Photo, Mark Allan
Friday, July 25, 2025
Royal Albert Hall, London
It was perhaps predictable that Maxim Emelyanychev would begin the Beethoven just as applause faded, that strings would be without vibrato, lyrical subjects would be unbending (save for the first-movement oboe soliloquy), the slow movement would mostly be quick and regimented. The Scherzo and Trio (repeated, whether wanted by Beethoven or not, we shall probably never know, although it seemed superfluous here, delaying the mysterious transition), found a lack of weight in the strings, although the Finale had a decent mix of purpose and grandeur. For all the excellence, commitment and vibrancy of the SCO, and the players’ close relationship with Emelyanychev, this was like many another ‘period’-leaning performance and ultimately insubstantial.
Before it, Jay Capperauld’s fifteen-minute Bruckner’s Skull (premiere of newly orchestrated version): “I composed the piece as a death-mask homage to composer Anton Bruckner and it is inspired by Bruckner’s obsession with death. In particular the work is about the two alleged occasions when Bruckner cradled the skulls of both Beethoven and Schubert when their bodies were exhumed and moved to Vienna’s Central Cemetery in 1888.” Incorporating quotations from string quartets – Beethoven’s C-sharp minor, Opus 131, and Schubert’s ‘Death and the Maiden’, D810 – Bruckner’s Skull is intense, probing, and painfully climactic, but listening with encyclopaedic ears (if I may be so conceited) the quiet stabs of sound at the beginning had me thinking of the shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho, or later, brief suggestions of Shostakovich and Vaughan Williams (if nothing specific). Whether this music is intended as a psycho-analysis of Bruckner, I know not, but a first hearing suggests something formless and too personal for an outsider to get involved, whereas Bruckner’s music is inviting, absorbing, and transporting.
However, much enjoyment at the concert’s start with selections from Rameau’s opera-ballet Les Indes galantes, a World-travelling opera-ballet (Paris, 1735), the dance music elegant and eloquent, capricious and colourful, festive and fastidious, done to a turn by the SCO and Emelyanychev, pairing it with Saint-Saëns’s ‘Egyptian’ Piano Concerto, his Fifth and final such work (1896), and welcome, although it tends to get out more than the others, by dint of a nickname, except for No.2. The Fourth would have been just as nice (below), and anyway Alexandre Kantorow plays them all, making a fair old fist for the ‘Egyptian’, which reflects the composer, an inveterate holiday-maker, away from home, incorporating the sights and sounds of this particular winter escape, Luxor, with additional exotica from further afield. It’s a lovely work – tuneful, picturesque, exuberant, beautifully crafted and surprising – with Kantorow the music-serving virtuoso, a gentle shapely touch when required, fully flamboyant yet technically nonchalant elsewhere (the Finale scintillated), finely partnered, his encore an arrangement by Nina Simone of an aria from Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Dalila (you may have to read that again), richly romantic.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002fwzx
Alfred Cortot/Paris Conservatoire Orchestra/Charles Munch; recorded 1935.
Thank you Colin. These must be the fastest reviews in the history of music criticism. And your prose remains as immaculate as always. Every time I visit your wonderful blog site I read this sentence with sheer pleasure: a colon, an Oxford comma and a semi-colon used in exemplary fashion.
Welcome to my Column, a bit of a blog: news, reviews, things to watch, and other posts to read; a mix of things.
Peter
Great review Col.
The Proms planners have not woken up and smelt the coffee.
Big Beethoven, this 5th and last year’s 3rd just don’t register on chamber orchestras at the RAH.
On the radio maybe. Live absolutely not.
I shall listen to the SS 5th PC with huge enjoyment. Is there a PC finale more exciting and exhuberent than heard here.
It may have been called a “chamber orchestra” but on the night it was full symphony orchestra size. I was there, having noted the Saint Saens orchestration beforehand.
How many double basses? Not enough on the radio for sure, orchestra lacked weight, performance lacked backbone.
There were four double-basses, led by Nikita Naumov on one of his now occasional appearances with the SCO.
The basses were elevated at the back of the orchestra so their sound projected very clearly. In the hall, to my ears there was no weakness in the bass line, the contrary in fact.
Maxim set a cracking pace in the scherzo & trio & the double-basses delivered triumphantly.
I agree. and I was sitting in the West Choir – although not getting the full frontal benefit, I found it satisfying. Bruchners’s Skull was excellent, and although the start of the 5th was at a gallop, it was well done
I wondered if the opening of The Skull was intended to portray the stuttering start of a Dawn Chorus. It did, though, feel like a very long 15 or 16 minutes and , for the musicians, perhaps longer.
Thanks for the review. I heard only the first movement of the 5th on the radio and thought it was horrible. Way too fast and so skirting over all depth and detail in the music, with ugly lumpy phrasing that is surely not at all HIP but a conductor’s invention. I couldn’t stay to hear the rest but this was enough.
Lithe Beethoven is all very good, and people have been doing that since Scherchen in the 50s, maybe earlier. But this is glib ugly disrespectful music making, and frankly pretty fraudulent in its claims for authenticity.
Thank you for your review, Colin, very fair & commendably speedy.
I feel you were a tad harsh on the Beethoven; on its own terms, the performance was thrilling, fleet like an arrow from first to last, nothing over-emphasised, the music speaking for itself.
I’m indebted to you for identifying Kantorow’s sublime encore.
SCO definitely underpowered for the Beethoven. It might have been enough for the promenaders and side stalls, but up in the Rausing it was feeble. Four basses, four horns and reduced strings – certainly insubstantial. Sir Roger will be turning…