SSO CONCERT: LENINGRAD SYMPHONY / Review

LENINGRAD SYMPHONY

Singapore Symphony Orchestra

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 110^th 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 3^rd 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. 

Conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky
shows his Shostakovich score to the audience
and then goes home with it!

SSO Concert: ROZHDESTVENSKY + RACHMANINOV / Review

ROZHDESTVENSKY + RACHMANINOV

Singapore Symphony Orchestra

Esplanade Concert Hall

Friday (22 March 2013)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 25 March 2013 with the title "Coaxing Russian out of Singapore orchestra".

When the veteran Russian conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky and his pianist wife Viktoria Postnikova took on the music of Brahms with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra exactly one year ago, the stodgy concert left this reviewer with mixed feelings. In this all-Rachmaninov programme, all remnants of reservation had evaporated like the morning dew. By putting an authoritative stamp on the music, the octogenarian maestro got the orchestra to bring out its Russianness.

Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943) was the musical heir of Tchaikovsky. Despite their age difference, the two Russians were good friends and colleagues. Tchaikovsky mentored Rachmaninov, so it was not a great surprise that his overriding sense of lugubriousness rubbed on the younger man.

The concert opened with the early symphonic fantasy The Rock, inspired by a short Chekhov story, a work not unlike Tchaikovsky’s fantasy overtures. Flautist Evgueni Brokmiller whipped up its agile recurrent motif with the greatest of ease, leading to the work’s brooding main theme. The ensuing development, with musical narrative coaxed to its climax and near breaking point, showed how well the orchestra responded to Rozhdestvensky’s baton.

Next was the rarely performed Fourth Piano Concerto, a late work Rachmaninov composed while permanently exiled from his homeland. Its darker, dissonant shades and aggressive posture meant it was unlikely to relive the popularity of its predecessors. Despite that, Postnikova carved out a trenchant and inspired reading that was totally persuasive.

With opening striding chords slightly off kilter in its swagger, she proved no slave to the metronome. It was Rachmaninov’s nostalgia, evident from quotations of past works, that came to the fore. Witness the second movement, where rays of sunshine from the short but glorious melody from an earlier Etude-tableau penetrated the gloom that came before.

Her technique and quicksilver reflexes held up well for the helter-skelter finale, which closed this Cinderella of a concerto on a violent and tumultuous note. With prolonged applause, she obliged with a thunderous reading of Rachmaninov’s Prelude in C sharp minor (Op.3 No.2), the composer’s most dreaded encore because audiences refused to leave until after he had played it.

The theme of nostalgia continued into the Symphonic Dances, Rachmaninov’s last work and de facto fourth symphony. Taken with a broad and expansive pace, Rozhdestvensky demonstrated that the first movement was marked Non Allegro (Not fast) after all. Tang Xiao Ping’s saxophone sang with a heartrending beauty, while the First Symphony’s once menacing main theme was relived, but now tamed and mellowed.

The second movement’s ghostly waltz teased and insinuated, heralded by excellent muted brass. It was the finale’s chorus, quoting the Dies Irae chant and his own Story Of The Resurrection from the choral Vespers, that truly resonated on all fronts. In charting his swansong, Rachmaninov bared his longing for past with an unapologetic fervour. Rozhdestvensky and his charges for the evening emphatically reminded one and all of that fact.         

  

SSO Concert: Brahms' Seconds / Review

BRAHMS’ SECONDS
Singapore Symphony Orchestra
Esplanade Concert Hall
Thursday (22 March 2012)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 24 March 2012 with the title "Sloppy seconds"

The title of the concert refers to the coupling of the Second Piano Concerto and Second Symphony by Johannes Brahms, which made for a very long evening. This was further exacerbated by the very slow tempos adopted for both works by guest conductor, the distinguished Russian octogenarian Gennady Rozhdestvensky.

There is a fine line drawn between the ruminations of profundity and being plain draggy, and both performances straddled across the divide on innumerable episodes. The highly exposed French horn solo at the outset of the concerto, tentative and marred by a spilt note, made one fear the worse. The pianist Viktoria Postnikova (or Mrs Rozhdestvenska) played from a score, and to put it plainly, needed that safety net.

Her opening cadenza was powerfully wrung out, reaffirming she has both the strength and endurance to weather the course. However accuracy and subtlety did not seem a major consideration, as there were wrong notes aplenty in the first movement. Where she was more confident, she stamped her authority with the single-mindedness of goose-stepping Red Guards.

