Preview
Enchantment/ Philharmonic Hall
AT THE Liverpool Phil tonight, Vasily Petrenko conducts Shostakovich’s Symphony No.7 (Leningrad), a work of some notoriety.
It was partly written during the siege of the city by the Nazi Wehrmacht in 1941, while the composer served as a member of the fire brigade. He was flown out from the starving city to safety to complete the last movement and the work was premiered in Kuibyshev.
A microfilm of the score was sent via Tehran, Cairo and South America to New York where it was conducted shortly afterwards by Toscanini. The accompanying torrent of propaganda about this cry from the stricken city caused it to be misunderstood by the emigré composers who heard it on the radio. Stravinsky and Schoenberg thought it loud and vulgar, and Bartók parodied it in his Concerto for Orchestra.
Certainly the 27-minute first movement rising to a shattering crescendo and then dying away shows the influence of the sidedrum from Ravel’s Bolero and a favourite song of Hitler’s from The Merry Widow. But the composer later said that the work had its origins before the war, and that Hitler was not the only tyrant in his sights. As so often with his music he showed the Soviet ability to double think, and listening to the symphony now can reveal a different message. In 1942, it was heard in Leningrad, where an orchestra was scraped together. It is said that three musicians died of starvation during rehearsals and one wonders what the effect was on the enemy, because the concert was broadcast through loudspeakers at the siege lines. Musik-Krieg indeed!
The symphony is live on Radio 3 and repeated on Sunday. Two curiosities open the programme, The Chairman Dances by John Adams and the premiere of Enchantements oubliés by the Chinese composer Qigang Chen, who came to prominence at the opening ceremony of the last Olympic games.
Review
RLPO/ Rachmaninov: Symphony No.3
PETRENKO and the Liverpool Phil also attract our attention this week with a new release of music by Rachmaninov. They have had great critical success with the Symphonic Dances and the Piano Concertos, released on the Avie label.
Now they go to the SEMI Classics label, with the third Symphony.
It is only in recent years that Rachmaninov’s music other than the second and third piano concertos, have been accepted and promoted, being too often regarded as the work of a conservative backward-looking romantic.
Petrenko brings out all the lushness and ebb and flow of the music. It is completed with Rachmaninov’s orchestral arrangement of his Vocalise and the early Caprice Bohemian, which could well come from the pen of Glinka or Rimski. An unqualified success.
