{"id":15987,"date":"2014-02-21T12:37:39","date_gmt":"2014-02-21T16:37:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.musicalamerica.com\/mablogs\/?p=15987"},"modified":"2014-03-15T17:39:00","modified_gmt":"2014-03-15T21:39:00","slug":"st-petersburgs-sound-then-and-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.musicalamerica.com\/mablogs\/?p=15987","title":{"rendered":"St. Petersburg\u2019s Sound, Then and Now"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Sedgwick Clark<\/span><\/b><\/p>\n

One of Yuri Temirkanov\u2019s goals when he became music director of the Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) Philharmonic in 1988 was to give it a more \u201cinternational\u201d sound\u2014to smooth over the deliberately edgy sonority cultured by the ensemble\u2019s long-time maestro, Yevgeny Mravinsky (1903-1988). <\/span><\/p>\n

Why, I wondered? The orchestra\u2019s four concerts of Russian music under Gennady Rozhdestvensky at Carnegie Hall in October and November 1973 had been among the most exciting I\u2019d ever heard. The hair-raising performance of Tchaikovsky\u2019s Francesca da Rimini<\/i> (at a time when I had some hair to raise) was unbelievably terrifying. The incredibly precise torrent of strings as literature\u2019s most perfervid adulterers writhed in eternal punishment remains equaled in my memory solely by my one and only viewing of the film Fatal Attraction<\/i>. I couldn\u2019t even think of sex for days. The laser-beam brass cut through but never overwhelmed the huge bodies of strings and woodwinds. And in Tchaikovsky\u2019s Fifth Symphony, the timpanist displayed the kind of flair in the finale that no one in our day of soberer-than-thou music-making would dare, flourishing his sticks in the air on alternate beats as the coda marched to its majestic end. Rozhdestvensky\u2019s performances of Glinka\u2019s Ruslan and Ludmilla <\/i>Overture, Prokofiev\u2019s Alexander Nevsky<\/i> and Scythian Suite<\/i>, the brand new Shostakovich Fifteenth, and several other works remain among my highlights of four-and-a-half decades of concert going.<\/span><\/p>\n

So what has Temirkanov\u2019s leadership accomplished? He shaved off the edge, that\u2019s for sure. In a pair of St. Petersburg concerts at Carnegie last week, the conductor conjured a gigantic cushion of sound in excerpts from Rimsky-Korsakov\u2019s The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh<\/i>. This is a huge orchestra, with ten double basses, and correspondingly augmented violins and violas\u2014as sumptuous an orchestral sonority as exists on the planet today, without a hint of the stridency one hears from many American orchestras that force their tone to achieve greater volume. <\/span><\/p>\n

In Rachmaninoff\u2019s Second Symphony, the pianissimo<\/i> cellos and double basses in the opening motto sounded like a chorus of Russian basses. Innumerable eye-rolling moments of orchestral beauty enveloped me during the work\u2019s three-quarter hour duration. But my disappointment with this performance had nothing to do with the playing or conducting. It was about Temirkanov\u2019s decision to prune huge chunks of a piece he once honored in toto<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

All conductors used to cut this gloriously garrulous piece. In the 1940s, Eugene Ormandy, claiming the composer\u2019s imprimatur, fashioned a heavily trimmed but musically cogent performing version through which most of us prior to 1970 learned the piece. In the late 1960s, Decca\/London released the first uncut recording of the work by Paul Kletzki and the Suisse Romande orchestra, followed by Andr\u00e9 Previn\u2019s highly regarded London Symphony recording from1973 on EMI. <\/span><\/p>\n

Enter Temirkanov. His 1978 recording of the work with the Royal Philharmonic (EMI) is the Holy Grail of the true Rachmaninoffian. It is a great performance, and it is complete. (Only Rozhdestvensky and Gergiev on LSO LIVE, to my knowledge, gild the lily by including the four-and-a-half-minute first-movement exposition repeat.) Inexplicably, the Temirkanov recording has never been transferred to CD. <\/span><\/p>\n

He rerecorded a sliced-and-diced version of the Rach2 for RCA at the same time he performed it last in New York with the SPb\u2019ers at Carnegie, on November 5, 1993. Whether the cuts were the same when he last conducted it doesn\u2019t matter; I was equally annoyed.<\/span><\/p>\n

So is either brand of this Russian band superior? Neither is by any stretch \u201cinternational.\u201d Fortunately, we have Mravinsky\u2019s recordings\u2014mostly live, as he hated to record\u2014to remind us of the intensely dramatic instrument he crafted. And we can wallow on Temirkanov\u2019s giant davenport.<\/span><\/p>\n