All this made for a bewildering performance which had moments of greatness mixed with the rough and ready tumble of a student rehearsal. Only in the slow movement, where Principal Cellist Ng Pei-Sian’s sublime solo sang with unspeakable beauty, did everybody seemed galvanised to be in perfect sync. Postnikova did get better and sprinkled the jolly finale with fairy gold dust, by which time the concerto clocked in a staggering 53 minutes when it ended. There was even time for an encore, Schumann’s Träumerei, which hemmed and hawed for all its simplicity.

Similarly, the Second Symphony languished in its sheer expansiveness for a full 50 minutes. Imagine the strain on the French horns, which have the most unenviable task of breath control. Principal Han Chang Chou and his quartet acquitted themselves most admirably, coming on cue perfectly and supporting with spot-on intonation.

From murky depths of the protracted grew saplings of very fine and poised playing, which Rozhdestvensky (left) conducting on the floor (as opposed to the podium), tended and watered with much care and love. There was an emerging radiance in the opening two movements, which culminated in a heady rush of passion for the finale. It may not have been the best of Second Symphony performances, but it was a memorable one. Great maestros tend to make these things happen.

N.B. The titles of Straits Times articles are not given by yours truly, but the copywriters of the newspaper, so occasional discrepancies do occur. I never used the word "sloppy" in this review, so a certain degree of latitude was employed in its title, perhaps to better capture the attention of readers.

SSO Concert: A Night With Tchaikovsky / Review

A NIGHT WITH TCHAIKOVSKY
Singapore Symphony Orchestra
Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Conductor

Esplanade Concert Hall
Friday (7 January 2010)

This review was published in The Straits Times on 10 January 2010 with the title "Conjuring up old Russia".

With Tchaikovsky, some things are almost certain: heart-wrenching melodies, overwrought climaxes and a surfeit of emotional excesses. For almost two and a half hours, the Singapore Symphony Orchestra was transformed into an emsemble that sounded like the great Russian orchestras of vintage. The catalyst was Russian conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky, who turns 80 this year, in his third outing with the SSO.

The elevated status of the podium was shunned, as he conducted with feet firmly planted on the stage floor, level with his charges (left). Wielding economical directions and gestures bordering on the miserly, he drew great swathes of sound that almost defied belief.

The sheer magnetism was palpable, as low strings heaved a forlorn sigh in the opening of the hour-long Manfred Symphony, as if bearing the weight of the world on their collective shoulders. This and more characterised the programme music based on Lord Byron’s Romantic anti-hero whose crushing guilt eventually gets the better of him.

The scherzo flew on feathered wings like some fairy tale scene while the slow movement’s lyric sunshine was clouded by undercurrents of deep-seated angst. All built up to an epic finale, where fateful forces of tragedy came to bear. Unlike the bleaker Pathetique Symphony, mighty chords from Evelyn Lim’s pipe organ offered glimmers of hope. Forget about Manfred’s redemption, the pathologically-depressed Tchaikovsky was scripting his own.

The first half was witness to the rarely-performed Second Piano Concerto in G major (Op.44) with Rozhdestvensky’s wife Viktoria Postnikova at the keyboard. But wait, was it not Stephen Hough who performed it just 18 months ago? The two readings were poles apart. While the Briton personified litheness and athleticism, the Russian radiated opulence and monumentality.

Besides dealing out heavy chords and octave salvos, she also proved extremely nimble in the fussy filigreed bits that demanded elfin-like lightness, culminating with a giant of a cadenza that was the last word in barnstorming.

The Rozhdestvenskys 

acknowledging the applause.

The best music came in the slow movement, a triple concerto in all but name. Here, concertmaster Alexander Souptel’s exquisite violin solo blended beautifully with Ng Pei Sian’s silky cello, and the ménage a trois was complete with Postnikova’s singing tone on the piano. Scintillating pianism wrapped up the rip-roaring finale, and her encore of Barcarolle (June from The Seasons) provided the icing on the cake. Simply irresistible.

Before emigrating to Singapore, 

SSO Concertmaster Alexander Souptel 

was Gennady Rozhdestvensky's

concertmaster in the 

USSR Ministry of Culture & USSR Radio 

Symphony Orchestras for over 10 years.