Voices of Revolution – Kuusisto/Philharmonia/Ashkenazy: Prokofiev, Exile and Return, 20 May 2018

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.

'Voices of Revolution, Russia 1917’: Abduraimov/Gulitskaya/Philharmonia/Ashkenazy: Mosolov, Prokofiev, and Glière, 22 March 2018

Royal Festival Hall

Mosolov: The Iron Foundry, op.19

Prokofiev: Piano Concerto no.3 in C major, op.26
Glière: Concerto for coloratura soprano and orchestra, op.82
Glière: Suite: The Red Poppy

Bezhod Abduraimov (piano)

Nadezhda Gulitskaya (soprano)

Philharmonia Orchestra

Vladimir Ashkenazy (conductor)

 

The title of the concert series is perhaps slightly misleading: ‘Voices of Revolution, Russia 1917’. It is perhaps also slightly belated, although one might argue that we are now living in the year following the centenary date itself of the October Revolution. No matter, as Martin Sixsmith, former BBC correspondent in Moscow and series advisor, explains, the intention is to explore ‘works by composers who had very different reactions to the Bolshevik Revolution of autumn 1917, with a selection of music that revolves around themes of idealism, propaganda and repression.’ Moreover, as Sixsmith and Marina Frolova-Walker proceeded, in an enlightening pre-concert talk, to discuss, the three composers on offer here certainly acted very differently in that respect:  Alexander Mosolov an archetypal figure of early Soviet modernism, Prokofiev an exile who eventually returned, and Reinhold Glière a purveyor of dubious ‘socialist realism’.

 

Glière simply wanted instructions from whomever was in charge so that he could get on with his (hack) work. As Frolova-Walker explained in the programme: “‘just tell us what to do”, … he said at one official meeting.’ When no ‘formalists’ were available for consideration, he passed the Zhdanov test and won the 1948 Stalin Prize, as he would again in 1950. He had also done so in 1946, for his 1943 Concerto for coloratura soprano, which struck me as rather more than hack work. Indeed, the conception itself, whilst not entirely original, remained unusual, even if the neo-Romantic language did not. Nadezhda Gulitskaya, a late substitution for Ailish Tynan, proved fully up to its demands, contributing more than a little glamour as well as necessary precision of a pitch to a work whose undeniable charms might otherwise have palled, however excellent the contribution of the Philharmonia Orchestra under Vladimir Ashkenazy (conductor of all four Philharmonia concerts). Let us be kind and say that the opening phrase merely displays a strong resemblance to a theme from Die Walküre (think of Brünnhilde’s ‘War es so schmählich’); there are only so many notes in the major scale, and there are in any case worse models for a melody than Wagner. The music proceeds somewhat in television-score-ish fashion, save for the imaginative vocalise, and certain moments beyond: for instance the soprano’s duetting with clarinet. The second of the two movements, a neo-Tchaikovskian waltz, seemed a bit odder, but it was a welcome opportunity nevertheless to hear a work hardly overburdened with performances.

The opening, quite un-Wagnerian theme

 

The Red Poppy, even in its suite version, is likely – I hope – to remain more of a rarity. Almost socialist realism avant la lettre, or at least long before its necessity, it was apparently the first Soviet ballet on a properly contemporary socialist realist theme: an imperialist one at that, Russian sailors venturing ashore to rescue victims of nationalist China’s capitalism. Bizarrely, and perhaps still more disturbingly, the United States later took it up, following the alliance between Roosevelt and Stalin, exchanging American sailors for Russians, and Japanese victims (of something else, I presume) for Chinese. It begins colourfully, cartoon-like, clearly being relished on at least one level by players and conductor alike. Yes, I suppose one would expect pentatonic writing – but really, it here soon extends here beyond a harmless joke. ‘I’m not racist, but…’ Glière was nothing if not eclectic – reactionary eclectic, though – and a bad Johann Strauss waltz entered to provide ‘balance’. It was all gorgeously played, solos as well as full orchestra, as I suppose they should be. The Naxos performance below is harder-edged, rather to the music's - and our - benefit, I think. This was fascinating to hear, once; but I cannot, even without its highly problematic Orientalism, imagine wanting to repeat the experience in a hurry.

 

Mosolov’s Iron Foundry is, of course, well known – if relatively little heard in concert – as a signal-bearer for Soviet musical modernism. The Philharmonia’s performance under Ashkenazy was every inch the match for the Glière items. For me, at least, the music, as well as the politics, are – and, in performance were – far more compelling. Riccardo Chailly once recorded it alongside (more) acknowledged works of international modernism, Prokofiev’s Third Symphony and Varèse’s Arcana. Here one could certainly here why. I thought also of the former’s Pas d’acier, the irony being of course that such high water-marks of Prokofiev’s own modernism were decidedly non-Soviet works. The size of the orchestra struck one visually, its volume aurally. Here was a factory of an in music, a worthy successor – indeed, a superior work, I think – to Honegger’s Pacific 231, replete, to quote Frolova-Walker, ‘with a kind of heroic “hymn to labour” in the horns’. Tremendous stuff!

