RSNO: Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto

Usher Hall – 02/12/22

Each concert this autumn given by the RSNO has been assigned an adjective to describe it, and tonight’s programme was “Passionate”. While my general reaction to this marketing ploy has been indifference, I must say that tonight’s offering was spot on!

The Prelude and Liebestod from Wagner’s sensuous opera ‘Tristan und Isolde’, the sexiest music ever written, the towering passions driving Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, and the tragic and doomed love affair of ‘Romeo and Juliet’, set to music of tempestuous, overwhelming love by Prokofiev, all of these combined to give us a concert of emotional waves, crashing down on an encouragingly full audience in the Usher Hall. Emerging as an emotional wreck at the end, exhausted but invigorated, I can concur that we did indeed experience a most “Passionate” evening!

Conducted by the French conductor, Ludovic Morlot, who recently took over as the Music Director of the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra, and was, for many years, Music Director of the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, the RSNO played with a vigour and sparkle which energised the audience to spontaneous eruptions of bravos and cheering. The Festive Season is indeed with us!

I have written before that the prelude to ‘Tristan und Isolde’ is one of the most amazing and extraordinary pieces of music ever written, and every time it hits me like a tornado. Starting from almost nothing, a gentle phrase in the cellos interrupted by a chromatic woodwind chord, it swells and grows into music of such heart-rending emotion that tears are wrenched out of the driest of eyes, and when in conjunction with the final few pages of the opera, sans voix, the great ‘Liebestod’ (Love’s Death – the consummation of the protagonists’ love in death), Wagner manages to convey the essence of what he has spent the last four hours in the theatre describing and demonstrating. This orchestral piece conceived and permitted by Wagner as a distillation of the opera, but in no way a substitute, is an antidote to all those who think his music bombastic and overbearing, and it drew playing of sensual beauty from the RSNO, a perfect beginning to a splendid evening. I do miss the voice of Isolde which in the opera rides on a chariot of glorious sound over the orchestra, but this version does give us the chance to hear internal strands in the textures that are hidden when the soprano is singing.

After a pause to bring the Usher Hall Steinway on to centre stage, we welcomed the young Israeli pianist, Roman Rabinovich, to play Tchaikovsky’s famous First Piano Concerto, premiered in Boston in 1875. By a delightful coincidence, the soloist of that first performance was Hans von Bülow, who ten years earlier had conducted the premiere of ‘Tristan und Isolde’ in Munich. A less delightful coincidence was that in the intervening years Von Bülow’s wife, Cosima (Liszt’s daughter), had left him and married Wagner in 1870!

Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto is rightly famous, and this, no doubt, was why such a good audience had turned up at the Usher Hall. We had heard a couple of weeks ago Grieg’s Piano Concerto, played wonderfully by Denis Kozhukhin, one of the greatest performances I have ever heard, and this week’s concerto was not quite up to that standard. However, despite the occasional blip (and one can excuse the odd wrong note when there are so many to play), Mr Rabinovich gave us a full bodied account of this magnificent concerto, full of passion and Russian drama and we were swept along in its wake. Great music is no less great because it is popular, and indeed its popularity is caused by it being so good. The concerto, although so well-known now, must have caused a sensation when first heard, and this performance, expertly conducted by Ludovic Morlot, and beautifully played by the RSNO was obviously very popular with the audience. From the first crashing chords in the piano above the glorious melody in the strings, through the thoughtful slow movement, and into the thunderous and tempestuous finale, Mr Rabinovich gave us a thrilling account of the concerto, which was met with a roar of approval at the end.

After the interval, we were treated to a magnificent account of excerpts from Sergei Prokofiev’s ballet ‘Romeo and Juliet’, whose music was first heard in 1938 in Brno, just as the apocalyptic Second World War was about to destroy any harmony that had existed between the nations of Europe. Prokofiev is one of those marvellous Soviet Russian composers, like Shostakovich, who had to fight to get their music heard, but whose compositions have long outlived the system which they struggled to work with. Dying comparatively young at 61, on the same day as Stalin, Prokofiev was immensely influential, leaving us ‘Peter and the Wolf’, ‘Lieutenant Kije’, ‘War and Peace’, ‘The Love of three Oranges’, ‘Alexander Nevsky’, the Cello Concerto, written for Rostropovich who I knew in Aldeburgh, and, of course, the ballet ‘Romeo and Juliet’. These are just the most important of Prokofiev’s compositions, and I’m not sure why he is not more popular now, given that his music is approachable and often thrilling.

This performance by the RSNO gave us several memorable examples of the orchestra’s individual stars, such as Katherine Bryan (flute), Adrian Wilson (oboe) and the fabulous Paul Philbert (timpani), and I must give a great cheer to the lower brass, the trombones and John Whitener on tuba, for their fantastic playing in the ‘Dance of the Knights’. As Ms Bryan said in her amusing speech at the beginning, who knew that Prokofiev would be a fan of ‘The Apprentice!’

Ludovic Morlot was a splendid guide through the ins and outs of the sad story of the Montagues and Capulets, his compact style quite different from the languid balletic conducting of Thomas Søndergård, but none the worse for it.

This penultimate concert of the main Autumn season was as good as all the rest. I consider myself fortunate indeed to be able to write about our national orchestra in such glowing terms, and I feel sure the ghost of Sir Alec Gibson will be most satisfied too, to know that his orchestra is in such good fettle.