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Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Rachmaninov: Nikolaj Znaider (violin), London Symphony Orchestra, Valery Gergiev, Barbican Hall, London, 7.5.2009 (GDn)

Stravinsky: Symphony in Three Movements
Schoenberg: Violin Concerto
Rachmaninov: Symphonic Dances 

Historical rather than musical connections link the works chosen by Valery Gergiev for his ‘Émigré’ concerts with the London Symphony Orchestra. Each is made up of works from the 1930s and 40s by European composers based in the USA. The works can be interpreted as composers’ responses to exile, but it’s not an interpretation routinely applied to any of them. If the risk of this programming strategy is incoherency, the payoff is variety, and the stylistic sensitivity with which each work was performed more than compensated for any hint of waywardness in the programming selections.

Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements is a difficult work to locate. It was written during the Second World War, and was inspired in part by contemporary newsreel footage. Coming as it does towards the end of Stravinsky’s neo-classical phase, it has a distancing air of formality, as if the mediation of the newsreels was as important as the events they relate. But much of the music harks back to Stravinsky’s Ballets Russes days, the visceral rhythms of The Rite of Spring or the brutal primary colour orchestration of The Firebird. This, perhaps, is the response to exile that justifies the work’s inclusion, and Gergiev is just the man to bring out these Russian roots. But he is also sensitive to the more sophisticated aspects of Stravinsky’s musical maturity. His tempi are rigorous without being rigid, not neo-classical as such, but keeping the Apollonian clockwork ticking over nicely.

The Schoenberg Violin Concerto is a rarity on the concert platform for two good reasons: it is beyond most players and beyond most audiences. But Nikolaj Znaider is a violinist who is able to address both issues. Technically, the work holds no fears for him (he literally makes it look easy) and musically he is a born communicator, infusing expression and meaning into every phrase. An argument could be made that Schoenberg fails to respond to the limitations and potential of the violin as a solo instrument. But Znaider has a gift for lending the music a sense of idiomatic logic, making this most calculated of concertos sound as free as transcribed improvisation. And his dark, rich tone (for which his Guarneri del Gesù is partly responsible) advocates effectively for Schoenberg’s solo line. Neither Znaider nor Gergiev make excuses for this music, they don’t over-Romanticise it or treat it merely as a virtuoso highwire act. The work clings to vestiges of Schoenberg’s earlier Expressionist vocabulary, but reduced and rationalised into an essentially Modernist form. This remembrance of things past is the link to the concert’s émigré theme, and the acute stylistic sensitivity of these performers allows Schoenberg’s music to maintain its critical balance between its European roots and its more immediate American context.

Gergiev’s versatility was amply demonstrated by these first half curiosities, but the Rachmaninoff Symphonic Dances after the interval marked a return to home territory. This was an utterly convincing performance of Rachmaninoff’s final work, with drive, focus, immaculate ensemble and a sense of inner necessity that united the diverse melodies and orchestral figurations into a tightly argued symphonic whole. Themes of exile and memory are relevant to this work in as much as the veiled allusions to Rachmaninoff’s earlier music, his First Symphony and Paganini Rhapsody, suggest nostalgia for other times and other lands. But as with the Stravinsky and Schoenberg, Gergiev is careful not to overemphasise these links to the past. This too is late music of considerable sophistication requiring, and receiving, great care in the performance of its subtle orchestral shadings.

Russian conductors presenting Russian works have become something of a staple for British orchestral life in recent years, and for as long as the results include performances of this calibre there are unlikely to be any complaints. His visits are infrequent, his baton technique is non-existent and his repertoire choices are eccentric to say the least, but Gergiev continues to work wonders with the London Symphony Orchestra, and this performance was spectacular. 

Gavin Dixon


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