The first time I heard Rachmaninov’s Second Symphony at the
Proms, it got rather a frosty reception.
Indeed, I recall the Proms Marshalls, as I labelled that handful of seasoned
Prommers who populated the front of the arena and issued instructions as to
what and when we were to shout out, urging us all not to applaud when the Symphony
came to an end. It certainly was not the
orchestral playing which upset us; we were hearing the Leningrad Phil, then one
of the world’s truly great orchestras, and they were everything they were
cracked up to be. What annoyed so many
of the audience was the fact that not only were they playing the version with
its wholesale cuts, but that it was driven along in an urgent, businesslike
manner which seemed to imply the orchestra had no interest in the music and
were only playing it under duress. They
got the whole thing over and done with in under 40 minutes.
Prommers at that time (it was the very early 1970s) had recently
been introduced to the Symphony without cuts and in an expansive performance
milking every last drop of emotion from it by a landmark recording from the LSO
conducted by André Previn, who proved that there was more than enough great
material from Rachmaninov to stretch out for 59 minutes and still leave us
wanting more. If the Soviets couldn’t be
bothered to treat the work properly, they didn’t deserve our applause. Since then the British audience has felt a
certain ownership for Rach 2 and woe betide the conductor who makes cuts or
glosses over its emotional significance.
No such hostility was ever going to face the Singapore Symphony
Orchestra who performed the same Symphony last night at the Proms. For a start they were going to give us the
whole, uncut version. And then Lan Shui,
whose over-indulgent approach to the work I have often found mildly cloying,
went to town on the over-indulgence managing to stretch the work out to a near
record-breaking 65 minutes. As an orchestra
the Singapore Symphony wasn’t a patch on the Leningrad team, their ensemble was
persistently ragged (hardly a single entry found all players together), at
times the violins seemed in something approaching disarray and wind intonation
was not all it might have been. But
music is not about right notes, seamless blend or perfect coordination; it is
about communication and this was as vividly a communicative performance as
anybody could wish for. It seethed passion,
pathos and power, it oozed emotion, empathy and excitement and it spoke in
compelling, if sometimes cloudy, accents.
From the very outset Lan Shui was determined to milk the
score for all he could get. A prolonged silence
prefaced the rumbling basses of the opening figure, setting off like some heavily
laden super-tanker leaving harbour under its own steam, and we had reached the end
of the Largo introduction at around the same time many conductors would have
had most of the first movement over and done with. Even into the Allegro moderato, we still were
battling against the current, rubato piled on not so much by the shovel full as
by the JCB bucket load, pauses stretched out to heart stopping length and a
general licence with the pulse which seemed the musical equivalent of atrial
fibrillation. With the second movement things
began to settle down, even if occasional bursts of energy were quickly stifled
by the blanket of rubato, but by the time the matchless third came along, Lan Shui
had got the excess out of his system and was allowing the music to flow at its
own pace. I often describe the third
movement clarinet theme as “seeming to hover on the very brink of eternity”,
and here it did just that. We did not so
much glimpse heaven as look lingeringly and lovingly over it. The Prommers have heard better; but they have
heard a lot, lot worse and, as one colleague put it afterwards, you would need
to go half way around the world to hear such a compelling performance again.
The orchestral untidiness was, unfortunately, rather too
pronounced for comfort in the opening piece, Glinka’s Overture to Ruslan and Lyudmila where a frenetic pace
made it seem exciting but, whether from nerves, the unaccustomed acoustic of
the Royal Albert Hall or simple carelessness, the SSO did not do proper justice
to this popular showpiece of orchestral virtuosity. We heard the noise the music made, but missed
out on the detail.
The orchestra were on top of their game in the new work by
Zhou Long, a piano concerto in all but name (its actual name was Postures). Soloist Andreas Haefliger was superb in this
somewhat hyper-active but often exceedingly arresting work, but the real
strength lay in the orchestral playing.
Zhou Long’s use of blocks of orchestral sound rather than carefully dovetailed
musical ideas (it was the piano which provided the connecting thread through
these various orchestral effects) suited the Singapore players well and their
command of what seemed quite a daunting score was deeply impressive.
However, as with most of the “world orchestras” who have
performed thus far at the Proms, the SSO reserved their most dazzling playing
for their encore. Not part of their
repertoire and learnt especially for this concert, they (and especially Lan Shui)
astounded us all with their Waltonian credentials in the rarely-heard March A History of the English Speaking
Peoples. The blazing brass, the
perky woodwind and the rich strings, not to mention the incisive percussion,
all combined to create a simply stunning conclusion which made one wish that
they might in future look towards Walton 1; they have the feel for this music
and it certainly appealed to the Prommers who, perhaps even more so than
Rachmaninov, feel a powerful sense of ownership for this music.
Hi Marc! We missed you at the concert! Royal Albert Hall is a big place, but it would have been real nice to have caught you post-concert among friends for drinks and pizza! Thanks for being there, and let's hope the Malaysian Philharmonic gets its chance soon!
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