"Oooh, Professor
Snape’s made an album" said my
girlfriend, spotting this CD on top
of another excitingly wobbly heap sent
by our heroic editor. The Alan Rickman/Yuri
Bashmet look-alike debate can continue
elsewhere, but with darkly soulful portraits
being the trend in several releases
in the current catalogue I sometimes
wonder where it will all end. There’s
a new Haitink - Beethoven’s 3rd
Symphony with the LSO - out there which
just looks like the music has given
someone a headache – not necessarily
a guarantee of hit sales. This new CD
from the distinguished and ever elegant-sounding
Moscow Soloists is actually quite a
tasteful affair, with a nice blue lining
and picture disc.
Bashmet and his players
know the secret of good string chamber
orchestral playing. Aside from the necessity
for impeccable tuning, articulation
and phrasing, the only real danger is
an overall ‘beige’ result from a lack
in dynamic contrast. Take any moment
from Apollo, and you’ll find
you ears constantly being teased from
piapianissimo to mezzo-forte/forte,
the genuine loud moments always roomy
and unforced, but reaching up from a
floor of genuine softness, so that the
contrast and shape is ever present.
Apollo is of course ‘Apollon
musagète’ under a different
name, revised subtly by the composer
to make the work more of a concert piece,
but altering it little from its ballet
origins. Making a comparison with Esa-Pekka
Salonen and the Stockholm Chamber Orchestra
(Sony SK 46 667) Bashmet has a lighter
touch and a more transparent sound,
and with only seventeen players you
might expect this. Both conductors appreciate
the abstract nature of the works neo-classicism,
but Bashmet is more playful, urging
the faster variations forward and making
the drama fleeting and elusive, giving
the slower variations more rubato
and infusing them with added value,
not in terms of extra weight, but certainly
in the way the music is narrated, drawing
the listener along through rides both
rugged and gentle. The vital Apothéose
deserves a mention. No doubt it
has something to do with Russian ‘soul’,
but Bashmet wrings out more emotion
than most in this movement, and the
four minutes of its duration are filled
with echoes explicit, elusive and ethereal.
The Concerto in
D came about as a commission from
Paul Sacher, and Stravinsky’s idea was
to create a work on the scale of one
of Bach’s Brandenberg concertos.
Once again, the Moscow Soloists fill
the work with contrast. Rhythmic energy
is a strong feature here, alongside
beautiful lines and some string colours
which make the hairs on the back of
your neck stand up. Salonen is good
too, but there is something in his approach
which makes you realise he is a composer
rather than a player. Bashmet is sometimes
a little less explicit with harmonic
or contrapuntal detail, but the impact
of the playing creates a great deal
more intensity and excitement. The opening
of the second movement is a joy. Bashmet
takes nothing for granted, but keeps
us in an agony of anticipation as nothing
and everything happens at the same time.
This is one of those ‘you have to
here this’ recordings, and you
can have fun watching your friends gradually
falling off the edge of their chair
by the end, after the nothing which
has happened, happens.
The USP of this disc
is of course the version for string
orchestra of Prokofiev’s Visions
Fugitives, which cover the youthful
composer’s attachment to Scriabin, right
up to the turbulent influence of the
February revolution in 1917. I know
the piano versions of these pieces fairly
well, and found the sound world created
by the string orchestra arrangements
to be a little disorientating at first.
Once you can accept these arrangements
as pieces in their own right, rather
than trying to find the recognisable
‘hooks’ which sound most like the familiar
piano renditions, then things begin
falling into place, and I soon gave
up trying to put one up against another.
I admire the way in which both Barshai
and Roman Balashov, whose completion
of the full set of twenty pieces is
recorded here for the first time, avoid
a slavish recreation of pianism. Rudolf
Barshai made an arrangement of fifteen
of the Visions Fugitives in 1962
for his own Moscow Chamber Orchestra,
and Balashov, assistant Professor at
the Moscow Conservatoire and himself
a viola player with the Moscow Soloists,
completed the set for this recording.
Plenty of specialist string effects
create a feeling of varied character
in the movements, with pizzicato, col
legno, harmonics and flautando
moments making for fascinating listening,
as well as the variations in perspective
created by solo parts against accompaniment,
and lines taken by entire sections.
Everyone will have their own favourites,
but I particularly liked the smoky mysticism
in XII Assai moderato, the inevitable
Shostakovich comparisons in nervy movements
such as XIV Feroce, and the intense
dissonant opening of XVI Dolente,
against its salon second section and
ultimate return in a lonely tremulando.
The overall impression
left over from this disc is one of poise
and restraint, everything gorgeously
under control, but at the same time
with a sense of real music making –
not overly sanitised, and certainly
with plenty of character and depth.
The recording is set in a pleasantly
resonant acoustic, but still with plenty
of detail. The playing is genuinely
brilliant and sensitively lead in Yuri
Bashmet’s interpretations. Bashmet of
course has string technique as part
of his DNA, but proves once again that
there is plenty more to say through
the medium of the small string orchestra.
Dominy Clements
Moscow Soloists/Yuri Bashmet 
