United Kingdom Sibelius, Weill, Shostakovich – Symphony of Shadows: Roderick Williams (baritone), Royal Philharmonic Orchestra / Vasily Petrenko (conductor). Royal Festival Hall, London, 27.4.2025. (JR)
Sibelius – Finlandia
Weill – Four Walt Whitman Songs
Shostakovich – Symphony No.7 ‘Leningrad’
This concert formed part of the ‘Multitudes’ Festival put together by the Southbank Centre, in an attempt to make classical music and the Southbank Centre more accessible. Before the concert began, in American concert fashion, the orchestra’s Music Director Vasily Petrenko took the microphone and explained the programming. He pointed out that all three of the composers in the concert were patriots and all either lived in countries faced by oppression or had been personally oppressed. Sibelius joined the fight for Finnish independence from Russia; Finlandia became a symbol nationalism and pride. Kurt Weill emigrated from Nazi Germany in 1933 and fled to Paris, then later to the United States. Shostakovich was fired from the Leningrad Conservatory, had many works banned and was oppressed by Stalin and the Soviet regime. Petrenko also went on to add that all three works were rated amongst the most popular works of all three composers – though the composers felt otherwise.
Finlandia proved an excellent curtain-raiser to the concert; the fine trombone section opened with a real blast, and Petrenko knew how to keep the piece flowing at speed and have stirring effect.
In 1942 Kurt Weill set to music three songs by nineteenth-century American poet Walt Whitman, and then five years later added a fourth. Originally for voice and piano, the songs were later orchestrated. The songs explore themes of war, loss and resilience of the human spirit. ‘Beat! Beat! Drums’ was suitably martial and defiant. ‘O Captain! O Captain’ is a touching and poignant setting of Whitman’s elegy for Abraham Lincoln, with gentle echoes of Mahler’s Lieder and the Berlin of the 1930s. ‘Come Up from the Fields, Father’ is a heartrending song about a family coming to terms with their son’s death in battle and finally The ‘Dirge for Two Veterans’ is Broadway bluesy and reflects on the lives and deaths of two Civil War veterans. Baritone Roderick Williams was most moving in all the songs, his top notes were sweet, including one in head voice. Apparently Williams was not well acquainted with these songs before this performance; his voice suited them perfectly, and with his usual clear diction injected pathos and warmth, without any hint of histrionics, following perhaps in the footsteps of Thomas Hampson in this repertoire.
The main work of the concert was Shostakovich’s mighty Seventh Symphony. Screens above and behind the orchestra depicted scenes first of frozen wastelands but were then most effective when the battle in the music commenced and showed images of collapsing buildings and burning villages. This was a new visual imagining of the symphony by art director Kirill Serebrennik and filmmaker Ilya Shagalov. Serebrennikov is the Russian theatre and opera director who, in 2017, was arrested for alleged embezzlement of state funds and spent the next two years under house arrest. In June 2020 he was sentenced to three years on probation but two years later the sentence was cancelled. The visual artist Shagalov helped Sebrennikov devise the images so that music and visuals were in perfect alignment. During the previous evening in the performance of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony (review here) the visuals (not by Sebrennikov) had been something of a distraction, here they certainly added to the experience.
It helped immensely that the Royal Philharmonic with well over 100 players on the stage, were on absolutely top form and I struggle to find sufficient superlatives for the conducting of Petrenko, energetic, nuanced, bold and in full command. The quiet passages were full of menace, impending doom; the onslaught of the army was ferocious. I highlight the trombone section in particular (six of them) and John Roberts (oboe); I also admired the exhilarating and rhythmic timpanist, Louise Lewis Goodwin. A magnificent performance all round, rightly receiving a standing ovation from a very full house.
John Rhodes