 

So too is and, once again, in performance was, Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, in C major – not in F major, as claimed in the programme leaflet handed out on the day. It is the most Classically proportioned of Prokofiev’s five essays in the genre, with three movements of more or less equal length, but in this performance as well as in this context, its relation to its own time sounded more than typically apparent. Bezhod Abduraimov’s pounding of the piano – and Ashkenazy’s of the orchestra too – reminded one just how radical Prokofiev’s percussive treatment of the instrument can, and most likely should, seem. Bartók is not the only pioneer in this respect. But Parisian neo-Classicism welcomed the work with open arms too; the C major ‘whiteness’ of the close also came strongly to the fore, alongside magical, silvery premonitions of Cinderella. That said, the finale’s status as complement to the first movement was also clear in retrospect. That first movement sounded as if taken at a relatively swift tempo: no bad thing. However, I am not sure that it actually was; the feeling was at least as much a matter of energy from soloist, orchestra, and conductor (who, of course, played the piece more than a few times himself). The central theme and variations proceeded briskly, again not too briskly, and again emerged all the stronger for it, rhythms nicely sprung: the basis, so it seemed, for much of the melody and harmony with which they worked. Its darker, almost cinematic, side was not neglected: again, I thought, an instance of ‘period’ interest in a strong rather than antiquarian sense. Shadows of Scriabin still registered too, in a truly brilliant performance. I hope to hear more from Abduraimov, even if his Schubert encore sounded closer, intriguingly so, to Prokofiev than to the ‘source’.

 

Bavouzet/Philharmonia/Ashkenazy - Dukas, Ravel, Falla, and Debussy, 11 December 2011

Royal Festival Hall

Dukas – L’apprenti sorcier
Ravel – Piano Concerto in G major
Falla – Noches en los jardines de España
Debussy – La mer

Jean-Efflam Bavouzet (piano)
Philharmonia Orchestra
Vladimir Ashkenazy

All too often, one witnesses a thoughtless reflex reaction directed toward pianists-turned-conductors. Maurizio Pollini suffered considerable hostility on beginning to conduct; the experience appears to have put him off for good, save for directing Mozart concertos from the piano. One sometimes still hears people say they wish that Daniel Barenboim would concentrate upon the piano, apparently oblivious to how much his conducting has enriched his performances at the keyboard, and vice versa. Vladimir Ashkenazy presents a more difficult case: clearly he is not a bad conductor, as some instrumentalists or singers have proved, but it would be difficult to argue that he has enjoyed similar success in that role as he did as a pianist. One can imagine, though, how much a pianist might value having him as a concerto ‘accompanist’, knowing so many works as a pianist himself. Ashkenazy presents such a genial, collegiate personality on the stage that one cannot help but wish him well; however, my experience on this occasion, as in the past, turned out to be mixed.

Dukas’s scherzo, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, received a disappointing performance. Following slight rhythmic hesitancy at the opening – on Ashkenazy’s part, rather than the Philharmonia’s – the conductor seemed to over-compensate, imparting thereafter a frankly brutal drive, which never relented. The mechanical entirely supplanted the fantastical; a smile was nowhere to be heard.

Jean-Efflam Bavouzet then joined the orchestra for two works, the first being Ravel’s G major Piano Concerto. The elegant ease with which Bavouzet despatched the opening piano flourishes was something to savour. Throughout the first movement, he remained alert to Ravel’s twists and turns – and, crucially, to their motivations. Ashkenazy’s handling of the orchestral music was less sure: there were a few minor imprecisions. More seriously, he was often too much the mere ‘accompanist’, following but never really leading. There was nevertheless a great deal to enjoy in the bluesy solos so evidently relished by various Philharmonia principals. The lengthy opening piano solo to the slow movement was not just exquisitely shaped but intriguingly alert to darker undercurrents, Bavouzet bringing the mood a little closer to that of the Left Hand Piano Concerto than s generally the case. Here and later on, his playing was full of subtle shading and phrasing. Again, there was some very fine woodwind playing, not least from Jill Crowther on English horn. The finale I found more problematic. It received a brisk, no-nonsense reading that rather lacked charm: Bavouzet’s delivery, followed by Ashkenazy’s, seemed at times closer to Prokofiev than to Ravel in its muscular approach. There were no such problems, however, with his encore, a darkly atmospheric account of Debussy’s ‘La puerta del Vino’ from the second book of Préludes. Rhythmic insistence was somehow combined with subtle and supple variation.

That ‘Spanish’ piece also offered a good link to the two pieces in the second half: Falla’s Nights in the Gardens of Spain and Debussy’s own La mer. Ashkenazy’s conducting seemed much sharper in the Falla: full of energy and with a considerably broader colouristic range, those two facets well integrated. Indeed, both he and Bavouzet moved convincingly between languor and biting precision in the first movement, ‘En el Generalife’. The Philharmonia’s cello section was on especially fine form, but all the strings, indeed all the orchestra, contributed to a tremendous climax. The second movement, ‘Danza lejana’, was equally well judged: atmospheric, yet not at the cost of melodic and rhythmic definition. There was a true sense of dialogue now between piano and orchestra, similarly in the final movement, ‘En los jardines de la Sierra de Córdoba’, though occasionally I wondered whether it was a touch on the driven side. I am not sure that the movement presents Falla at his most distinguished, but it received a fine performance nonetheless.

La mer had much to offer too. The outer movements received for the most part eminently musicianly readings, though I have heard saltier accounts. No matter: there were some beautifully hushed moments and Ashkenazy conveyed an impressive degree of quasi-symphonic logic throughout, which, if anything became more pronounced during the course of the first movement. I do not recall a performance in which the presence of Franck has been so pronounced. Ashkenazy reinstated the brass fanfares at the conclusion of ‘De l’aube à midi sur la mer’. (I approve, though some do not.) ‘Jeux de vagues’ offered glitter but purpose too, precision but not too much, its mystery retained. What I missed, and this registered most strongly in the final movement, was a sense of Debussy’s modernity. This was, broadly speaking, Debussy emerging from the nineteenth century – Liszt, Tchaikovsky, and Borodin all sprang to mind – rather than the progenitor of Messiaen and Boulez. There is room for both approaches, of course, and doubtless for others too, though the final climax proved surprisingly brash. A little more refinement there would not have gone amiss.