RSNO: Christmas Concert
Usher Hall - 08/12/23
This was very much a game of two halves. The second half was something like a Champions League semi-final while the first half resembled more a 0-0 draw at a wet and windswept Firhill (with apologies to Partick Thistle supporters!) With a youthful audience swelled by families of the RSNO Youth Chorus, who sang in the Nutcracker after the interval, this was an open goal for the RSNO to attract a new audience, and they blew it by programming, in the first half, a stirring but bellicose piece by Victoria Vita Polevá about Ukraine’s reaction to Russia’s attack on her country, and a dreary violin concerto by André Tchaikowsky, recently discovered, but eminently forgettable. Amends were made in the second half with a wonderful rendition of a selection from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s ballet, ‘The Nutcracker,’ but it was a spectacular programming mistake, I suspect initiated by tonight’s guest conductor, Andrey Boreyko, who has premiered both of the pieces played in the first half with the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, of which he is Music and Artistic Director.
What looked at first sight, in the Season’s full programme, a Tchaikovsky Fest of his Violin Concerto and the Nutcracker, a mouth-watering feast of seasonal goodies, turned out to be anything but! It was unfortunate that the obscure Polish composer, Robert Andrzej Krauthammer, changed his name, for very good reasons (to escape the Warsaw Ghetto into which he had been thrown by the Nazis) to Andrzej Czajkowski and later, having emigrated to the UK, anglicised his name to Tchaikowsky. This understandable but sneaky decision caused a certain amount of confusion, and I can’t have been the only audience member who was expecting a rather different Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto last night. I realised my mistake last week in my preparation for this concert, but I am sure many people last night were surprised to hear Ilya Gringolts playing, very well it must be admitted, this Concerto Classico for Violin and Orchestra, dating from 1964, never performed at the time, and found under a laundry basket in a house clearance of a property in London in the last decade. It received its world premiere in 2021, played as tonight by Ilya Gringolts with the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by tonight’s conductor, Andrey Boreyko. Both soloist and conductor were born in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) and certainly are dedicated to making this concerto better known.
The concert began with ‘Nova’, a dramatic short work composed in 2022 by Victoria Vita Polevá, a Ukrainian composer born in 1962 in Kyiv. In her notes, Ms Polevá describes the piece as ‘Martial music in a patriotic sense – not music of war and aggression, but truly martial music.’ Now something may have been lost in translation from the original (presumably Ukrainian) notes, but ‘martial’ means ‘relating to fighting or war’, so the distinction was lost on me, and certainly the music, with insistent snare drum and timps and bass drum beats, seemed pretty warlike. The composer has inserted into the mix a solo trumpet playing Jeremiah Clarke’s ‘Trumpet Voluntary’, apparently recalling King George VI’s support for the people during the Second World War, mirrored by the present President of Ukraine rousing his people to fight the aggressor. Clearly Ms Polevá is expressing her feelings about the horrors going on in Ukraine at the moment, and her piece is very dramatic, but again I wonder why it was programmed in a Christmas concert full of children?
The Concerto Classico by André Tchaikowsky started promisingly with an evocative pizzicato opening for the strings, but soon lost its way, as the soloist rattled off screeds of notes seemingly unrelated to the orchestra. For me, the nadir came when, for a few minutes, Ilya Gringolts nurdled away unaccompanied in seemingly random passages of violin playing. It was all a great shame, as he is clearly a superb player, playing a fine Stradivarius instrument, but you could see people looking at their watches and fidgeting long before the end.
Mercifully, the second half was splendid, a lovely opportunity to listen to the brilliant music Tchaikovsky wrote for his much loved ballet, ‘The Nutcracker,’ first performed in St Petersburg in December 1892. No one was to know that, less than a year later, the composer would be dead of cholera at the peak of his powers. The more Tchaikovsky I listen to, the more I rate him as one of the greatest Romantic composers of all time. Opera, ballet, symphonies, concerti, all these genres poured from his pen in a succession of masterpieces. The fact that he has become so popular should not disguise the genius of his work. The RSNO, who had played well in the first half, were superb in the second. The conductor, Andrey Boreyko, who had seemed metronomic in the earlier music, was transformed into a living, breathing dynamo, coaxing wonderful sounds from all sections of the orchestra and getting lovely wordless singing from the massed ranks of the RSNO Youth Chorus, expertly trained by Patrick Barrett. All the famous bits were wonderfully played (shout outs to Lynda Cochrane on celeste and Pippa Tunnell and Teresa Romao on harp). All the usual principal players were in fine form, and a special credit must go to the guest leader, Zsoly-Tihamér Visontay, firstly for a great name and secondly for excellent playing. He is a much sought after soloist and leader, and his presence was very strong on the stage.
I have been away for the last month in Singapore and Australia, and it was a pleasure to return to the marvellous playing of our national orchestra. I attended a concert of Beethoven and Chopin in Singapore (reviewed on the EMR), which was distinguished by some good playing but primarily by the enthusiastic and lively young audience. If we are ever to see that in Scotland, we need to encourage our young people to come to classical concerts, and an occasion like this Christmas concert should have been an opportunity to introduce them to some of the great music in the repertoire. This was an opportunity half lost!
Finally, I will make my usual request for some light to read our programmes during the concert. The ability to follow the story of the ballet was lost in the darkness. Why?
