KHATIA BUNIATISHVILI PLAYS TCHAIKOVSKY / Singapore Symphony Orchestra / Review

KHATIA BUNIATISHVILI 

PLAYS TCHAIKOVSKY

Singapore Symphony Orchestra

Esplanade Concert Hall

Thursday (14 April 2022)

 

It is a good thing that cancel culture does not obsess Singaporeans or the Singapore Symphony Orchestra. Otherwise, this concert of Russian music would have been cancelled or had its programme drastically altered. Tchaikovsky’s music belongs to the world, and not Kremlin-dwelling ideologues. Prokofiev’s music is universal and does not just reflect Russian mores. He, however, did return to his homeland from the West, and later got denounced for all his troubles. The poor man died on the same day in 1953 as Stalin, but hardly anybody noticed.

 

Under the baton of Principal Guest Conductor Andrew Litton, the orchestra showed what many people suspected all along: SSO is really good in Russian music. The concert opened with the lively Colas Breugnon Overture by Dmitri Kabalevsky, a true orchestral show-piece from a subversive 1938 opera. Much of it sounds like movie music (John Williams had probably taken some ideas from it), with the same happy and lively vibes as the better-known Ruslan and Ludmilla and Festive Overtures by Glinka and Shostakovich respectively.

 

This was a performance that could scarcely be bettered, but having said that, Kabalevsky was mostly known to have been a political apparatchik. He was never censured for his music, which was mostly Socialist Realist friendly or written for children and youths. That Vladimir Ashkenazy did not have good things to say about him in his autobiography Beyond Frontiers, or his name being completely omitted in the Shostakovich-Volkov Testimony says quite something.

  

 

Next came what the full-capacity audience had been waiting for: French-Georgian pianist Khatia Buniatishvili in all her glittery ruby-red sequined splendour. There was a huge roar from the throng, to which she waved and blew kisses even before the performance had begun. And she did not disappoint. In the familiar warhorse that is Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, she was determined to put her personal stamp. That was to apply the most extreme of dynamics possible, big crashing chords juxtaposed with soft mincing passages, contrasted with the fastest double octaves fusillades while challenging the orchestra to keep up. Keep up they did, only just but it certainly got everyone’s attention.

 

The first movement’s barnstorming would have elicited the usual inappropriate applause, but that did not happen. This was quite a surprise, but is the audience becoming more sophisticated? This was followed by Khatia's lightest and mercurial of touches in the slow central movement, which more than justified its poetic description as a “scherzo for fireflies”. The finale marked Allegro con fuoco was more like a Prestissimo possibile by her account, again with faultless fingers flying and sweeping effortlessly over the keyboard. At the orchestral tutti leading to the final octave outburst, her gliding arms were already swaying to the music, like an eagle poised for the swooping kill. With that coup de grace, what she killed was the lingering stench left by Yundi Li from his catastrophic concerto car crash of 2009.

 

And how the audience bayed for more. She then obliged with three encores: a luminous and nuanced account of the Marcello-Bach Adagio, a souped-up version of the Liszt-Horowitz Second Hungarian Rhapsody, more outrageous than the master himself, and a jazzy arrangement of her own from her album Labyrinth. The obligatory waving and blowing of kisses followed, and there has been no louder or more vociferous reception than this since Martha Argerich in 2018.   

 

Another surprise for the evening: most of the audience stayed on to witness the orchestra perform the rarely heard Fourth Symphony of Prokofiev. Litton chose the revised 1947 edition, which is more substantial than its original 1930 version by half. Despite its unfamiliarity, the idiom was not too far distant from Romeo and Juliet or Peter and the Wolf, which made for quite gratifying listening. Much of its music was adapted from the Diaghilev-commissioned ballet The Prodigal Son, with its first and fourth movements extensively expanded from the original symphony.

 

A throwback to the classical symphonies (think Haydn and Beethoven), a slow introduction was followed by an explosive and bustling Allegro section which was convincingly brought off. The slow movement’s Lloyd Webberesque melody was introduced by Jin Ta’s flute, and the love music that ensued provided the loveliest moments of this underrated symphony. The Scherzo used the sultry seduction music from the ballet to alluring effect, and its jaunty Trio did remind one of the Cat’s theme from  Peter and the Wolf. 

The playful finale revived earlier themes, besides introducing new themes, with the music working to a impassioned climax and impressive close, and the brass having a field day. That this performance was greeted with loud accolades echoing those from Khatia’s outing, showed over two years of the Covid pandemic, the audience had become more hungry, and hopefully a more mature one.