SSO'S FORGOTTEN RECORDINGS: RIMSKY-KORSAKOV'S SCHEHERAZADE

 

That's Alexander Souptel's autograph
on the cover of my CD sleeve.

RIMSKY-KORSAKOV Scheherazade

GLINKA Ruslan and Ludmilla Overture

Singapore Symphony Orchestra

Lan Shui

Sometime in 2001, this self-produced SSO recording came out of nowhere. Neither recorded by Donald Wong nor BIS, but by Paul Zinman for Sound Byte Productions, it sounded very good. Was this the SSO, which had not made a recording since that unauthorised Richard Strauss Alpine Symphony of 1993? Since when has the SSO recorded mainstream repertoire? And since when has the orchestra sounded this polished in ruinously familiar music?

A new broom sweeps clean, so they say. Lan Shui, who succeeded Choo Hoey in 1997 as music director, had main sweeping changes in personnel. He retired several older and past sell-by-date musicians, and recruited new and younger professionals, mostly from USA (where he had conducted in Boston, Baltimore, New York and Detroit) and the SSO was beginning to sound fresh and revitalised.

Russia-born concertmaster Alexander Souptel, who arrived in 1993 during the Choo Hoey tenure, was retained and was the superb solo violinist for this Scheherazade. Sasha (as he is affectionately known) had played for decades in professional orchestras in the bygone Soviet Union, including being Gennady Rozhdestvensky’s concertmaster in the USSR Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra in all those Melodiya recordings. The effortless manner in which he handled the storytelling that begins The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship and the final Festival at Baghdad sounds totally natural. The harpist is unfortunately uncredited.

The orchestra performs this familiar favourite with gusto and verve, and the performance survives repeated listening, which was saying a lot. SSO was really this good, and the strings shine particularly well in the filler, Glinka’s Ruslan and Ludmilla Overture. This became the orchestra’s calling card, and little wonder that SSO used this showpiece to open its BBC Proms debut in 2014. By this time, Souptel had retired and the concertmaster position handed to his younger compatriot, the Russian-American Igor Yuzefovich.