fri 29/03/2024

Philharmonia Orchestra, Petrenko, Royal Festival Hall | reviews, news & interviews

Philharmonia Orchestra, Petrenko, Royal Festival Hall

Philharmonia Orchestra, Petrenko, Royal Festival Hall

Petrenko's thrilling Shostakovich strips away all ambivalence

It is quickly apparent when you are in the company of exceptional talent. In even the most hackneyed repertoire nothing is quite as you expect it to be: there’s a charge in the air, phrasings take on a different urgency, textures are opened up and newly revealed. And on this night, certain revelations concerning Shostakovich’s 5th Symphony were, under the exciting baton of Vasily Petrenko, no longer conjecture but irrefutable fact.
But first there was a Night on the Bare Mountain to endure and if you thought that the tamer Rimsky-Korsakov version of Mussorgsky’s classic had ceased to intimidate then Petrenko was about to do a Blair Witch on you. How did he do it? Well, by simply putting back some of the trenchancy into those concerted string rhythms for starters. Actually it was simply more Russian. Exaggerating the tempo fluctuations increased tension and accentuated the folksy colour – these malevolent spirits danced up a storm. Then there were the textural details like the horns’ little semi-tonal sneers into “stopped” notes and all the insinuating glissandi in the strings. It was spooky again.

And the restorations continued. There may have been about a foot in height difference between Petrenko and Russian born Boris Giltburg (just 24 years of age) but they were a perfect fit in refreshing the parts of Grieg’s Piano Concerto that others don’t reach. Giltburg produced a big and generous sound. What’s more its richness totally related to the fantasy of his phrasing. The way Grieg’s lyric fancies opened to his touch here made you understand why this piece is so adored. Mind you, Petrenko and the Philharmonia strings gave him something quite lovely to aspire to at the start of the slow movement. He answered with crystalline arabesques and a sense of wonder.

But having brought the finale’s fragrant flute theme to such a resounding apotheosis what on earth possessed him to come back with Rachmaninov’s C-sharp minor Prelude? A moment of misdirection at the heart of it almost brought him to grief. He recovered well. But that’s youth for you. Maybe next time he’ll quit while he’s ahead.

Petrenko is currently well ahead in Liverpool where he’s embarking on a recorded cycle of the Shostakovich symphonies with the RLPO. I’ll be bringing a series of exclusive audio conversations to The Arts Desk as and when the discs are released. My recent review of Symphony No.5 revealed how he had stripped away any ambivalence from the intended message of the piece and this tremendous Philharmonia performance was a further endorsement.

This was the most anti-heroic reading imaginable. I don’t think I have ever heard the ineffably sad second subject of the first movement sound so vulnerable as it did here in expectant violas before the brutal forces of repression rolled in on growling horns and four trumpets stopped so low as to be almost featureless. Very ugly. And what a storming accelerando Petrenko achieved at the climax as the very first music we heard reared up again in defiant unison.

The galumphing scherzo was pure Mahlerian irony with a halting deliciously gauche violin solo from James Clark. And the dynamic extremes were Mahlerian, too, with the great slow movement – wonderfully played by the Philharmonia strings – ranging from near-silence to near-meltdown. Again it was a fragile beauty that Petrenko and his players communicated with an almost religious intensity in the Thomas Tallis like middle section.

But there was emphatically no triumphalism in the finale whose notoriously difficult gathering of impetus Petrenko managed with consummate skill. He believes the tempo marking for the coda is simply a misprint. Capricious? Malicious? In any event it turns jubilance to crushing despair with all those repeated As suddenly sounding decidedly cruel and unusual.

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