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Rozhdestvensky’s strokes are direct and unambiguous, peppered with the occasional arabesque when he wanted to make a special point. SSO responded to the presence of the great conductor, producing some of its most passionate sounds yet. The intensity of the violins in Tchaikovsky's First emerged out of the depths of every single player and coalesced into a magnificent organism that reached out from the stage and pulled on the heart strings of the audience. Horns and flutes produced some awkward errors at prominent points.
Vitoria Postnikova stole the show in the second half with her immaculate performance of Rachmaninov's Paganini Rhapsody. At turns steely, ephemeral, fiery, and elegiac, this was a classic performance by a Russian virtuosi wanting in no aspects, except perhaps the choice of a rather tired, haggard, artistically vacuous piece of music. The eighteenth variation was a relief from the sad story of Rachmaninov’s decline as a composer under American capitalism which rewarded him oh-so-richly as a pianist.
Taken from the satirical film of 1983, The Dead Souls’ Register, Schnittke’s music has been orchestrated by Rozhdestvensky and staged as a absurd theatre complete with 2 metronomes clicking at different speeds; a pianist who plays ‘wrong’ notes, falls asleep at the piano, and has a pretentious Romantic epiphany; orchestra players that ‘lost’ their place in the score; a section of ‘Russian’ band music featuring vulgar brasses and piccolos; and much more of the same. Comedy is the gentle corrective for human foibles and the audience lapped it up completely. There is hope yet.
The composers tonight belong to a group of Russian artists who have experienced tragedies. Schnittke suffered under the socialist regime which persecuted his music, Rachmaninov under the capitalist regime which exploited his fingers, and Tchaikovsky under the bourgeoise regime that eventually blackmailed him into committing suicide for his homosexuality. Tchaikovsky’s First was itself written under a time of great anguish, physically and mentally devastated as he was by the criticism of his teachers Anton Rubenstein and Nikolai Zaremba from the St Petersburg Conservatory. The scent of sweetness in the First is only a thin foil against which his inner turmoil raged. One mulls over the startling relevance of art - on the one hand - and life under censorship, capitalism, and bourgeoise conformism - on the other - in this Russian programme.
