Music-making of outstanding sensitivity and power from Vasily Petrenko and the Royal Philharmonic

United KingdomUnited Kingdom Berg, Beethoven, Stravinsky: Boris Giltburg (piano), Royal Philharmonic Orchestra / Vasily Petrenko (conductor). Royal Festival Hall, London, 26.1.2025. (CK)

Vasily Petrenko conducts the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra © Frances Marshall

Berg – Three Pieces for Orchestra, Op.6
Beethoven – Piano Concerto No.5, ‘Emperor
Stravinsky – The Rite of Spring

This impressive Royal Philharmonic Orchestra Sunday afternoon concert rested on two mighty pillars, both dating from immediately before the First World War. Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra, written shortly after Mahler’s death, hammers (literally) the last few nails into the coffin of the Austro-German symphonic tradition; Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring enacts a musical coup in which rhythm overthrows the long dominance of melody. A death and a birth, both of them violent.

Lights in the Dark is the theme of the RPO’s concerts between now and the summer: more modest than the London Philharmonic’s wide-ranging, season-long Moments Remembered, though it will embrace such behemoths as Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony and Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony. No matter: as with the LPO and Edward Gardner, it is the excellence of the partnership between the RPO and Vasily Petrenko that makes their concerts so enticing.

The outstanding qualities of all these performances were an absolute clarity – an extraordinary sensitivity to sound – and an absolute refusal to inflate or distort the composer’s intentions or the notes on the page. There was nothing coldly didactic or emotionally disengaged about this – the impact of all three performances was very much the opposite. Take the beginning of Berg’s brief opening movement (Präludium): silence gives way to barely audible noise (bass drum, side drum, cymbals, tamtams, two sets of timpani), from which fragments of musical sound begin to emerge, building steeply to a harsh climax before the process goes into reverse. Berg is sensitising our ears for the kind of listening we are going to need for the next twenty minutes; though we also begin to realise that this music contains elements of decadence (more overt in the second movement, Reigen) that guarantee its eventual self-destruction. Details glinted with almost hallucinatory vividness; the clarity of sound was maintained through the highly complex concluding Marsch, all the way to its cataclysmic end.

Vasily Petrenko conducts pianist Boris Giltburg and the RPO © Frances Marshall

I am sure I wasn’t alone in looking forward to hearing Paul Lewis playing the Emperor; but he had been hit by a car, we were told, the previous morning – he was all right, apparently, but devastated at having to withdraw. We wish him a speedy return to the platform. His eleventh-hour replacement, the diminutive Moscow-born Israeli Boris Giltburg, gave a marvellous performance, bright, beautiful and utterly fresh, looking back to Mozart rather than forward to the nineteenth-century warhorses. It was not at all small-scale – there was Beethovenian thunder when it was needed – but there was no hint of Romantic excess in Giltburg’s crystal-clear fingerwork. His relationship with the orchestra was a source of continual delight, and in the slow movement the woodwinds were as delicious as they always are in a Mozart concerto. The performance was enthusiastically received; we had probably all forgotten that Giltburg had had only a day’s notice, though my neighbour – at the concert with his wife and two small children – remarked admiringly, ‘Fancy having that in your back pocket!’ Giltburg’s Robert Schumann Arabeske in C encore was beautifully played.

Pertinent here, perhaps, to say that the large audience that this concert attracted seemed significantly younger – and. I think, more enthusiastic – than the audience one sees at most RFH concerts. Behind me was a row of lively young women; after the Berg one of them asked the hall at large (instead of whispering discreetly) ‘Why did that trumpet player stick something in the end of it?’ ‘Makes it snarl’, I offered helpfully (though not entirely accurately). A short while later, while the piano was being positioned, another young lady in front of me turned round, waving her programme vaguely, and said ‘Excuse me, you seem to know what’s going on – which piece are we on?’ I reassured her that the Berg was over and Beethoven was next. I record this not to smirk at their ignorance but to rejoice that there seemed to be a significant part of the audience who were probably at a classical concert for the first time, with no preconceptions, and who gave every indication of enjoying and being absorbed by a challenging programme. If this happens regularly at Sunday afternoon concerts, it is a cause for celebration.

The Rite of Spring was clean as a whistle, very much in tune with the rest of the programme in its impressive demonstration of the detailed super-sensitivity (and power) of the playing that this partnership of conductor and orchestra seems able to achieve. The performance leaned towards sophistication rather than raw, primitive force, and was none the worse for that: there was no shortage of excitement, except perhaps in the Introduction and Mystic Circles that open Part II (where atmosphere and tension are all). In an engaging (though overlong) introduction to the concert and the series, Petrenko remarked that – despite the apparent absence of melody – musicologists have traced 31 Russian folk tunes embedded in the score, and in a performance as detailed as this, one noticed tiny things: a muted trumpet, a curious little shred of melody on solo cello… Perhaps most impressive of all was the opening bassoon solo, which seemed to emerge mysteriously, as if shrouded in mist. It earned Richard Ion a huge roar when he was brought to his feet at the end.

Chris Kettle

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