SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky: Vladimir Jurowski, cond., Stephen Hough, piano, Russian National Orchestra, Benaroya Hall, Seattle, 17.2.2008 (BJ)


Globalization has its rewards. Time was, you could tell when a Russian orchestra was playing because the horns sounded like saxophones. Devotees of local color may deplore the change, but now Russian orchestral horns produce the same kind of straight, solid tone as horns anywhere else, and I am very glad of it. The upturn in the Russian economy, meanwhile, has evidently corrected the blip of early 1990s impecuniousness: Russian string-playing, after the disappearance of the Iron Curtain, suffered a decline because the orchestras for a while couldn’t afford good instruments. That such a problem is a thing, equally happily, of the past was amply demonstrated by the Russian National Orchestra’s guest engagement in Seattle.

The program began, under the baton of principal guest conductor Vladimir Jurowski, with Rachmaninoff’s substantial and absorbing tone-poem The Isle of the Dead, which received a performance of powerful poetic intensity and lustrous sonority. The strings, in particular, produced jewel-like sounds in every register, and Jurowski shaped the music’s obsessive five-beat rhythms with a sure hand and an evidently hypersensitive ear for texture and balance.

Next came the same composer’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, in which the soloist, touring with the orchestra, was the English pianist Stephen Hough. With orchestral support of whiplash precision, he dispatched the faster sections of this super-virtuoso work with awesome athleticism, and responded with no less intensity to the lyricism of the famous 18th variation. His choice of encore was The Young Girl in a Garden, a hushed miniature by that charming Catalan composer Federico Mompou, and it made a wonderfully refreshing change of pace and dynamics after Rachmaninoff’s fireworks.

The symphony of the evening was Tchaikovsky’s Sixth, and here I must confess I was less comprehensively bowled over than I had been before intermission. There was much to admire, including a bassoon solo of impressive solidity and grace at the start, and an unusual clarity to the projection of the finale theme’s arresting interchange between first and second violins (rightly grouped respectively to the conductor’s left and right). The second movement’s “limping waltz” in quintuple time, however, seemed rhythmically straitjacketed–it would have benefitted from a little give-and-take in pulse–and the third movement’s rapid march tempo was also rather aridly rigid, In the latter case, moreover, the strings’ tumultuous triplet figures sounded too much like three groups of two rather than two groups of three–a violinist’s bow, after all, has only two ends, and you have to take a great deal of care over accentuation if that is not to happen.

The Russian National is a superb orchestra, no question, but it isn’t perfect. Hearing this performance so soon after the Seattle Symphony’s New World Symphony the day before was especially instructive. Listening first to The Isle of the Dead, I felt that such gleaming string tones were as fine as anyone could imagine. But in the Tchaikovsky, it became evident that the Russian orchestra’s violins are better at sustained tone than in rapid passage-work, for their sonority was much less impressive even in the first movement than the Seattle-ites had been in comparable music. And while the Russian National woodwinds showed themselves, by and large, the equal of most of their American colleagues, the heavy brass, though powerful and rhythmically precise, sounded much less warm and solid–somewhat papery and almost toy-like–than Seattle’s unrivaled brass section.

I was particularly keen to make the acquaintance of Jurowski’s conducting, because he is often mentioned as a potential successor to Christoph Eschenbach in my former home-town, Philadelphia. For this reason, I regretted that the Tchaikovsky Sixth had replaced the symphony originally announced for this program, which was Schubert’s “Unfinished.” Even with the substitution, it was obvious that this is a conductor of uncommon gifts and enormous promise. But it is from works like the Schubert that a listener can form a much clearer impression of a conductor’s musicianship than from his handling of Tchaikovsky. So I wait eagerly to hear Jurowski in music from the great tradition of the Austro-German classics.

Bernard Jacobson


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