Glinka : Valse-fantaisie
Shostakovich : Violin Concerto No. 1 (Boris Brovtsyn, violin)
Mussorgsky (orch. Ravel) : Pictures at an Exhibition
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Vassily Sinaisky
Glinka's Valse-fantaisie turned out to be one of those pieces I knew to hear, but not who it was by. For all that Glinka is largely recognised as the Father of Russian classical music - certainly the first truly significant composer native to those lands - I've never found he has a readily identifiable style. Not that I don't like his music, but it's not as easy to pick out as Tchaikovsky, for example. The thing that constantly leads me astray, and is one of the indicators of Glinka's qualities, is that I'm always placing the date of composition several decades later than it actually is. Glinka is an almost exact contemporary of Schumann, but his music can, and often does, sound like it belongs to the Late Romantic period, rather than the High Romantic one. Small wonder he and Berlioz were friends, that 'modernism' of sound was certainly a shared trait.
Originally written for piano in 1839, the Valse-fantaisie falls in with a group of similar explorations of the waltz, at a time when the waltz was finally shedding the last of its formerly sulphurous reputation. Frowned upon for many years because the cavalier was required to put his arm around his partner and hold her rather more closely than decorum dictated, the dance had steadily gained ground, and it's in these early-middle years of the 19th Century that you see it acquiring letters of nobility off the dance-floor and on the concert platform; Berlioz orchestrated both Weber's Aufforderung sum Tanze and this Valse-fantaisie (although tonight's version was Glinka's own orchestration), and contributed a version of his own in the second movement of the Symphonie fantastique all within the space of a decade or so. The apogee of the genre would come with Johann Strauss II and Tchaikovsky, and the apotheosis with Ravel. What Glinka's bitter-sweet essay offers is a window to the future, and you can hear echoes of those great Tchaikovsky waltzes to come, as well as Prokofiev or Glazunov and other examples yet to be penned.
A few years ago, reviewing another performance of Shostakovich's first Violin Concerto, I remarked that I didn't feel that the solo part had much purpose to it. It wasn't the right performance. In the hands of Boris Brovtsyn, the violin sang and struggled, played, fought, grimaced, laughed, wept, driven through a dense, complex scenario, angry and hopeless, fraught but determined, challenged and challenging at every turn. There's nothing easy in this concerto, Shostakovich is in a particularly serious frame of mind, and even the Scherzo is more sarcastic than playful. Quite often, Shostakovich can write tooth-rottingly sweet tunes - usually meant cynically - to off-set his more abrasive moments, but there's no such relief, however sardonically intended, here, just a grim meditation with few happy thoughts, played both by soloist and orchestra with great concentration and conviction.
The scheduled conductor tonight was Alexander Vedernikov, but, indisposed, he was replaced by Vassily Sinaisky, who has, fortunately, been a regular guest conductor with the BBC SSO for years now. That the orchestra was on familiar terms with the replacement conductor was undoubtedly an asset; I don't know how much change he brought to the way the music was interpreted, but it certainly felt like he made it all his own, particularly the Mussorgsky. Comparing tonight's performance of Pictures with Søndergård and the RSNO back in October, the SSO's playing lacked the precision and accuracy of the other orchestra, and the interpretation was, in many respects, cruder, less detailed. However, there were also distinct virtues here. Although individual brass players were less than pristine in their solos - and the principal trumpet, in particular, came sadly to grief over Schmuyle's stuttered, repeated notes in the sixth tableau - the brass choir en masse was a magnificent thing, a resonant wall of richly textured sound conjuring up weight, solemnity, menace or splendour as required. There was, in all, an operatic quality to this reading, a sense of theatre, broader and bolder than Søndergård's interpretation, but quite as effective its own way.
[Next : 13th February]
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