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The Festival Critics: CLASSICAL MUSIC / Seized by St Petersburg

Michael White
Saturday 29 August 1992 23:02 BST
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ST PETERSBURG was always Russia's window on the West, but the years of ideological reorientation closed off the view; and though it's open again, you can't expect the legacy of enforced isolation to fade so fast.

The sound of the St Petersburg Philharmonic is such a legacy, and it's a mixed one. When you hear this orchestra you hear a self-contained tradition, unrelated to the resonantly glossy sound that British ears - used to the well-oiled drill of the American ensembles and the glamour of the Austro-Germans - listen for in foreign bands. The Petersburg Phil have a different sort of grandeur: the aural equivalent of threadbare plush in early 19th-century palaces. You hear no blend, no homogeneously moulded sound that Western orchestras work hard to get. In St Petersburg the individual colours colour individually. And not always agreeably. The horns bray, the woodwind go for curdled, cheesy textures, the string sound can be frayed and the ensemble poor. Yet I came away thinking that this is still one of the world's great orchestras - given the right repertory and conductor, which in this case was a Russian full-house of Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov and Shostakovich under Mariss Jansons.

Jansons shares the St Petersburg rostrum with Yuri Temirkanov, and they don't have much in common. Temirkanov is full of tricks and a rather slothful showmanship. He likes to put his baton down in mid-performance, smile and fold his arms while the orchestra plays without him. Jansons has started to dabble in similar games, but he is also young, intense, athletic, with a dynamism that shook Shostakovich's 5th Symphony and its equivocal last movement triumphalism like a flag of defiance. It was untidy, hurried, with some wayward intonation; but it seized its audience by the gut. Tidiness you can fret about in Morningside. Shostakovich is not antimacassar culture: there are bigger issues, and they were brilliantly addressed here.

The next night wasn't quite so enthralling. Mikhail Rudy disappeared into the orchestra too much in Rachmaninov's 2nd Piano Concerto and prominent details like the cellos' pizzicato support in the middle movement were astonishingly crude. But again there was a sense of players harnessing, by instinct, some deep-rooted energy in Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony. The stabbing penetration of the opening fanfare put the listener on immediate alert; the finale was magnificent; and the middle section of the slow movement was a lesson in how to divest of self-consciousness a passage that British orchestras usually play like Gilbert & Sullivan.

Tchaikovsky is wall-to-wall this year and almost inescapable. But I escaped him: at a Queen's Hall recital by soprano Barbara Bonney, accompanied by Geoffrey Parsons, and again at a double-bill of two chamber operas for solo voice. Ms Bonney was the happier experience. An American soprano with a bright tone that would be thin but for the roughage of a fast and texturally clouding vibrato, it's a voice ideally suited to lighter-weight repertory (here, in Richard Strauss's airy 'Schlagende Herzen'), but she found darker and warmer colours for a sequence of Grieg songs, and was captivating in Samuel Barber's 'Hermit Songs' which came with the direct, unaffected charm of a wise child. Geoffrey Parsons was, as always, the ideal accompanist: secure where it counts but, equally, pliant and considerate.

The opera double-bill was a nice idea: Claudio Desderi in the first half singing and conducting Cimarosa's one-man comic satire on a petty tyrant with a baton, Il Maestro di Capella, and Elisabeth Soderstrom in the second singing Poulenc's one-woman scena of disintegrating love, La Voix Humaine. But the Cimarosa is a three-minute joke extended to 30: novel in the way the singing-conductor comments on a performance he is part of, but utterly third-rate 18th-century muzak.

La Voix Humaine is an altogether finer work, setting a monologue by Cocteau in which a woman pleads on the telephone with her unseen, unheard former lover. Soderstrom is a classic interpreter of the role; and although her voice is worn now, it suits the fractured insecurity of this woman, shored up by a vivid personality. But it was lamentably staged: no budget, no imagination. Soderstrom and a few props were dropped, with amateurish disregard, beside the orchestra. It looked like something from the Fringe. Edinburgh has hardly bothered with a serious opera content this year - which is odd given the background (WNO) of its new director, Brian McMaster. Perhaps he's biding his time until the promised opening of the new Edinburgh Festival Theatre in 1994. But what happens next year? From the story so far, opera audiences need not apply.

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