pianomania: MISCHA MAISKY & HAN-NA CHANG / Singapore Symphony Orchestra / Review

MISCHA MAISKY & HAN-NA CHANG

Singapore Symphony Orchestra

Victoria Concert Hall

Friday (29 September 2023)

This review was first published on Bachtrack.com on 2 October 2023 with the title "Mischa Maisky still a live wire on his Singapore return".

The year 1986 was a special one for the young Singapore Symphony Orchestra. For a seven-year-old fledgling outfit, it was gaining in confidence and beginning to take on big name soloists for marquee concerto performances. Enter Latvia-born cellist Mischa Maisky, he with his wild black, curly locks, irrepressible personality, and a high profile recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon besides. “Love me, love my cello” shouted The Straits Times preview, and he went on to sweep the Victoria Concert Hall audience away with Saint-Saëns’s First Cello Concerto in A minor.

It seems that 37 years has done little to change this artist. His flowing mane is now fully silver but the demeanour of “let me show you what I do, the way I do” remains wholly intact and totally kicking. It was Saint-Saëns One again on the cards, but it is the turn of a new generation of music-lovers to experience that full flush of Maisky, and his famed big tone. The concerto’s 19 precious minutes seemed all too brief, but he made every moment count. The fiery entry sizzled with the high voltage of a live wire, one which never stopped sparking. In a concerto without a true slow movement, the central Allegretto con moto provided some kind of respite but it was the orchestra traipsing lightly in close repartee with Maisky that kept the conversation hyper-alert and totally engaging.

Credit goes to the orchestra led by Han-Na Chang, herself a virtuoso cellist in an earlier iteration. If there were any conductor sympathetic to a soloist, that would be her. Not that Maisky needed any concession, as he blazed away in the finale, which also included three short slower sections to emote. The cello’s full-throated voice again came to the fore, and although one might have earlier wished for Dvorak or Elgar, this Saint-Saëns did its job with lots to spare. The enraptured young audience was rewarded with three encores, Maisky’s own arrangement of Lensky’s Aria (Kuda, kuda, vi udalilis) from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, accompanied by orchestra, and solo J.S.Bach, the Preludes from Suites No.1 and 2.

Although this gala concert was built around Maisky, the orchestra still had much to offer. The evening opened with Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll, expanded from its original scoring for thirteen instrumentalists to 47 players. This allowed for a greater bandwidth for the strings to shine, and a rich sonority was generated from the stillness of its quiet lullaby-like opening. The entry of winds was sensitively handled especially the oboe solo, but it soon got congested and blustery, with the trumpet’s thirteen bars unfortunately submerged beneath the throng.

The concert’s second half was devoted Mozart’s Symphony No.41 in C major (K.551), the Jupiter after the ruler of Roman gods. Its regal opening movement, heralded by well punched-out chords, flexed muscles and exercised unabashed vibrato. Under Chang's sure-headed direction, this was how we used to hear this music before the rising of the period instruments movement. The slow movement oozed operatic grace but not without exhibiting tension and mild dissonance as it unfolded. The Minuet and Trio was suitably animated, and the valedictory finale then piled on the volume. The fugal culmination in Mozart's greatest symphonic finale, well negotiated by the orchestra, showed he knew his Bach and Handel well. Could he have topped that had he lived beyond 1791? That has to be one of music history's abiding mysteries.