Pines of Moscow
MUSIC 71 HE first foreign 'band' ever to appear at the 1 Henry Wood Proms, Moscow Radio Orchestra played fourteen pieces at four con- certs, having picked and deployed the fourteen in such a way as to make sure that Tchaikovsky should win most of the rounds. Nor was this a bad thing. The longer post-Tchaikovsky music goes on (or off), the grander and more seductive that of Peter Ilyich becomes. At the end of the sequence, last piece on the last night, the Pathe- tique sprang, spread and towered : a great tree of sound—and of thought. Repeat: thought.
In this country people who had taken more Brahms than was good for them used to stare huffily at anybody who said Tchaikovsky was capable of symphonic thinking. Tchaikovsky was a chap who took lengths of bead-string, threaded them with ballet-type tunes and called necklaces symphonies. It is true that this line of nonsense isn't much heard nowadays, but there are vestigial distastes. We still hear of over- emotionalism; of fate and yearning and despair brimming over this movement or that and treac- ling down the sides.
Any visiting orchestra other than a Russian one which offered three Tchaikovsky symphonies in half a week, with the Violin Concerto and Fran- cesca da Rimini thrown in for good measure, would have been trounced as naive. Thank god, then, for Russian orchestras and, coming back to our Moscovites, for a performance of the Pathb tique which, owing partly to the shining logic of Gennadi Rozhdestvensky's speeds, made as much of the symphony's pinnacled architecture as of its Byronic glooms and graces.
Before the interval we had had Scriabin's Prometheus tone poem (1910)—an instructive antithesis. People were yawning at Scriabin's fake philosophy and pseudo-mysticism decades ago. Yet there is a small something that lives on in music which he composed ostensibly to exalt woolly ideas. Thinking up languishing or swag- gering tunes, Scriabin would mull them over without getting off the spot, like some village organist extemporising on a sleepy Sunday after- noon. His ear for orchestral sound, however, was, for its time, fantastically sensitive and individual. In both Prometheus and The Poem of Ecstasy (1908, an earlier run over the same ground) there are twitterings and flutterings and trillings and swoonings on strings and woodwinds which— although, up to a point, they anticipated certain pages of Stravinsky's Firebird—are essentially unlike anything else in the orchestral repertory. On Friday, then, Scriabin's orchestral textures, supplemented towards the end by the BBC Choral Society's vocalises (around 1910 it was the smart thing to top off a tonepoem with a wordless chorus), held my ear, kept boredom at bay and made me forgive the general shapelessness.
At an earlier concert Tchaikovsky's 'unofficial' symphony, the rarely heard and underrated Manfred, came on the heels of the Shostakovich Cello Concerto. Again the music sprang like a giant tree, the biggest umbrella pine ever heard. If the concerto seemed puny in its shade, that
was not because Natalie Shakhovskaya's tone and technique were undernourished or under-con- fident. What made the concerto shrink was its constricted plugging of four-note rhythms and, especially as to the finale, a factitious rustic jollity of which Soviet composers have given us more than enough. The slow movement, true, has the sort of sadness that mysteriously equates with healing and radiance. But it was the outet'move- ments that stayed on in the ear. By comparison with these Manfred was spacious as a minster: room there and to spare for all those noble, knightly gesturings which are always out of date and nobody would go without at any price.
The shade-tree on the opening night was Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 4: hardly as rounded or eloquent in performance, except for the scherzo and finale, as the other Tchaikovsky pieces. As opening nights go this went jumpily. What was wrong? To begin with, some of us were dashed by the new Shostakovich cantata, The Execution of Stepan Razin. Yevtushenko's poem, which tells of a peasant insurrection and its ill-starred leader, was sung in Russian by an extremely impressive bass soloist, Vitaly Gromad- sky, and by the valiant BBC Chorus, who contri- buted some uproarious and elating glissandos. In English translation the text has a somewhat conformist ring. It smacks of Soviet historical frescoes—just as Shostakovich's score smacks of Moussorgsky reapplied. Even more lowering to one's spirits was Rachmaninov's Fourth Piano Concerto, another neglected piece of consider- able merit. Because it had not been possible be- tween a late rehearsal and the concert to make an effective job of retuning the Steinway piano to the orchestra's relatively high pitch, much of the performance was a near-shambles. I am sure that Nicolas Petrov in the solo part would have given us a poetic as well as muscular reading if his instrument had not been at cross purposes with most of the' woodwind.
The two post-Tchaikovsky pieces which, in the event, did stand up and flourish in their own right were Mahler's Kindertotenlieder (Janet Baker's phrasing and timbre repeatedly took my breath away) and, oddly enough, Prokoviev's Second Symphony (1924), even rarer than Manfred, a work that is boisterous, smart, scented, trans- parent and original. I was so taken by it that ever since I have been trying to get hold of a record- ing. No luck so far.
Finally, an anatomy of the MRO. It wasn't until the second concert that the woodwind seemed to get the feel of the Albert Hall. Leaders who at the outset had been a bit dispirited or ten- tative blossomed out individually, each with a timbre and manner of his own, yet ready to melt into ensembles self-effacingly. Horn tone is in the French tradition and of a kind that doesn't find much favour here; often it carries a tremu- lous touch of saxophone. The trombones com- mitted some superb sunbursts; they are a team of note. The trumpets, again characteristically (as one remembers from the Leningrad Symphony Orchestra), have at times a disturbingly sharp edge. Disturbing, that is, to ears which expect trumpets to scream fortissimo and be mellow at the same time. (Somehow the thing can be man- aged.) Considering how swamping the Albert Hall can be, the strings were surprisingly compact and rich : no disintegration on high, awkward posi- tions into disparate, watery strands.
Rozhdestvensky obviously counts for much in the orchestra's training and excellences. His beat is precise and genial in a way that precludes spurs of the moment and picturesque impulses. Some- times he permits himself startling wriggles of the left fingers. There was a scherzoid passage in the Shostakovich cantata where his conjuring passes all but produced rabbits from the woodwind bells. But he kept shape in mind, and, in music, shape's the thing.
CHARLES REID
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