THE SINGAPORE COLLECTION: RACHMANINOV SYMPHONIES & ORCHESTRAL MUSIC / Singapore Symphony Orchestra / Review

 

RACHMANINOV

SYMPHONIES AND ORCHESTRAL MUSIC

Singapore Symphony Orchestra / Lan Shui

BIS 2512 / 4 CDs TT: 5 hrs 6’11”

This is the first review of a series which I will refer to as “The Singapore Collection”, devoted to classical recordings by Singapore artists and artistic groups. The Singapore Symphony Orchestra (SSO) is the obvious starting point, having a tradition of making records from the early-1980s under its founding music director Choo Hoey. With Lan Shui’s tenure from 1997, the SSO began making big strides in its partnership with the independent (not any more) Swedish label BIS. Then came a multitude of well-received and critically acclaimed discs of a variety of repertoire, both mainstream and off the beaten path.

This Rachmaninov box-set is a culmination of the orchestra’s penchant for Russian repertoire, incorporating the three symphonies and complete orchestral music (excepting those with chorus and voices, such as The Bells). The symphonies were recorded first, dating as far back as 2008. These were originally issued as single discs, some coupled with concerto performances by Russian pianist Yevgeny Sudbin (Piano Concerto No.1 and Paganini Rhapsody), not included here.

The set opens with the First Symphony in D minor (Op.13), discarded by Rachmaninov after its disastrous premiere in 1897, but pieced together after the Second World War. It remains one of his boldest creations, and gets a very lively and trenchant performance befitting the early promise. The Symphonic Movement in D minor (1891), also referred to as his Youth Symphony, belies an obvious depth of influence to Tchaikovsky. Rachmaninov’s first tone poem, Prince Rostislav, dates from the same year and was inspired by a ballad by Aleksey Tolstoy (second cousin of Leo). This early style looks forward to his better-known tone poems The Rock and Isle of the Dead, and deserves listening.

Probably the weakest performance of the set was the Second Symphony in E minor (Op.27), which was the first to be recorded. It is still rather good although suffering from a surfeit of portamenti in all its movements, rendering it somewhat sickly sentimental. Ma Yue is the eloquently plain-singing clarinettist in the Adagio. Nonetheless, it held together well enough for SSO to programme it in its BBC Proms debut in 2014. The fill-up is Rachmaninov’s own transcription of Vocalise (Op.34 No.14), where portamenti are fine when sentimentality is key.

SSO at the BBC Proms, 2014.

Coming from Rachmaninov’s late period and years of exile in America was his Third Symphony in A minor (Op.44) and Symphonic Dances (Op.45), his last work before passing in Beverly Hills. Both receive fine performances despite the former’s final movement which is unusually short-winded and soon runs out of ideas. The latter supplies an appropriate response to his (discarded, so he thought) First Symphony, it first movement subject which once sounded defiant now returns as retiring and resigned. As a whole, this disc (recorded in 2011 and 2014) represented the mature SSO at a new high, an advance over on the previous few years.

The fourth and final disc has the most recent recordings (from 2012 to 2015), including tone poems The Rock (recorded last and arguably the finest in the set), Isle of the Dead, Capriccio Bohemienne (a surprisingly effective showpiece in the slow-fast schema of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies), and the early but derivative Scherzo in D minor (1887), composed as a 14-year-old. Also included are four orchestral excerpts (Introduction, Intermezzo and Dances) from Rachmaninov’s first opera Aleko (1893) and a true rarity, the Prelude to The Miserly Knight (1904).

Lan Shui's work with the SSO
will never be forgotten.

There are famous recorded cycles of this repertoire, notably from the London Symphony Orchestra under Andre Previn (on EMI, now Warner), St Petersburg Philharmonic with Mariss Jansons (also EMI / Warner) and those vintage Melodiya recordings by Evgeny Svetlanov, but none is as complete as this survey. The much-vaunted BIS recorded sound lives up to the hype. This set is a source of Singaporean pride, and rightly so.