Saturday, April 29, 2023
Southbank Centre, London – Royal Festival Hall
Guest Reviewer, Peter Reed
Photo, LPO
This LPO concert was titled “Music from the Shadows”, and Klaus Mäkelä steered the orchestra through works written between 1910 and 2016, all of them tonal, melodic and traditionally symphonic. And there were plenty of shadows, ranging from colourless grey to deepest black, also from haunting anxiety to rock-hard darkness.
The programme note described Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No.1 as “a symphony in all but name”, which gave Julian Rachlin all the leeway he needed to impose and withdraw the soloist’s prerogatives in an overwhelming working-out of identity and domination. Rachlin delivered a performance that made no bones about the huge risk the composer courted with this postwar (1947) work, which, given the depth of Soviet oppression, had to wait eight years for its Leningrad premiere, by which time Stalin was dead. Whether picking his way through the bleak neutral landscape of the ‘Nocturne’, leading the dance in the delirious Scherzo, embracing a fathomless sense of regret and loss of self in the ‘Passacaglia’, or summoning up savage fury in the Finale, Rachlin spared himself and us nothing in revealing the complexities of this great piece. He was also in total, almost insouciant command of the sort of high-wire virtuosity that instantly connects. And he kept the tension tight in his not-so-modest encore, Ysaÿe’s Sonata No.3. Prior to which, Mäkelä and the LPO provided as much attitude and contrast as you could want from music that thrives on danger and limitless meaning.
Thomas Larcher’s Symphony No.2, composed as a memorial to refugees who have drowned crossing the Mediterranean, started out as a concerto for orchestra, and Mäkelä and the LPO didn’t miss a trick in Larcher’s virtuoso scoring, with a large (six players) and brilliantly conceived role for percussion and significant contributions from piano and accordion. Unlike the Shostakovich, Mäkelä ensured that this ‘Kenotaph’ Symphony made a vivid, overt impact, and while its moods of grief and anger sometimes sounded generic, its four movements kept faith with the scope of late-romanticism. Larcher judges the balance between gesture, content and expression with a sure hand and he has an impressively developed ear. It was, however, quizzical impulses such as the Scherzo’s Ländler trio added as though it was an afterthought, or the magical instrumentation in the Adagio, when Larcher’s music took you by surprise and by the throat. The score’s angular, powerful dynamics and rhythmic force suited Mäkelä’s bold and communicative conducting style, and the LPO was sensational.
The opening of the Adagio first-movement from Mahler’s unfinished (by him) Tenth Symphony was like a return to the spirit of the Shostakovich. I have been used to voluptuous heartbreak as the default mode of this work, and Mäkelä’s different approach paid off handsomely. The violas’ opening tone was neutral, wiry and self-communing, summing up the music’s isolation and resignation with unexpected eloquence. It was thoroughly internalised and private, with the brass outbursts seeming all-the-more volcanic and uncontrollable. It was like hearing the piece for the first time, for which much thanks.
Shostakovich
Violin Concerto No.1 in A-minor, Op.77
Thomas Larcher
Symphony No.2 (Kenotaph)
Mahler
Symphony No.10 in F-sharp – I: Adagio
This review will also appear on Classical Source
This is a very perceptive review by the estimable Peter Reed, with which i agree completely with one very major exception. The Shostakovich Violin Concerto No 1 is one of my favourite works and soloists like Lydia Mordkovich, who introduced me to the work and filled the Royal Festival Hall with her sound, many years ago, and, more recently Alina Ibragimova with our own Vladimir Jurowski, have the capacity to reduce me to an emotional wreck when we reach the Passacaglia, which I felt went for very little in this performance. The climactic DSCH quotes were thrown away as nothing. Rachlin has a phenomenal technique and the fast movements (2 and 4) were fine but the first movement was drained of any colour or contrast. The Ysaÿe encore was breathtakingly well played but, i thought, entirely inappropriate to what had preceded it. I am sorry because it was otherwise a great concert and loved the Larcher and the Mahler and the LPO played fabulously throughout.