Royal Festival Hall
Seven,
they are Seven, op.30
Violin Concerto no.1 in D
minor, op.19
Cantata
for the Twentieth Anniverary of the October Revolution, op.74
David Butt Philip (tenor)
Pekka Kuusisto (violin)
Aidan Oliver (voice of Lenin,
chorus director)
Philharmonia Voices
Crouch End Festival Chorus
Students of the Royal Welsh
College of Music and Drama (military band)
Philharmonia Orchestra
Vladimir Ashkenazy (conductor)
The Philharmonia’s ‘Voices of
Revolution’ concert series, programmed in the wake of celebrations for the
hundredth anniversary of the October Revolution, reached its climax with a
performance of Prokofiev’s Cantata for
the Twentieth Anniversary of that revolution. First, however, we heard two
highly contrasted works by the composer from 1917 itself: the much shorter
cantata, Seven, they are Seven, and
the First Violin Concerto (on whose material he had begun work two years
earlier).
Seven,
they are Seven (Semero ikh) received an exhilirating
performance under Vladimir Ashkenazy, conductor of the entire series, joined by
the equally fine David Butt Philip, Philharmonia Voices, and Crouch End
Festival Chorus. Talk about starting in
medias res! Here was a Russianised hymn to Mesopotamian paganism such as
few of us, however feverish our imaginations, might otherwise have imagined,
albeit with a materialist, nihilist bent the performers could not and should
not shake off: the Scythian Suite
rendered choral and, somehow, both more and less austere. Prokofiev’s clamour
for a spirit world in which he clearly did not believe – hints of something
later in the programme, or not? – looked forward to The Fiery Angel, and perhaps even beyond. Perhaps, though, the
deepest, darkest music came with the relative hush towards the close: ‘Spirit
of Heaven, conjure them’.
That Silver Age dying away into
nothing seemed apt preparation for the Violin Concerto’s celebrated silver
opening. ‘Febrile’ is a word I am sure I overuse. It is difficult, however, not
to resort to it in describing Pekka Kuusisto’s performance, full of the most
intense – perhaps, for some, too intense? – variegation in articulation and
phrasing. Unfashionably, I have always preferred the concerto’s G minor
successor; if this performance did not change my mind, it came closer than most
and, indeed, seemed almost to highlight what the two works have in common
rather than what distinguishes them. Moreover, its side-slipping harmonic
progressions, especially in the first movement, seemed almost to incite
metrical equivalents. The second movement proved truly a twentieth-century
scherzo, with the musical – and technical – consequences implied. Bitter-sweet
lyricism and much else one could imagine, whether a priori or a posteriori,
characterised the finale. Kuusisto’s despatch of Prokofiev’s double-stopping
was despatched with almost diabolically casual ease, he and Ashkenazy shaping
and characterising the movement to a tee. Kuusisto’s encore improvisation on a
Russian folksong, ‘Midnight in Moscow’, was perhaps for fans only – but he
clearly, far from unreasonably, has a good few of them.
Then
came the Cantata grand finale. Ashkenazy
seems to have had it about right in an interview
with The Daily Telegraph –
remember when that was still occasionally a serious newspaper? – in 2003,
telling Geoffrey Norris that the composer had ‘kind of welcomed what was happening in Russia and wanted to see
the brighter side. He didn't want to see the tragedy. With this welcome back
into his country, he felt he should do what the country wanted him to do.’ More
specifically concerning the Cantata, Ashkenazy continued, ‘it wasn't … an
obligation ... Some people say that he wanted to mock, but I don't think so.
It's a great piece, one of his greatest achievements. His attitude was just to go
along with the general flow.’ It is a fascinating piece, certainly; I am not
entirely convinced that it was one of his greatest achievements, but it is far,
far too good not to hear. And how the world has moved on since that interview:
bar a few irreconcilables on the Right, we are mostly communists again now, albeit
of very different stripes, from ‘fully automated luxury queer space’ to
something a little more traditionally Stalinist. If the point, as Marx
maintained in his Theses on Feuerbach,
as heard here, were not just, as philosophers had done, to interpret the world,
but to change it, then the progress socialism has made in just the last few
years augurs well indeed. It still seems a little odd, perhaps, to watch a
Festival Hall full of Home Counties concert-goers, celebrating Leninism, but none
of them seemed to have a problem with doing so. Good for them, for who, in what
is also Marx 200 year, is not now in some sense a Marxist? At any rate, surely
none of us would have the grimly negative imagination – or perhaps you would? –
to dream up a neoliberal cantata celebrating, say, Hayek, Thatcher, and May:
perhaps one of those
curious ‘Hecklers’ who once disrupted Birtwistle performances? Trump,
perhaps, albeit in a gaudier, more ironic fashion: perhaps a commission
for Helmut Lachenmann. As for a Blairite
Third Way…
The opening sounded as if a socialist
realist-ish Boris Godunov, the
Philharmonia brass commendably ‘Russian’ in tone, albeit without raucousness.
Whether that lack of roughness were an entirely good thing one may wonder; it is certainly Ashkenazy’s way. Listening afterwards, for instance, to Valery
Gergiev in Rotterdam, I found more variety, perhaps something deeper, but it
would be churlish to complain unduly, in what remained a highly accomplished
performance. For Prokofiev’s late (late for him, that is) modernistic
fragmentation retained degrees both of revolutionary disconcertion and of
traditional grounding: surely Beethoven’s Ninth in the cellos that prepare the
way for the choral entry: ‘massive’ here in every respect. Frozen, then thawing
strings seemed also to pave the way for the ‘patriotic’ world soon to come, of Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible. Russia or socialism?
You decide – or rather, Stalin will. Factory metal resounded, a reminder,
perhaps of Mosolov,
heard earlier in the series?
The lack of belief, in a strict
sense, is quite different here from that of Shostakovich, and sounded as such.
Whatever we think of the latter composer as ‘dissident’ or anything else,
Prokofiev’s personality, musical and political, was of a very different nature,
as side-slipping as those harmonies, which is not to impute cynicism, but
perhaps to return us to Ashkenazy’s observations. (He, after all, unlike most
of us, lived in the USSR.) And, just as in the Violin Concerto, Cinderella called too. There are no
straight lines to draw in Prokofiev’s career; he did not come to write as he
later did only on account of ‘external’ pressures. For there was belief of a
sort: on hearing ‘We vow to you, Comrade Lenin…’ we did – if only, to quote
Ashkenazy, ‘kind of’, at least whilst in thrall to Prokofiev’s stream of
consciousness. Deafening: almost. Extraordinary: certainly.
