The phantasmagoria
that is Tishchenko’s Seventh Symphony
has come to recorded fruition in this
live performance from Moscow; its first
recording. In five movements, simply
numbered and not named by the composer,
the Seventh covers a myriad of moods,
as well as rhythmic and stylistic front
lines, and takes its hearer on a vortex
ride of ambiguity and disjunction. It’s
easier to say what the symphony does
than what it’s about, easier to be descriptive
of its scheme than to point to definitive
influences, though obviously Tishchenko,
as a famous Shostakovich pupil, will
ever have that name appended to his
own.
The jocular introduction,
quiet over pizzicato strings, gives
way to more immediately pensive material.
It’s not long before the burlesque-grotesquerie
appears and haunts the symphony like
a Pierrot at a Ball. The raspberry blowing
brass deepens the cynicism – all this
from the innocent seedbed of the opening
bars. The second movement gives us circus
music, some music hall (a close cousin
of Shostakovich’s Jazz Suite No.1) oom-pah
and xylophone flippancy of a completely
unabashed kind. Thus far we’ve been
led from light to foolish indulgence
but in the third movement we have a
tense, still reprieve with winds taking
striking lines and the listener feels
temporarily removed from the potentially
menacing night-sweat material that surrounds
it.
The fourth movement
introduces a chorale figure and a weird,
sinuous, worrying glissando that leads
onto the final movement. The military
tom toms that assail us are juxtaposed
with marching songs, string swirl and
hieratic brass. The big, ungainly and
galumphing theme that emerges turns
strident and blustery and we end, well,
to my ears with a nasty and insidious
march that wraps things up with a sneer.
The audience’s applause
at the end is quick and genuine and
is soon faded out, if you’re not into
that sort of thing. Otherwise they are
commendably quiet and listen in near
silence to the white-hot performance
by the Moscow Philharmonic under Dmitri
Yablonsky’s compelling direction. This
is a symphony that seems to embody some
musico-psychological confluence, its
apparently random disjunctions seemingly,
as we listen, as smooth and logical
as a dream. Whatever meaning might lie
behind it there is a compelling force
to it; unsettling, wearing masks, ultimately
military – and catastrophic.
Jonathan Woolf
see also reviews
by Colin
Clarke and John
Phillips
Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra/Dmitri Yablonsky.
