Esplanade
Concert Hall
Friday (26 February 2016 )
An edited version of this review was published in The Straits Times on 29 February 2016 with the title "Madcap finale pulls out all stops".
If one thought Shostakovich to be a
box-office risk for a concert, that opinion might have to be revised following
this all-Shostakovich programme by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra conducted
by renowned Russian conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky. This, if anything, was
the best possible advertisement for the Soviet era Russian composer on the 110th
anniversary year of his birth.
The concert began with his First Piano
Concerto, a youthful work scored for piano, obbligato trumpet and strings.
Its appeal lies in an anarchic spirit, one born of the circus, vaudeville and
popular sources, while cocking a snook at the musical conventions of Beethoven
and Haydn. Equal to the task was pianist Viktoria Postnikova, wife of the
conductor, who seemed to play it cool at the outset but soon unleashed its
barrel-load of vitriol.
Droll understatement and surprises when
one least expects were part of the game, and SSO Principal trumpeter Jon Paul
Dante's entry was a surreptitious one. He was complicit in this musical joke
too, interjecting at crucial points and having his own wallow in the slow
movement, accompanied by languid waltzing strings.
A madcap finale pulled out all stops,
with cheeky quotes and comedic repartee between piano and trumpet. This
laugh-a-minute routine culminated in a cadenza that seemed to skirt off the edge of a precipice before closing in a
perfectly punched-out series of C major chords.
C major was also the key of the Seventh
Symphony, or the Leningrad Symphony as it was composed in the
Russian city that was under siege by the Nazis in 1941. In the 900-day battle,
over a million Russians perished, and this symphony was to be a universal
symbol of Soviet resistance and courage. Shostakovich later revealed a
different angle; it was “the Leningrad Stalin destroyed, and Hitler merely
finished off”.
Interpretations of the work have been
subject to controversy. Is this absolute music, programme music or hubristic
propaganda? The programme booklet listed its playing time at an optimistic 69
minutes, but the actual performance was a distended 83 minutes. Despite that
disparity, there was not a slow coach to be found in Rozhdestvensky's reading.
He conducted from the floor, but his
economical beats conveyed volumes. The opening had suitable pomp and heft, with
empty bombast left at the door. The
infamous Fascist march sequence began as a wheeze from Roberto Alvarez's crystal-clear
piccolo, interrupted by Mark Suter's obstinate snare-drum beat. The cycle of
repetition, a bolero of death and destruction through a spiralling crescendo,
built up inexorably to one which seemed nigh insupportable. At one point, the
deafening drone of air-raid sirens could be imagined.
Survive and thrive it did, with the
orchestra fully responsive to the conductor's seemingly minimal cues. In this
4-movement work of vasts contrasts, it was not just the blustery bits that
impressed. Both central movements mirrored each other with gentle beginnings
and violent upheavals in the middle, and much care was taken to colour and
differentiate these shifts.
A chamber-like quality to the playing
revealed an unexpected intimacy. Take the 3rd movement for instance,
with solos from Jin Ta's flute, Concertmaster Igor Yuzefovich's violin and a
smiling melody from the violas. However it was the valedictory finale, rising
heroically and majestically from the ashes, which cued the shouts of bravo and
a standing ovation. For this was a great performance of a great symphony led by
a great conductor.
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| Conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky shows his Shostakovich score to the audience and then goes home with it! |
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