BBCSSO, 30/11/2017
Tchaikovsky : Piano Concerto No. 1 (Denis Kozhukhin, piano)
Shostakovich : Symphony No. 11 "The Year 1905"
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Alexander Vedernikov
There are times I wonder why Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto is so popular. It's quite seriously imbalanced - the first movement lasts as long as the other two combined - and he presents us with a magnificent theme right from the start which is never heard again after that barnstorming introduction, which is more than a little frustrating. Then you get performances like this one when all you can do is sit back and revel, and never mind the incongruities.
Denis Kozhukhin's formidable technique, while not absolutely foolproof, nevertheless made light work of the mechanistic complexities of the concerto, with a nice clarity of touch, especially in the upper register, which benefited from a particularly fine, silvery tone. It was, however, the second and third movements that really lifted this performance out of the ordinary. The gentle romance of the second movement was exquisitely delivered, touching without being overly sentimental, with that lovely silvery tone in the upper registers really coming into its own here, while the central scherzo flickered with a lightly playful touch of malice, and the last movement brimmed over with exuberance, especially from the orchestra.
Emerging from the Tchaikovsky bubbling over with the enthusiasm of that last movement was very much the preparatory "pep talk" required to face a singularly bleak performance of Shostakovich's 11th Symphony. It was written for the 40th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, in 1957, but instead of evoking October 1917, Shostakovich chose to write about the events of January to October 1905, and specifically the Bloody Sunday massacre of 22nd January, outside the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.
Shostakovich spent much of his life and career on a virtual tightrope, constantly viewed with suspicion by the authorities. The 11th Symphony was met with considerable appreciation, as ostensibly it ticked all the right boxes with the Party, especially as it includes a number of well-known and approved revolutionary songs, all sending, in Party terms, the right sort of message. Of course, with Shostakovich, it's never that simple, and 60 years on, it's a little hard to conceive that no one, amongst the powers-that-were, heard the anger and the pain, not to mention the complete lack of any kind of optimism, in the music. One must assume that those that did kept very quiet about it. Whether Shostakovich was expressing his regrets over the 1905 Revolution, the 1917 one, or, as has been suggested, the Hungarian Uprising which had been violently quashed just the year before, there is nothing here of triumphalism or vindication, it's a cold, bleak depiction of an ugly, brutal event followed by grieving, and a grimly despairing determination to survive.
It is also one of Shostakovich's most 'visual' scores, the second movement in particular a quite graphic depiction of the events of Bloody Sunday. Vedernikov, very experienced in conducting stage works, as a former Music Director of the Bolshoi, amongst other appointments, was well able to exploit this graphism in the orchestra, with finely graded shading of the orchestral colours, and precisely calculated pacing. James Horan's melancholy cor anglais solo in the third movement was especially affecting.
[Next : 2nd December]
Shostakovich : Symphony No. 11 "The Year 1905"
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra
Alexander Vedernikov
There are times I wonder why Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto is so popular. It's quite seriously imbalanced - the first movement lasts as long as the other two combined - and he presents us with a magnificent theme right from the start which is never heard again after that barnstorming introduction, which is more than a little frustrating. Then you get performances like this one when all you can do is sit back and revel, and never mind the incongruities.
Denis Kozhukhin's formidable technique, while not absolutely foolproof, nevertheless made light work of the mechanistic complexities of the concerto, with a nice clarity of touch, especially in the upper register, which benefited from a particularly fine, silvery tone. It was, however, the second and third movements that really lifted this performance out of the ordinary. The gentle romance of the second movement was exquisitely delivered, touching without being overly sentimental, with that lovely silvery tone in the upper registers really coming into its own here, while the central scherzo flickered with a lightly playful touch of malice, and the last movement brimmed over with exuberance, especially from the orchestra.
Emerging from the Tchaikovsky bubbling over with the enthusiasm of that last movement was very much the preparatory "pep talk" required to face a singularly bleak performance of Shostakovich's 11th Symphony. It was written for the 40th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, in 1957, but instead of evoking October 1917, Shostakovich chose to write about the events of January to October 1905, and specifically the Bloody Sunday massacre of 22nd January, outside the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.
Shostakovich spent much of his life and career on a virtual tightrope, constantly viewed with suspicion by the authorities. The 11th Symphony was met with considerable appreciation, as ostensibly it ticked all the right boxes with the Party, especially as it includes a number of well-known and approved revolutionary songs, all sending, in Party terms, the right sort of message. Of course, with Shostakovich, it's never that simple, and 60 years on, it's a little hard to conceive that no one, amongst the powers-that-were, heard the anger and the pain, not to mention the complete lack of any kind of optimism, in the music. One must assume that those that did kept very quiet about it. Whether Shostakovich was expressing his regrets over the 1905 Revolution, the 1917 one, or, as has been suggested, the Hungarian Uprising which had been violently quashed just the year before, there is nothing here of triumphalism or vindication, it's a cold, bleak depiction of an ugly, brutal event followed by grieving, and a grimly despairing determination to survive.
It is also one of Shostakovich's most 'visual' scores, the second movement in particular a quite graphic depiction of the events of Bloody Sunday. Vedernikov, very experienced in conducting stage works, as a former Music Director of the Bolshoi, amongst other appointments, was well able to exploit this graphism in the orchestra, with finely graded shading of the orchestral colours, and precisely calculated pacing. James Horan's melancholy cor anglais solo in the third movement was especially affecting.
[Next : 2nd December]