticket for the European cup final).

The first and most important thing to say was that this was a thoroughly exhilarating evening, one of those concerts which – justifiably – brought the house down. The quality of orchestral playing was quite outstanding and every note was played with a degree of conviction and intensity which, at times, well-nigh took the breath away. Orchestras on tour, and orchestras playing music with which they must be utterly familiar can, of course, be a recipe for the dull and uncommitted. But this was as far away from the merely routine as one could have hoped.

The Russian State Symphony Orchestra – sometimes known as the State Academic Symphony Orchestra of the Russia Federation – was founded in 1936, as the USSR State Symphony Orchestra, with Alexander Gauk as its first conductor, a post he held until 1941. The roll call of later Chief Conductors is profoundly impressive, including as it does names such as Natan Rakhlin (1941-1945), Konstantin Ivanov (1946-1965), Evgeny Svetlanov (1965-2002) and Vasily Siniasky (2000-2002). Since 2002 Mark Gorenstein has been the orchestra’s Chief Conductor and Artistic Director. This was the first Russian orchestra to tour abroad, beginning in 1956 and continuing to do so regularly. As interpreters of Russian music – and as ambassadors for that music – they stand in the first rank of orchestras.

For all sorts of pretty obvious reasons, orchestral sounds are less distinctively ‘national’ than they once were, but it would be wrong to deny the existence of something still distinguishably ‘Russian’ at the core of the sound to be heard here. With its huge string section (seven double basses, over thirty violins), with the horns played with rather more vibrato than we often hear in the West, with some fierce brass playing, this was an orchestral sound (and balance) perfectly attuned to the performance of this music, even if one might not want to hear it deployed in some other repertoire.

The programme began with a reading of Mussorgsky’s St John’s Night on the Bare Mountain (in Rimsky-Korsakov’s rather reductive, if polished, orchestration and recomposition) in which the orchestral attack grabbed and held the attention very powerfully, in which passages of controlled frenzy were played with utter belief and certainty of ensemble, and in which contrasts of tempo and dynamics were vividly marked and richly expressive. The brass section was thrilling, the string section lushly insinuating in the closing bars, the muted violins exquisitely, chillingly, refined. In some of the wilder moments earlier on, this was a performance which gave one a clear sense of a musical line of descent to The Rite of Spring.

In Rachmaninov’s First Concerto the orchestra were joined by Dmitri Alexeev, whose distinguished recording career includes a particularly fine set of the complete Rachmaninov Preludes for Virgin Classics, a recording which demonstrates his consummate sympathy with the composer’s musical vision. He has – naturally enough, given his background – a consummate technical assurance, and a sense of absolute comfort within the idiom. With a compelling presence at the instrument, Alexeev played with an aristocratic grandeur and bravura, but also with an unexaggerated poetic sensitivity. One has heard more ‘poetic’ readings of the central andante but such interpretations too often cross the border into the saccharine. That never happened here. In truth this First Concerto has never been a piece by which I have hitherto been entirely convinced; but this was a performance which made me hear and see virtues in it to which I had previously been oblivious. Played with great intimacy, the lingering conclusion of the andante was remarkably beautiful, the interplay of soloist and orchestra beautifully refined. Rachmaninov’s music – not just this concerto – so often seems to have a kind of self-awareness of being a performance (even on the page, as it were). Its self-dramatising quality can lead to performances that are decidedly fey or camp. But at the hands of Alexeev and Gorenstein the rhetoric was never empty. Yeats once said that while rhetoric is the expression of one’s quarrels with others, poetry is the expression of one’s quarrel with oneself. Rhetoric involves self-consciousness of the audience, of one’s designs on the audience. Too often performances of Rachmaninov never seem to get beyond such audience-awareness. But this was an exhilarating exception, in which the most passionate declamatory playing (as in the opening of the final movement) was simultaneously invested with introspection, of self quarrelling with self.

