RSNO, 18/08/2021

Tchaikovsky : Serenade for Strings

Shostakovich : Piano Concerto No. 1 (Steven Osborne, piano; Christopher Hart, trumpet)

Stravinsky : Apollon musagète

Royal Scottish National Orchestra

Valery Gergiev

Planning concerts with internationally recognised artists requires planning many months, not to say years, in advance, and when the Edinburgh International Festival started considering actually having a festival this year, at that point there was no question of using any of their usual, indoor, venues.  So they came up with alternatives, marquees set up, one in the quadrangle of the Old College, for the chamber music recitals, and a bigger one, on the playing fields of Edinburgh Academy, for the orchestral concerts.  These are no flimsy canvas and pole constructs either, they more resemble a kind of Quonset hut, open-sided and at least partially transparent for the roof.  It's not perfect - to begin with, Scotland's weather is only very intermittently friendly to open-air events - but it's certainly a huge improvement over not having any venues at all.  So one files away the creaks and rattles of the structure under somewhat boisterous breezes on an otherwise fine evening, and enjoys the fairly comfortable seats, and the playing of the strings of the RSNO, very much in the spotlight with tonight's all-Russian programme.

Tchaikovsky has a penchant for nostalgia in much of his writing, and particularly in the lush pages of the Serenade for Strings.  Even the livelier 'Russian theme' of the last movement has a wistful air to it, as though it's a childhood memory of peasants dancing on the family estate.  As for the very famous Waltz, in Gergiev's hands, it was also an echo of a lost memory, as if seen through a scrim, elegantly hazy, and sounding just slightly distant, like from another room.  On the whole, the Serenade was comfortably reassuring, a lure into the more complex depths that were to follow.

The Festival has had more than its fair share of substitutions, usually thanks to Covid-related travel issues, and where we should have been hearing Daniil Trifonov play Shostakovich, it was the ever-reliable Steven Osborne who took his place at short notice, thankfully without a change in programme, because the first of Shostakovich's two piano concertos doesn't get the exposure it deserves.  Written for piano, trumpet and string orchestra, it's a very different affair from the more popular Second Concerto.  Written for Shostakovich (aged 27) himself to play, the piano writing - which was apparently something of a second thought - is, in the outer movements, a dazzling, feverish flurry of notes, with strong undertones of early film music (the Keystone Cops came to mind ), or fairground music, and popular dances.  

Against this, the trumpet is an often sardonic commentator.  It's not an entirely equal partnership, the trumpet doesn't really have nearly as much to play as the piano, despite the fact that originally, apparently, Shostakovich was intending to write a trumpet concerto.  However, like the other two pieces tonight, there's a glance back to historical forms, and there's a concerto grosso aspect to the final result.  If Osborne and the orchestra were the black-and-white soundtrack to a silent movie, even to the melancholy, sentimental second movement, Hart's trumpet was a streak of gilding picking out the salient points, or taking things in a new direction in the last movement to which the piano objects fiercely and amusingly.  As often with Shostakovich, his apparent good humour has an edge to it, and Osborne's manic reading underlined that, giving the piece an angry tint, an antidote to the sweetly elegant pining of Tchaikovsky's Serenade.

In 1934, the choreographer Georges Balanchine used the Serenade for Strings to create a student ballet for his newly-minted School of American Ballet, the seed of the future New York City Ballet, and it was a revelation in a country which had as yet no ballet tradition of its own.  It is generally considered as the first (and many still think, the greatest) of Balanchine's 'American' ballets.   In 1928, Balanchine choreographed Apollon musagète (later to be rechristened Apollo) to a specifically commissioned score by Stravinsky, and that remarkable work is usually considered to have put Balanchine on the international map as a choreographer, as well as cementing the long-standing collaboration between choreographer and composer which resulted in sixteen works in all.  

To my mind, Apollon musagète is the most perfect of all Stravinsky's neo-classical scores, and despite some rough corners (and a couple very rough ones!) Gergiev brought the orchestra to a quality of silken evanescence that I've rarely heard in concert.  Gergiev has almost certainly conducted this score for the stage, as well as for the concert, and it shows in the controlled expansiveness of his timing, spinning out long lines that inspired matchless choreography, shimmering with cool grace right up to the final ascent into the light that brought time to a standstill.  

The (possible) disadvantage of this marquee setting of concerts, is that people find it easy to get up and leave, and it's true that the concert as a whole overran the projected duration by a good ten minutes, and maybe some more.  However, it seemed clear that there was a proportion of the audience for whom the Stravinsky simply went right over their heads, and who found it impenetrable.  I cannot understand how it is that they did not perceive the magic of both the music, and the interpretation, and I hope they all missed their buses!

(Before you accuse me of being unfeeling, it was only 19:30 in the evening, plenty of time to catch the next bus.)

[Next : 19th August]