RSNO, 05/12/2013

Glazunov : The Seasons - Winter
Rachmaninoff : Piano Concerto No. 1 (Lise de la Salle, piano)
Tchaikovsky : The Nutcracker - Act 2

Royal Scottish National Orchestra
Alexander Shelley

As they say, you know it's Christmas when the Nutcrackers start appearing.  Although, for my first of the season, it wasn't an actual performance, but a concert rendition of Act 2 - the first danced one will be next week, courtesy of the broadcast from the ROH.  However, to start with, there was a very interesting segment of Glazunov's ballet The Seasons.  I've never seen this work danced (has anyone?  Is the Petipa choreography even still extant?), and of the music, the 'season' that is the most familiar to me, by some way, is Autumn.  Winter is a handful of delicately delineated miniatures, by turns playful and wistful, and a keen reminder that Glazunov was a pupil of that master orchestrator, Rimsky-Korsakov.

Almost equally ignored is Rachmaninoff's first Piano Concerto which, even after he revised it extensively in 1917, remains thoroughly overshadowed by the substantially better-known 2nd and 3rd Concertos (and I think I've given up hope of ever hearing the 4th live).  It was his official Opus 1, originally composed when he was just eighteen.  The revision improves on the structure and the orchestration, but if the piece doesn't have the melodic sweep of his later works, it has an exuberant virtuosity that is the prerogative of the young and talented.  Even though Rachmaninoff dedicated it to Alexander Siloti, he wrote it for himself to play, and Rachmaninoff is widely considered as one of the greatest pianists of the last century.

Tonight's soloist was the young French pianist Lise de la Salle, and there was plenty of dash and sparkle in her playing.  She can also pull off the big sound you want for this music, but I felt that sometimes the lyricism of the piece escaped her, a little drowned in the pyrotechnics.  While the concerto, as I mentioned, doesn't have the "big tunes" you get in the later works, there is nevertheless a clear foreshadowing of what Rachmaninoff was to accomplish later.  When you hear recordings by the likes of Ashkenazy, or Byron Janis (never mind the composer himself) you realise what can be achieved, and I wasn't getting that here.

One of the good things about a ballet score in concert is that usually the conductor is able to be much freer with the tempi, not bound by what's actually happening on stage, and this can impart a fresh vitality to the score.  However, that implies being able to handle the score in the first place.  The thing about the great ballet scores is, while they can be performed perfectly well in a concert context (unlike, say, the efficiently pretty but ultimately inane doodlings of a Minkus or Drigo) it never does to forget their true function.  They were written for the stage; more, they were written for movement, and they possess a pulse that can never be overlooked.  This is especially true for the two latter Tchaikovsky scores, which are practically calculated to the nth degree, the timing and pacing incredibly precise and purposeful.  The start of this performance made a poor impression, little imprecisions of timing in the orchestra blurring the outline of the music just enough to be unsettling (at least to me), and the transition into the arrival of Clara and the Nutcracker Prince was woefully lacking in dramatic tension.

Things settled down considerably when the orchestra got into what is surely more familiar territory for them - the movements that usually constitute the Nutcracker Suite.  The character dances were mostly very good, and a couple of times excellent - a slyly demure Danse des Mirlitons and a delightfully rumbustious 'Mother Goose'.  I was a little concerned about what would happen when the more habitual fare was once again left behind, after the Flower Waltz, but the Adagio of the pas de deux had all the sweep and grandeur one could wish for.  On the other hand, the Prince's Variation was again a shade out of focus, the off-the-beat punctuation missing the mark just a fraction, as it did in the Coda.  The final Waltz and Apotheosis, however, were well-judged, and provided a satisfactory conclusion to an imperfect, but charming evening.

[Next : 12th December]