This concerto was Rachmaninov’s first substantial composition, the first version being completed in 1891, when he was eighteen. It was after the revolution in 1917 that he revised the concerto, a concerto which he had grown to find rather crude. But it had a ‘youthful freshness’ he still valued and which he sought (largely successfully) to retain in the rifacimento. The revision was undertaken, it should be remembered in the very year that Rachmaninov left Russia. It is not, I think, fanciful to say that there is a kind of anticipatory nostalgia about the work, a sense that it affirms and celebrates sounds (like the church bells which ‘ring’ more than once in the work) and feelings that Rachmaninov thought of as distinctly Russian. In this sense the piece is a kind of ‘hinge’ work, the link between the compositions written in Russia and the compositions written in exile. The much older Rachmaninov was to say, in a 1939 interview with Leonard Liebling, “I feel like a ghost wandering in a world grown alien … I have made intense efforts to feel the musical manner of today, but it will not come to me … I always feel that my own music and my reactions to all music remain spiritually the same, unendingly obedient in trying to create beauty” and later still in a 1941 interview (two years before his death), “I am a Russian composer, and the land of my birth has influenced my temperament and outlook. My music is a product of the temperament, and so it is Russian music”. Some of the complex issues surrounding ideas of national identity, always particularly complex in the Russian context and even more conflicted in the immediate context of the Revolution, are surely explored and expressed (however unconsciously) in the revised version of this concerto, revised at so pivotal a point in the histories of both nation and composer. It is, as it were (in its revised form) the work of a man conscious of impending exile. Played, post-perestroika, by a Russian soloist, conductor and orchestra, of international reputation, in the West, such issues were foregrounded in a fresh and increasingly complex fashion. It made for an engaging and thoroughly fascinating performance – for me at least it had an almost revelatory quality, making me reassess the work itself.

Tchaikovsky’s Fifth is another work which negotiates between Russian and Western sensibilities and ideas of form. Here it got a performance which was not as subtle some, not as prone to linger productively on detail, but was white hot in intense passion, full of mood swings and almost startling contrasts in dynamics. After the introductory andante, the allegro con anima of the first movement was restlessness itself, the magnificent lower strings relentless, the upper strings often lustrous in their beauty. The fortissimo climax was formidable without any real loss of precision. In the andante cantabile, the opening had an impressive weight of emotion, the work of the double basses was superb, the horn arietta hauntingly melancholy (the soloist was, I assume, the Principal horn, Voznesenskiy Leonid); the subsequent second melody was full of a yearning roughly challenged by the ‘Fate’ motto which unifies the whole work. The interplay of emotions in the movement’s conclusion, the essential emotional ambiguity, was beautifully achieved. The Valse which constitutes the third movement had great vivacity and playfulness, with rather more of an air of the idealised ballroom than ‘symphonic’ waltzes always have. Gorenstein here – and elsewhere – ensured a perfect balance between sections and articulated the music’s lines with a fluidity which was relaxed without ever being loose. In finding the last movement the least satisfying of the four, I have the excellent precedent of Brahms, who after hearing a rehearsal of the work was full of praise for – significantly – the first three movements. The triumphal march which opens the movement speaks of a kind of insistent confidence that the blows of fate can be survived, and opens up, in the allegro vivace, into music of exhilarating energy which always (even in a performance so full of conviction as this one) strikes me as just slightly factitious, as if Tchaikovsky is trying just a little too hard to persuade both himself and the listener. But enough of my quibbles – I was certainly, like everyone else present, carried along by the passion and fervour of the playing Gorenstein and his orchestra produced. The movement’s closing sense of triumph certainly seemed fitting as a triumphant ending to a very successful evening.

These were performances grounded in immense familiarity with the music; of course the bland and the workaday can sometimes be the product of such familiarity.  There was never any risk of that here – Gorenstein is too experienced a conductor to allow it, in any case. But more than that, one had the sense that for these musicians performing this music is part of the way they define their very identity, that it constitutes an affirmation of cultural (and even temperamental) continuities that have underlain – and survived – prodigious political and social changes. The very lengthy applause and the obvious audience excitement at the end of the concert seemed to get things about right.

Glyn Pursglove


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